Saturday is husky day in the forest that abuts our home.

Tethered to new-age chariots, the great tundra runners exchange crisp white snow for mushy February forest. And while, in the icy wastes, these strange wild spirits fraternise only with themselves, there is a considerable likelihood that here, they will meet with a small insolent biohazard-on-legs with a propensity to pick a fight.

Alias, Macaulay the Shrewsday dog.

This morning my husband donned his running gear: shoes, kit and iPod, and headed out of the door with the dog, to pound some peat.

Covering the miles he was lulled into the rhythm of the tread, lost in a piece of music, until he became aware of a commanding voice bellowing a frankly feudal command: “Clear the way! Clear the way!”

She was bearing down upon him at a rate of knots: a modern-day Boudicca in her mid-sixties. She was piloting a team of ten baying huskies, perched in a three-wheeled chariot. She glared imperiously at my husband through goggles and riding cap, like Toad in his automobile, alarming and, it seemed, alarmed.

Phil tore off his headphones and retrieved the dog. He grinned affably. She retorted testily, by way of explanation: “I’m sorry, but you couldn’t hear!”

She did not seem particularly repentant, or indeed in control of her husky team. If there was a magic word to halt the momentum she was either unequipped or unprepared to use it.

As the dogs flew past, Macaulay cowered at Phil’s feet, tail down: but the moment they had swept past in a cloud of mud spatters, he was there in the middle of the wide track, rapping out: “Yes, off you go, and don’t try coming back either!”

This woman had found a helter-skelter way to career through her sixth decade. She is roller coasting her way into her third age and as I listened to Phil’s colourful tales on his return, I thought, how audacious. Sixty-five years,  ten huskies and one sledge, and Danger is her middle name.

Of a certain age. In these days of eternal youth we eschew Balzac’s definition of this fistful of words: between thirty five and forty. Sixty is the new forty, and the words were embodied by this hurtling harridan.

Later on in this quite perfect day I found myself in what must be one of the best bookshops around.

Helene Hanff  knew the indispensability of a really good second-hand bookshop.  In correspondence with Marks and Co at 84, Charing Cross Road, she shared her love of other writers, and so much more.

Her letters began as business correspondence but became words between friends. And it also reflected her love of books that were not new. They arrived at Charing Cross Road with a history. Hanff describes how she  adores the way second-hand books fall open at beloved pages.

She tells the booksellers: “I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else has turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.”

They were books of a certain age.

I have not been to my favourite bookshop for some time. A set of Biggles from the 1930s graced a display on flying over the last century. There were fabulous 1940s children’s adventure books and a wonderful examination of Victorian writers from 1780 – 1830. Perfect.

But I had an agenda. I needed a Really Big Dictionary.

I encountered a rather wonderful woman of a certain age behind the desk, proprietor of this shabby beloved wonderland, who directed me to the dictionary shelf.

Reader, I gaped. I goggled and stared open-mouthed and gazed unashamed at the fare before me.

A big fat Oxford fulfilled my requirements; but there was an Oxford dictionary of quotations; a pictorial dictionary which illustrates and names everything from fairground and chivalry to conifers; and my particular favourite: the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.

I have been in heaven ever since. Beside me, waiting for me to finish this, is a fabulous anecdote about Thackeray.

A certain age adds an indefinable something. Indeed, it frees us.

Thus, for our forest Boudicca, for a short time there is nothing and no-one but the wind in the hair, the sound of the chariot skimming the mire, the breath of the dogs and the exhilarating speed. And my bookshop proprietor lives and breathes the volumes in her care. The moment is everything, when time becomes measured.

But a measure of time under one’s belt makes the pages fall automatically to the bit one needs, when one needs it. For some of the books in that shop, the clamour of the initial decades has formed habits which cut those ugly angular early corners and make straight for the heart of a matter. So, too, I surmise, for us.

My Longfellow tome falls open here:

Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.