Happy New Year! 2014… it makes you think, doesn't it? We've just had the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, a momentous date which heralds its 51st year, and now, in 2014, with new episodes featuring a new Doctor coming later in the year, we are entering the series’ 52nd calendar year. Those numbers keep on creeping up, don’t they? A lot of years. Does it make you feel old?

During the build up to the big day of the Doctor, my mind often cast back to that other big anniversary, the 25th. It was a slightly smaller affair, and one which the general viewing public could be excused for not noticing, but for my eleven year old self, it was huge! I’d been watching the show regularly for a good six or seven years, was starting to build a respectable library of the novelisations (maybe a dozen by that point) and with our first VCR (Video Cassette Recorder for you youngsters out there) I was starting to build up a fair few actual episodes on tape; by the anniversary I had eight whole episodes taped off telly to watch and re-watch to my heart’s content. That eighth episode was Silver Nemesis, Part One, and it was glorious! It was really the dawn of my status as a Doctor Who fan, rather than simply an avid viewer.

25 years seemed like an impossibly long time back then. But then, 1963 was fourteen whole years before I was born, and my most distant memories of the show, with the fourth Doctor regenerating into the fifth, a vague memory of K9 in a greenhouse in the middle of the night, and gleefully hiding behind a cushion from the big bang at the end of every closing title sequence being a mere quarter of the way back into its history. And yet, here I am now, contemplating a time when the universe was less than half its present size. Do I feel old? Absolutely not!

Okay, so the decades are rolling past, and our lifespan is such that this fact is a major deal, but all I can think of is my Mum telling me, on several occasions throughout my childhood, how the first ever episode was transmitted on her 22nd birthday, and how she used to race home across London every Saturday after hockey practice to watch it. Of course, she was my Mum, so the previous generation thing was simply taken for granted, but the concept that my adult self would one day be looking back over that same expanse of time simply didn't realise itself in my pre-pubescent mind.

But old is the one thing is does not make me feel. 2013’s 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who’s own 25th Anniversary episode, Silver Nemesis, Part One, has simply given me an appreciation of how young Mum was back then, both in 1963 and 1988, and she doesn't really seem to be that old now. Time is just a measurement of how much life you've lived. Feeling old is just an optional extra.