It’s a familiar tale. Midway through life’s journey, Marcus Berkmann woke to find himself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Without a Virgil to guide him through the trials and torments of middle age, he composed a bestselling memoir based on his experiences, A Shed of One’s Own – not so much a divine comedy as a mildly amusing stocking-filler. In his latest book, Still a Bit of Snap in the Celery, he realises he has entered a new age category: the so-called ‘young-old’. It’s easy to picture the delight on the sleepy faces of many a grandparent this Christmas as they wake to discover young/old Father Marcus has visited again.

As the success of films such as The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel suggests, there is now a whole sector of the entertainment industry monetising the onset of old age, perhaps because this generation of senior citizens will be the last to enjoy much disposable income, a societal shift of which the author is uncomfortably aware. As Berkmann notes: ‘When I was 50 most of my friends of my age were in full-time and often well-paid jobs. Ten years later, very few of them are. It has been carnage out there.’

Faced with the prospect of never actually being able to retire, the author seeks consolation in simple pleasures – a pint in the pub with a mate, reading in the armchair in the conservatory – and both the tone and pace of Still a Bit of Snap suggest a gentle stroll on an autumn morning, faithful Labrador at one’s side, before starting work packing customers’ shopping in the local branch of Waitrose, where a cup of coffee remains free at the point of use.

Fittingly, then, the contents page reads like a cross between a gerontological questionnaire and a to-do list: ‘Aches and Pains’, ‘Children’, ‘Gammon’, ‘Memories’ and ‘Happy?’. Weirdly, this litany reminded me of another monologue created by a successful author looking ahead to the mixed blessings of decrepitude, Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. A shabby figure sits in a shed (OK, loft conversion) itemising the remnants of a past in which he was virile and healthy. ‘Knees made of biscuit… I used to run upstairs all the time and everywhere… I am unwilling to completely let go of who I once was,’ ruminates Berkmann. ‘Watery eyes… Wheat intolerance. I love saying the words “wheat intolerance,”’ he continues, like Krapp lingering over the word ‘spool’. Neither Beckett nor Berkmann is blind to the comedic potential of a well-placed banana skin: ‘Old age isn’t kind to testosterone levels in the male body, and most of what’s left seems dedicated to the industrial production of ear-hair and pubic eyebrows.’

Since the publication of his cricketing memoir Rain Men in the 1990s, Berkmann has become a skilled practitioner of light comic prose, the kind of droll commentary that might once have appeared in the pages of Punch under the bylines of Miles Kington or Alan Coren, the solid profession formerly known as ‘humourist’. When Berkmann composes a paean to the joys of pottering, it is Stephen Potter who comes to mind. And indeed, Still a Bit of Snap is not unlike a collection of columns on a theme, dispatches from the pensioner’s lunch club, that sort of thing. Berkmann is not given to skewering his subjects; rather, he approaches each topic – the inadvisability of face-lifts, say, or the baffling foibles of Generation Z – with an avuncular, seething reasonableness. He is frequently funny and self-deprecating company, but nonetheless he knows what he doesn’t like:

I am not a member of the WhatsApp group as I don’t have a mobile phone. I have to be contacted separately when a drink is in the offing. Indeed, if I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure I know what a WhatsApp group actually is.

Yet what lies beneath this seemingly amiable progress into that good night is a frustration which the young/old perhaps share with the old/young: an adolescent howl of ‘It’s so unfair’. But while teenagers may mitigate growing pains by slamming their bedroom doors, a beenager like Berkmann can only respond to life’s inevitable winding down with a wry shrug of the shoulders: better to K.B.O. (keep buggering on). Still a Bit of Snap in the Celery is a ramble against the dying of the light; and the conclusion the author comes to is that the autumn of our years will be the season in hell, heaven or purgatory we make of it.