As Eliot lifts me up and I straddle him, I forget I'm nearly 50...

The Soho restaurant Eliot has chosen for our date on this early winter evening is hard to find.

The sign is discreet, but the whole side of beef slowly rotating in the window tells us we are in the right place. When we descend the stairs into the cavernous interior there are more hunks of meat spitting above a long line of coals, stoked by tattooed wait-staff.

As I stumble towards our table in the near-darkness, I gradually become aware of the fact that everyone in the place is at least two decades younger than me.

The waiters, the sommelier, the clientele and Eliot himself, of course, in his blue jeans and skater T-shirt. I note with dismay that I am over-dressed. While everyone else is in 'casual work-wear', I am in heels and high-waisted trousers that bite into my stomach as I sit down.

Things get worse as I look down at the menu. I can make out nothing; letters swim up through the gloom, but no actual words. And the noise is at ear-bleed level.

My reading glasses are at the bottom of my unfashionable backpack, one of my 12-year-old daughter Maud's cast-offs that I'd borrowed because my ex-husband Simon has the kids for the night and I plan to stay with Eliot.

I couldn't face rummaging through the backpack in this aggressively hip atmosphere, and more than that I couldn't handle the idea of myself as the one wise old owl, squinting down through her glasses. So instead I turned on the torch of my phone – the wrong choice, because now our table glowed brightly in the darkness.

'Can you actually not read the menu?' Eliot seems genuinely astonished.

I respond as I often do when I'm embarrassed: I gave him a lecture. 'When you are older,' I shout over the noise. 'The lenses of your eyes thicken and don't bend as well, which makes it difficult to see. And the number of light-sensing cones decreases…' I trail off. His own face, handsome and unlined, looks at me quizzically.

'I can read the menu to you if you like,' he said.

I thanked him politely and replied in the negative. That's what I did for my own mother, who was approaching 90.

But I didn't feel far off her age, if I was honest, in this place. I definitely felt older than I would if I were with my Gen X friends in a less fashionable restaurant.

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THE SEX DIARIES: Post-divorce, I'm taking pleasure in rediscovering the sensual joy of kissing

Sometimes dating Eliot brought me up against my age in a hard way, more than it would if I were dating someone in their 50s. Yet other times, reflected in Eliot's striking green eyes, I felt young, as if by being with him erased the 20 years between us.

When he came back from the bathroom I tried to reset. Ageing is not a sin after all. It happens to us all, even Mephistopheles with the man-bun over there tending the coals. I knew that Eliot loved me for being strong and grown-up, successful and discerning.

I turned off my torch and touched his thigh, enjoying the breadth of it, hard as a rock under his jeans. 'I can't wait till later,' I told him. He looked embarrassed, but also happy. Eliot was quite puritan outside bed, but completely uninhibited inside it.

'You look so handsome,' I said. 'Have you got the massage oil at home?' I moved my hands up higher, knowing he'd stop me before I went too far.

Eliot smiled and shifted in his seat. The seats were pretty uncomfortable, suitable to the austere aesthetic, so it made sense that we ate the (admittedly delicious) food quite quickly and headed back to his.

When we got to Eliot's bedroom we undressed rapidly, still standing up. Then, as we kissed, he lifted me up and I straddled his waist.

Prior to Eliot, I'd never had sex in the standing position in my life; I've always been too self-conscious about my heaviness – and my ex-husband was too skinny to pick me up.

But Eliot was strong – he always claimed he'd lifted heavier than me in the gym – so I tried not to be self-conscious. The position is more of an athletic feat than one I can properly enjoy myself in, but it made me feel as if I was having young-person's sex.

Then, taking out the massage oil, I put my hands on his bulging chest muscles and asked him to lie down; I'm good with my hands. And sex with Eliot makes me feel sexy – by which I mean fit and desirable, and turned on of course (an obvious thing to say perhaps, but I've had sex, particularly during bad times with my ex-husband, which made me feel the opposite).

After that we moved on to several other positions that involved considerable amounts of athleticism. When we had sex like we did that night – prolonged, showy, noisy – it wasn't as if I forgot my almost 50 years, but I certainly didn't feel it.

• Annabel Bond is a pseudonym. Names have been changed.