An Embittered Meditation: Old Age
Time it was and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you
Paul Simon, Old Friends.
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| Father and daughter, 1966. I thought I'd live forever, and Sarah knew she wouldn't. |
When you’re pushing at age 71, you realise just how much the world has changed since you came into it. You also reach a mental plateau which every septuagenarian throughout history must have reached; an illogical incomprehension with those younger folk around you. This is further exacerbated by the rapid growth of technology which, rather than strengthening the bonds between human beings, seems to dissolve them, to be replaced with a myopic fixation on no longer communicating vocally and face to face, but by the blurred, rapid movement of texting thumbs.
We all, and even you, twenty and thirty-somethings, long after this 70-year old has shuffled off, eventually face that internal query “why didn’t everything stay the same as it was?” Yet the rhythms of life and death fluctuate wildly in every era. We are in an age of discovery, where being human becomes less and less important as our biology becomes absorbed by the unstoppable, creeping moss of robotic science.
What my generation knew as ‘traditions’ have evaporated. These may be silly examples to a younger mind, but take November 5, Guy Fawkes night. The anticipation of Bonfire Night when I was at school held almost the same frisson as that of Christmas Day. We stealthily bought up fireworks with our pocket money, storing them ready for the glorious night. We spent a month collecting anything combustible for our bonfires. Tree branches, old timber, rubber tyres. And then came the night itself, just one night, and if it rained, tough. But it HAD to be November 5th. It was a 3-hour riot of flame, of thunder-flashes, Roman candles, jumping jacks and rockets. On the morning after we would sadly skirt around the smouldering embers, and pick up expended fireworks, morosely remembering the night before. Then we’d shut down our glumness and start looking forward to Yuletide. Yet what happens now? As soon as the somewhat alien importation of America’s insistence on Halloween is over, fireworks start exploding everywhere from the end of October, almost up to December. If the ‘traditional’ November 5th isn’t on a ‘convenient’ day, then it will be ‘staged’ on a Friday or a Saturday. Nothing must interfere with business.
But Guy Fawkes night is nothing. Capitalism dictates that every previously folk-based point on the calendar has nothing to do with heritage, but with profit. Hot Cross buns and Easter Eggs rapidly fill the shelves now in January, four months ahead of their festive time-slot. Mince pies make their appearance now as early as September. We’re flagging up Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and even Remembrance Sunday so far ahead of their time that when they arrive we’ve all but forgotten what they are. So what were once elements of tradition are now the background white noise of commercial prodding devices; buy, buy, buy.
As for technology, you are almost exiled from humanity without it. The PC and e-mail are fine; over the past two decades we’ve absorbed their benefits. But they are not enough for the corporate world. Everything is a ‘must-have’; a basic mobile phone isn’t worth looking at - only the I-phone will do. But then you need an I-Pad or some kind of tablet, and why buy a clunky printed book made of paper when yu can read literature on your Kindle. (Until, of course, you accidentally drop it, or someone steals it). The I-phone has had the effect of cutting off the outside world. Walk down any major street and note how many people are shambling along, both hands clutching their phone, thumbs a-blur texting, oblivious to the flight of birds, the wind in trees, the joy of actually strolling. ![]()
How terribly strange to be seventy
All this griping is what you’d expect from a curmudgeonly old crust like me. When I was younger you’d find people past pension age sitting on park benches smoking pipes, chuntering away about ‘the state of the world’ and it was hard to imagine that you’d ever become one of them. But be warned - it happens. Being ‘old’ seems an alien concept when you’re 25. Simon and Garfunkel said it best on their Bookendsalbum in the mid-1960s:
Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes of the old friends
Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends
Can you imagine us years from today?
Sharing a park bench quietlyHow terribly strange to be seventy
Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
As I write this Paul Simon has reached the age of 72. There seems to be a cosmic unfairness about human biology. Yet if we were immortal, the world would be so crammed full of greatness, massive giants of intellect and totally insane megalomaniacs that it would explode. We need to die, but before that, we need to marry, we need to love, we need to have children, we need to do as much as we can in our allotted span to make sense of it all. This week I attended the wedding of my Niece, Cassandra. It too had none of the ‘traditions’ of most marriages. It was something new, something different, but none the less understandable, because it was original and, above all, creative.
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| A Goth Wedding: Cassandra Bainton Marries Neil Codd, February 6, 2014, Cottingham, Hull. |
Next week we shall attend the funeral of our departed friend, Dorothy, who made it to her late 70s before that same evil which took our beloved daughter Sarah 14 months ago hit her; cancer. Joy and death, all in the space of a week. So perhaps all the progress I rail about, all the demolition of what I hold to be tradition, can stretch beyond the I-pad and the I-phone and Kindle and come up with a cure for Cancer. Perhaps then, we shall all be ‘old friends’ for a few decades more.
I shall now return to what my decreasingly agile brain still allows me to do; creative writing. And there’s a thought. When they scatter the ashes, something of us remains after all; these words.