With British political parties starting their general election campaigns and at last realizing that the older you are, the more likely you are to vote, the spotlight is on seniors, and there's a good deal of national hand-wringing about how they deal with their old people. The picture can't be described as bright: small families with distant sons and daughters aren't geared to coping with frail grans, old people's homes are often either awful or expensive and there are far too many isolated and lonely people scraping by on nothing much -- and they're mostly women.
Because men die sooner; because few women have built up decent pensions; because too often, a lone old man attracts more well-wishers than a lone old woman. Go into any care home, and residential retirement facility, and there are on average half a dozen women for every man.
Why women live longer remains a puzzle: they're certainly used to looking after themselves, making the best of things. In terms of evolution, it's been suggested that the reason women live past their reproductive age is apparently because the grandchildren carrying their genes will benefit from their help. But nowadays they live long past the age when the grandchildren need looking after at all; the problem then is who should look after them?
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Do other countries, maybe, deal with old people better? What happens as you get older in Japan, in Italy, in Australia? A series starting April 11 on BBC television went to five countries (and a cruise ship) to find out. They optimistically call the series Golden Years, and that seemed a fair description of one Australian venture: Betty Mounser, a widow herself, had started an outfit called Solace, a very successful self-help group for widows. It is a vital network of friends who live in retirement villages and who have lost a lifestyle as well as a husband. Amazingly, the group pays visits day and night to various gambling casinos, which are apparently a key element of Australian culture.
In Japan, there used to be strict rules about who looked after parents: it was always the family -- ie, the wife -- of the oldest son.
And the family house was passed from generation to generation. But as more and more people of working age move into towns, the pattern breaks down: the BBC film shows an old woman, who couldn't sell or move from her large country home because it had to be kept for the family, who only saw her son on visits but who was cheered up by a fluffy cartoon-like doll that said "hug me" and "goodnight" and "I love you". These creatures sell by the thousand and, amazingly, provide some comfort.
And there were other technical whiz-kid solutions: for example a house where all human needs can be answered at the touch of a button -- not much of a substitute, you'd have thought, for the touch of a human being.
One of the most also got the lowest birth rate in Europe so it's common enough for an old woman to have no one around to care for her but the social services. So in the north Italian town of Bra they have tried out this adoption scheme with several families, and here was Laura, mother of a couple of teenagers, planning to build an extra bit onto her house to adopt the toothless Giovanna. Everyone seemed delighted with the arrangement -- except Giovanna herself, who'd just achieved a place of her own for the first time in her life and hated to give it up. And it remained a puzzle, frankly, why anyone would particularly want to take her in.
China, with its one-child policy, has got the generation imbalance worse than anywhere else. They are heading for 240 million retirees and have suddenly started to focus on the elderly. The old folk used simply to stay indoors out of sight playing mah jong, but are now encouraged to get up and go.
Take Jin for example, an ex-factory worker of 68 and a demon break-dancer, who joined 6,000 in a battle to go to Beijing to take part in a beauty contest for the elderly. It's a rather sterner "beauty" contest than most -- teams have to show they can fix a puncture in two minutes. Jin wins her contest to become an ambassador for the elderly, but has to be rushed to hospital (where, as the wife of a retired general, she gets almost free treatment).
Which is always the trouble: hale and hearty you may be, but the good old machinery is beginning to wear out, and that can't always be fixed in two minutes.
So how golden are these years?
"Golden pleasure-seekers" is now a marketing category for what you might call the Saga lot, mortgages paid off, decent pensions, freedom now that the kids are grown, two holidays a year. But there are two age groups here that shouldn't be confused: the active pensioners in their 60s and 70s, and the older and more ailing who really do need looking after. Of course, some people in their 60s get bad hips or diabetes or find themselves going deaf, and equally there are 90-year-olds with all their marbles, straight spines and a good appetite, but the difference is real: the age difference between a 60-year- old and an 80-year-old woman is the same as that between a girl of 10 and a woman of 30.
None of the solutions in the series -- except perhaps the Australian one -- seem to me to provide a real answer to the question of how nowadays anyone should best grow old. So where is it best to spend your declining years? Nuns, apparently do well: they stay in a familiar environment, they go on doing what work they can, they're looked after quite naturally by their sisters.
It used to be much the same in Oxbridge colleges, but Oxford apparently discontinued its life Fellows after one old don felt obliged to fire a gun through his ceiling every day -- immediately below another old codger who thought he was a mushroom and sat endlessly on his floor.
Big families can accommodate the old and ailing, but the operative word is "big" -- an old person added to a couple or a single son or daughter arguably uses up far too much of their lives. There are, though, some family substitutes around. In the north-east English city of Liverpool they dreamt up a scheme for fostering old people if those they lived with had to go out to work.
In Denmark and Holland and to some extent in the US, there is co-housing, which aims to imitate the closeness of a traditional village: that is to say the people have their own rooms or apartments, but share a good deal -- a communal room, events possibly, buying in bulk, and especially the habit of looking out for each other. For the people who like it, it can be an ideal way of keeping a bit of your own space while not being lonely.
In London the Older Feminists Network has dreams of buying a house together along the same lines, and in the US, there are occasionally such communities in trailer parks. There is at least one all-woman one, where 95 percent of them are lesbians and the remaining 5 percent their mothers, and I heard of one being formed with the cheerful name of Crone's Nest.
Independent, liberal people tend to shudder at America's rich "ghettoes for the aged," sun-bleached and safe behind strong gates.
But a good deal of our scorn is probably aimed more at the affluent values that they seem to espouse, than at their getting out from under a youth-dominated culture. Perhaps at their best they are not unlike the European through-care retirement communities which have bungalows, a community centre and various degrees of homecare.
One thing is clear: if even those countries that have been most family-oriented in the past are having to think of new solutions, it's plain that we can't go back to landing all the problems of age on our descendents. So maybe the message for all of us is that it behoves us to plan for our declining years as assiduously as we ever planned for our careers; for they may go on for an awfully long time.
Though I shan't, actually, be getting myself to a nunnery.
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