IN THE PRIME OF SENILITY
Our lovely late daughter, Sarah, used to say frequently that she had no desire to reach old age. Perhaps this was the inevitable influence of her working life; for ![]()
30 years she had worked in the NHS caring for geriatrics. She saw life at its withering end, every day. Leaving us at 46, she had her way. She never grew to be an ‘old lady’, so perhaps those last few smiles she gave us on December 23 2012 signified something. She’d had a good, full life and enjoyed herself. We can’t ask for much more than that.
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Those of us left behind, who have ‘grown old’ see life through a different lens. I used to look at retired people when I was still out driving my weekly 1,000 miles up and down the country, making a fraught living, and envy them. No more being ruled by the alarm clock. No bosses telling you what to do. Your days, open-ended; golden hours to fill as you wish. In many ways, yes, this is how it is. Living as we do in England, where we have a pension, a roof over our heads and we don’t starve, we’re some of the luckiest people on the planet. Being old and retired? What’s not to like?
There are things about getting old that they don’t tell you about. That’s because most folk under the age of 60 have no idea what they are. These things come as part of a package along with your pension. Firstly, because of what we call the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’, once we hang up our working clothes the rhythm of life changes. Earning one’s daily bread, keeping the mortgage paid, feeding and clothing the kids, this was the perpetual motion engine which made us function. Leisure time therefore was compressed into the spaces in between, and made precious by the fact. When the machine shuts down, something remains; a sense of guilt. I should be doing something. I’m luckier than most because I fill my time writing, turning my thoughts and interests into words. But I suffer the same external tribulations as my fellow retirees. Prominent among these is that post-65, we enter what I call the ‘season of funerals’. Your friends and relatives, those in this age group, have an inconvenient habit of dying. This inevitably engenders your own personal gloom. How long will I last? Now that I’m 71, each day another name is flagged up, another death. We’ve had four funerals in the past year. On top of this your whole physique begins to let you down. Aches and pains abound. Bending down to pick up a piece of dropped cutlery becomes a small challenge accompanied by a grunt. I used to sleep well. Now, I hate going to bed. I read until the early hours, and once we do nod off, sleep is wrenched from us by the demands of the bladder. And throughout the day, the outside world, brimming with youthful activity, becomes a more complex and incomprehensible place.
Being old, we feel like part of another ‘tribe’. We are constantly puzzled. Why are all those people wandering around clutching their I-phones, why do they disfigure themselves with tattoos, why do they throw their discarded packaging to the pavement? What the hell is the attraction of Rap and Hip-Hop? Why can’t these people take an active interest in politics and social affairs and sort this bloody awful world out?
The fact is, none of this really matters because this confusion is simply another element of the old age package. We all remember, discovering our pop music in our teens, that voice shouting up the stairs - “Turn that bloody racket down!” It seems that once we stop work at 65, our minds are frozen in aspic and every external movement becomes a threatening conundrum. In the final analysis, my old friends, there is a consolation here. No-one is immune to these afflictions. Yes, once Cheryl Cole’s over-tattooed arse becomes a wrinkled 70 year old approximation of a crocodile handbag, once Dappy from N-Dubs ‘grows up’ (some chance) and sees his various headgear as a clown’s haberdashery, and when Michael McIntyre retires, rich yet in the realisation that he wasn’t 1% as funny as Billy Connolly or Eric Morecambe, then they too will look in the mirror and text their friends with WTF?
I like being retired for the freedom it gives me to spend time writing down my thoughts. I like the open-ended days. I love the wide landscape of potential creativity. What I don’t like is the unfairness of it all. Fifty years of work, struggle and discipline externally imposed, and what do we get at the end? Ten years of ‘freedom’ if we’re lucky. So in the end biology defeats us. Here endeth this rant.
However, looking at the wider world, all these words I have written here are sheer luxury. As I write this some poor woman in Africa, with a life expectancy of 50, is walking 5 miles every morning to get 5 gallons of muddy water in a jerry can. Children in Iraq and Syria watch as the stark madness of ‘religion’ engulfs and destroys their family as murderous psychopaths, hell-bent on dragging us back to the 12thcentury, hack innocent people’s heads off whilst telling us that ‘Allah is merciful’. Hundreds of tiny children have died around the globe whilst I’ve been sitting in obese safety and comfort carping on about what a ‘bum deal’ we old English folk have.
Thus I balance it all by telling myself: Quit the crap, abandon the bullshit and face facts. There are degrees of misery in this world and, based on a scale of 1 - 10 mine is a 1. So although navel-gazing is good every now and then, we ought to look down and be thankful that our navel is still there. Time for a pot of tea and a sandwich now, and a cold reality check.