W hat was your reaction on hearing that the Spanish mother who gave birth to twins at the age of 67, had died aged 69?

Mine was rage, and I told you so, because now there are two orphaned two-year-olds, thanks to their mother's selfishness.

Though women of her age may look younger and feel younger, physiologically, whether they like it or not, they are running down.

The question of age and how society deals with it has dominated the news all week, and rightly so because everyone is living longer, and inevitably the cost of supporting an increasingly elderly population is going to be enormous.

So should the oldies be allowed to work on past the age of 65 if they want to?

Employers don't like the idea because it keeps the younger staff back, but a court ruling last week said working on was a legal right. It makes sense because a working oldie pays tax and boosts his or her pension, and doesn't need to claim benefits from the state.

But what if you are retired and poor, and in need of care? Again there's a planned shakeup – people will no longer have to sell their homes to pay for residential care, if this government stays in power.

The state will have to provide more towards the cost of care, and that means higher taxes for those working. Could this cause a backlash against the old?

But why get old at all? A new discovery of what seems to be a natural anti-ageing substance could mean in a decade or two the ageing process could be prevented or even reversed, which sounds like something out of science fiction.

Medical scientists have already developed an age-free mouse, but imagine a world population forever young, or frozen at the age of their choice.

Also in the future is genetic engineering which will prevent all the killer diseases. We are in danger of becoming immortal.

And if you could choose never to age, would you want to go on and on and on, like Mrs Thatcher? Would you never stop work, never stop having children, never stop consuming, fighting, learning, loving, hating?

Which brings us to the other big ethical problem caused by an ageing population – should we have the right to choose when we die?

There was a lot of moralistic talk about the decision by conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife to go to Dignitas in Zurich to end their lives.

He wasn't terminally ill, say the antis, so he had no right to choose to die – what they did was really carry out a suicide pact.

His wife was terminally ill with cancer, so she was allowed the choice, but not him.

The fact that they were a devoted couple who felt neither could go on without the other didn't come into it.

The religious view was that God should decide when you die, not man, and palliative care is excellent. We can all go into a nice hospice and die drugged up to the eyebrows, which apparently was what God and the medical profession intended.

This debate is going to get more and more urgent, and I know what I'd want when the time comes, I would like to have control of my destiny, provided I was compos mentis. I would like to have a button to press when I'd had enough. And believe me, I would press it.