You Can't Fix Everything with Duct Tape & WD40

Last Wednesday, I spent a lovely evening with two friends, both of whom are in their seventies and former military officers. One is a retired Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Military Police and the other a former Major in the Intelligence Corps.

As a lowly former Guardsman, I was very happy to act as Mess Steward for the evening.

As these evenings often do, the conversation wandered across a wide and diverse range of subjects. At some point, we spoke about a friend of ours who had recently passed away from prostate cancer.

Both of my friends had themselves been diagnosed with prostate cancer some years ago and had undergone treatment.

Being 59, it wasn't long before attention turned to me. "Do you have your PSA checked, Chair?"

The Major and I are members of the same Masonic lodge, and I was happy to confirm that I attend the free PSA testing sponsored by and held at Freemasons' Hall in London.

A simple blood test. Nothing embarrassing, nothing particularly unpleasant and certainly nothing heroic.

What struck me afterwards wasn't really the conversation about prostate cancer. It was the fact that we had the conversation at all.

Three men, all from military backgrounds, sitting together and talking quite openly about ageing, cancer and our health.

I consider myself fortunate that my small circle of male friends is willing to have conversations like that.

I wonder whether we would have done so thirty years ago.

There seems to be something ingrained in many of us that says we're supposed to just get on with things.

Bit of pain? Walk it off. Feeling low? Shake it off. Need help? Nah. We're alright.

My late father's best friend Mick perhaps summed this up better than anyone.

Many years ago, he eventually arranged an appointment with his GP. On arriving at the surgery, the doctor commented that he hadn't seen Mick for more than five years.

Mick replied: "No, I haven't been well."

It was very funny at the time and the story has stayed with me ever since.

As I get older, however, I'm beginning to wonder whether it was quite as funny as I once thought.

Mick belonged to a generation of men for whom visiting the doctor could almost seem like an admission of defeat. You went when something was seriously wrong, preferably after exhausting every other possibility first.

I'm not entirely convinced my generation is that different.

We will service the car, sharpen the tools, change the oil and repair almost anything with enough determination, duct tape and WD40.

Ourselves? Apparently, we are maintenance free.

Of course, we aren't.

Prostate cancer happened to be the subject that prompted our conversation last Wednesday, and increasingly it is something men of my age are talking about.

As Billy Connolly once joked about the peculiar unfairness of growing older, as the likelihood of testicular cancer recedes, the likelihood of prostate cancer increases.

Life, as he observed, is a bowl of cherries.

But physical health is only part of it.

I have already alluded elsewhere to my own challenges with anxiety and depression.

That has taught me something else about the male tendency to "get on with it."

Sometimes there isn't a pain to walk off. Sometimes nothing shows up on an X-ray or blood test.

And sometimes saying "I'm struggling" is considerably harder than rolling up your sleeve and allowing somebody to stick a needle in your arm.

Men don't necessarily show distress in ways that are easy to recognise either. Instead of crying, we can become angry. Instead of talking, we shut down. Some turn to drink. Others, like me, isolate themselves.

And sometimes we push away the very people who care about us most.

Perhaps that's why I've come to value male friendship rather differently as I've grown older.

When I was younger, friendship between men seemed to revolve around doing things together. Work. Sport. The pub. The military. Taking the mickey out of one another.

There was always conversation, of course, but there were subjects that remained safely below the surface.

Age seems to change that.

Perhaps experience does too.

By the time you reach your fifties, sixties and seventies, most of us have accumulated a few scars. We've lost people. We've watched friends become ill. We've worried about our partners, children and parents. We've discovered that our bodies aren't quite as indestructible as we once imagined.

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, we become a little less frightened of admitting it.

That's why I keep returning to that conversation last Wednesday.

Two men in their seventies were able to tell another man, without embarrassment or self-pity, that they had both been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

And then they asked whether I was looking after myself.

There was no lecture. No great declaration. Just friends looking out for another friend.

Perhaps that's how these conversations should happen.

We don't necessarily need to sit one another down and announce that we're going to discuss men's health. We just need to become a little more comfortable asking the question.

"How are you?"

And occasionally, when somebody asks us, perhaps we should resist the automatic response of "Fine." Because sometimes we aren't.

Growing older has its disadvantages. Things ache that didn't used to ache. Hair disappears from places where you'd quite like it and starts appearing in places where you most certainly wouldn't.

But perhaps there are advantages too.

One of them might be learning that asking for help isn't weakness and neither is accepting it.

And another might be having friendships in which somebody cares enough to ask whether you've been to the doctor.

I don't know how many years I have ahead of me. None of us does.

But I do know what I'd like to do with as many of them as possible.

I would like to spend as much time as possible watching my grandchildren play in the sun and not be a dusty photograph on a shelf.