THERE are, I know, few reasons to be cheerful these days. There’s a war in Europe, the ice caps are melting, Liz Truss is the new Prime Minister and Stirling Albion could only draw at the weekend. So, you know, hell, handcart, all that.

In the circumstances, then, any bit of good news, however small, should be cherished. In which case let’s all raise a glass to Alan Garner who, at the age of 88, has become the oldest author to make the shortlist of the Booker Prize with his latest book, Treacle Walker.

That Garner should be in contention for one of the most auspicious of literary prizes some 62 years after he published his first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is a testament to both his creativity and his endurance. He makes M John Harrison, who won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020 aged 75 for his novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, look like a mere tyro.

It’s also good to be reminded that art is not a young person’s game. As a culture we tend to fixate on the next big thing. And that’s not surprising. There is always something thrilling about the shock of the new (these days I’m mildly obsessed with the music of Ethel Cain, Yaya Bey and Doechii, all of whom I’ve discovered in 2022).

But there is also something heroic about artists who rage against the dying of the light, who continue to create long after they’ve reached pensionable age. Think of Matisse in his eighties, unable to paint and confined to bed, cutting up painted paper and making vibrant, life-enhancing collages out of them. Works like The Snail (1953) or his picture book Jazz (1947) sing with colour. Or Louise Bourgeois the French-American sculptor who was born in 1911 and didn’t have her first retrospective until 1982 and was still making art in 2010, the year she died. And if anything the art of JMW Turner became wilder and more potent the older he got.

What should be celebrated is the creative urge, the need in some artists to continue to work, to create, to continue to find a voice, even if that voice is not in fashion.

Age offers a different palette. Experience, mortality, loss all move to the fore. To listen to Johnny Cash sing the Trent Reznor song Hurt is to hear a man confronting the end of life (he died less than a year after the record was released).

Not all will produce their best work in old age. I’m not sure many would consider House of Gucci Ridley Scott’s best movie. But the octogenarian is still on film sets marshalling an army of actors, designers and technicians to bring his vision to the screen. He doesn’t need to be. Presumably he wants to be.

We can get sentimental about late artistic flowerings, but the best work created by older artists is rarely sentimental. It looks unblinkingly into the dark ahead.

In both life and art endings are often harder than beginnings. It’s why we should cherish them.