I think 60 is a brilliant age. There’s a clear road ahead

September already, and in my mind this is the start of the new year. Forget January, the weary hangovers and faded fairy lights, the fretful resolutions and strangling waistbands — for me, new beginnings are hot-wired to this autumnal month. Flipping over the calendar, I can almost smell the bleach-like scent of new textbooks, feel the grainy covers of blank copybooks, the slip and slide of too-big school shoes.

In childhood, September was an optimistic month, one in which I’d yet to fail. In September, everyone was on the starting blocks together. In September, I’d yet to be marked absent on the roll call, yet to be branded weak, yet to be scrutinised and found wanting.

I cherished September for the sharpened pencils and unused chalks, the slick blackboard, the polished floor; everything pristine and unsullied by my own shortcomings.

In September, it was possible to believe that the year could still be different. The numbers would unravel from their cat’s cradle of circles and spikes, the ball would land in the net, the fadas doff their caps. This could still be the year that Sr Ryvita would send you home with a holy picture in your satchel and an iced caramel in your pocket, rather than dispelling your illusions with a low thread of sarcasm and a copybook full of exasperated Xs.

Dublin constituency: Left-wing candidates face dog fight for the last seat

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Mary Hannigan: Ireland are competing but they’re nowhere close thus far to pointing

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Ken Early: Effortlessly elegant Ancelotti deservedly considered among the world’s best

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House swapping: ‘It’s never hard to find people who want to come to Dublin’

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I liked September; by January, the war was always lost.

And, without beating the analogy to death, I kind of feel that same sense of possibility now in the autumn of my own life. (Sorry, did I just kneel in a cowpat of sentimentality there?) Seriously, though, I think 60 is a brilliant age. There’s a clear road ahead, which, from this current vantage point, seems fairly unlittered with other people’s needs or expectations.

[ Hilary Fannin: The bill for our scrambled eggs arrives. We quickly remortgage to come up with the cash ]

I was talking recently to a pal whose professional calling is to understand and analyse the human mind. I asked her if she thought people changed as they aged, and she said that, in her view, we become more who we are, unless, of course, we’re radically disrupted by circumstance.

Driving down a country road as we spoke, the light bouncing off the bay, the merest hint of the changing season discernible in the orange depth of the roadside montbretia, I found her views comforting.

I used to fear that I would become unrecognisable to myself as I got older, a stranger in my own psyche. Now I no longer believe that we lose that sense of our essential self along the way, like a scarf or a lover or a favourite aunt. I don’t feel, as I feared I would, simply like a distorted or diminished version of my younger self. (I do sometimes wish, though, that I could reach back and tell that person to stop worrying about her future, to stop being so damned tractable, to stop trying to fix things and make them look all right.)

It’s often assumed that people become more agreeable as they age, a little more conscientious and emotionally stable. Personally, I find that reassuring theory less than convincing.

Even now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, I sometimes meet female contemporaries who are struggling, on the outskirts of middle age, to know their own needs at all. They are women who have lived quietly within the societal structures of their times, women who went from being diligent workers to flustered brides to energetic, painstaking mothers. Conductors in their homes to a whole orchestra of other people’s demands, they are women who are now looking for a purpose beyond their thinning domestic routines. And yes, of course there’s satisfaction to be taken in a family job well done, in children educated and out in the world, in equitable partnerships, in ageing parents tightly tucked up in their daughters’ dutiful care.

I met an acquaintance at the supermarket checkout the other day. She was unpacking her heaving trolley and keeping an eye on two small grandchildren who were spinning the greeting-card carousel around and around.

“Some things never change, eh?” she said. “I have to tell you, I’m exhausted.”

I helped her unpack her trolley, full of cereals and spaghetti hoops.

“I always thought,” she continued, “I don’t know what I thought ... Just that it’d be something different at this stage, you know?”

It’s September, I told her, and explained my theory of the autumnal new year. We both smiled. Maybe this year, I suggested, she should practise saying no, turn off her phone and clear her way to the open road.

Read more from Hilary Fannin, here