A generation that still pictures itself as rebels in blue jeans is bemused by the notion of imminent old age.
Once, when a tyro, he was sufficiently volcanic in temperament that team-mates would hide if an eruption seemed imminent, with age he has mellowed and diversified.
Because of its messianic (salvatory figure) themes, Isaiah became extremely significant among the early Christians who wrote the New Testament and the sectarians at Qumrān near the Dead Sea, who awaited the imminent messianic age, a time that would inaugurate the period of the Last Judgment and the Kingdom of God.
Despite a flurry of 1970s media reports on an imminent ice age, there was never anything approaching a scientific consensus on the likelihood of further cooling, and it appears that greenhouse warming has long since eclipsed the mid-century cool spell.
Last year SD Crockett depicted an imminent new ice age in After the Snow, in which young Willo needs all Mica's resourcefulness to survive alone in near-future Britain after social collapse.
Civil War historian Blair Worden comments that "Vane's opaque political ideas and religious beliefs are now barely intelligible", and biographer David Parnham writes "He presented himself as a 'witness' of light, as a spiritualist, as one dispensing advanced wisdoms in the epistemological setting of an imminent and apocalyptic age of the Spirit".
Nobody now alive is younger than 25, and the disappearance of the human race is imminent as an aging population inexorably fades away.
One Banana More Another welcome return this summer for those of a certain age is imminent.
(Hugh Ross's gently spoken Duncan feels like a relic from another age; his imminent death is inevitable).
Until journalism's seer of seers, Lord Rees-Mogg, announces that an economic golden age is imminent, one cannot assume that we're all doomed.
