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Being old is not necessarily such a bad thing

By Katharine Whitehorn
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Tuesday, Sep 02, 2008, Page 9

Being 80 is the moment of truth. This is the moment when you can no longer think of yourself as “promising,” when you can no longer huffily say “elderly” or use the dread phrase “I’m 78 years young.” You are old.

Being old is not necessarily awful. My 95-year-old aunt says: “Oh, the 80s were fine.”

I recently came across a card she wrote when she was 89 that said: “I’ve bought a new car, I’ve had a blood transfusion and I’ve booked our next summer holiday. But don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for my 90th birthday.”

It is not all a bundle of laughs, though. You — I mean we — have to accept that there are wrinkles or bulges or sags; well, a few may not have them, but most of us do. It’s always a question at a school or a college reunion whether it’s more depressing to see Helen Mirren lookalikes, who make you feel you should be trying a whole lot harder, or crumbling old people your age who make you think: “Oh God, that’s how old I really am.”

“I’ve bought a new car, I’ve had a blood transfusion and I’ve booked our next summer holiday. But don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for my 90th birthday.”

— birthday card from an 89-year-old woman

You are unlikely to charm anyone at a party with the melting invitation of your smile and you’re preoccupied with wondering about a hearing aid, considering a cataract operation, being begged by your children to hold on to the banister going down stairs.

Ah, the children. Or rather the young, since so many of our age either haven’t got children, or they live hundreds of miles away, or don’t get on with them anyway. What has fundamentally changed, between my generation and that of our parents, is that the dependence of one generation on another — either way round — is negotiable, not laid down. The old used to advise the young, but technology has reversed the equation and it’s the young who teach the old how to cope with the newfangled mechanisms of modern life. (I couldn’t be writing this if my son hadn’t kindly endured a wholly tiresome two hours sorting out my errant laptop.)

There’s no denying that the over-80s are terribly concerned about health. When you’re younger you mostly think that if something’s wrong with you, they fix it and you’re back to normal. Not at our age. We have a hip problem; OK, they give us a new one, which may have us dancing around like Fred Astaire (though probably not like Ginger Rogers, who did everything he did only backwards and in high heels), but it may mean a stick from then on. We don’t necessarily expect our small ailments to go away — just to be treatable. Pills are our daily diet. In the UK, the health service, having switched, in the words of the great Sir George Godber (the brilliant chief medical officer in the 1960s), from emphasizing care to concentrating on treatment, is probably going to be quite good at treating the burgeoning over-80s.

But we’ll have a hard time finding anywhere to recover, when there are no convalescent homes and we’re regarded as bed-blockers in hospitals. I’ve had women write to my Saga magazine agony column saying they’ve got plenty of women friends, but would so like to meet a man because they’re sick of talking about health all the time. (I tell them to stop hoping to bump into a literate widower and join the University of the Third Age, a self-help organization providing courses and companionship, which simply didn’t exist in the olden days.)

I don’t need to labor the fact that there is going to be a crisis when the diminishing number of young are asked to prop up the pensions of the vast expanding army of the old; it seems perfectly obvious that the old are going to have to work longer and I would be astounded if anyone under 60 thought anyone older should be able to just sit back and put their feet up at their expense.

So the question of work is crucial. The days when you were at work by your early 20s at latest, rose to some sort of seniority or expertise by 45, and retired at 60 or so are obviously over. It probably isn’t reasonable any more to think of each of us having just one career or skill — especially if we went into it in the first place mainly through lack of an available alternative. We badly need many more chances and grants for older people to retrain, reassess, rethink or switch skills. I had a great aunt who wanted to go to university; her father didn’t approve so she waited till he died and then went at 40.

Later she wished to study art in Paris, but had to wait until she was 60 and her disapproving mother had died. That wouldn’t work today, because both Mama and Papa would live too long; and maybe by then she would be a bit old for student life in Paris. But maybe not: art is one of the things enjoyed by thousands of pensioners and there must be more indifferent water colors around Europe today than when sketching was the only thing a polite young lady should do.

What do we — the old — want or need? A reason to get up in the morning — collecting dolls, washing the dog, deadheading the roses, protesting against ... what? Oh, come on, there’s always something to protest about. We need something we can use for money and we need people. Family maybe; neighbors perhaps; members of the book group or the cricket club (you can always do the scoring); other people who are also barmy about cats — and maybe someone to love. You can’t count on that, of course — but can anyone?

What we want and need is not, when you come to think of it, much different from what anyone wants — it may just be harder to find. But a recent survey suggested that the old are actually happier than the middle-aged; so there could be a good time coming.


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