ELEANOR GOGGIN

Offer me your seat — at your mortal peril

Iam becoming increasingly age sensitive. I never thought I would care, but it’s become evident that I am capable of homicide when it comes to people treating me as an older person. Towards the end of her life, my mother started asking people to guess her age. People in the bank, buying oranges in Dunnes, the milkman, the coalman. Anyone who came her way. I cringed. Of course they were going to take years off. She died when she was 78, and people would invariably, out of politeness, pitch her in her sixties. She would shove out her chest and say with aplomb, “I’m well into my seventies.” They would feign stunned surprise. And the more they pretended, the more she liked them. It was a sort of a game. A ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ kind of thing.

The awful part is that I am now behaving exactly like her. I’ve ditched the whole thing of lying about my age and I now brazenly impart the truth without even being asked. If people nod and behave as if that is exactly where they had pitched me, I hate them. If they act all surprised, they will be my friend for whatever bit of life is left to me.

I got on a full bus home yesterday and had to stand. A guy who was sitting in one of the front seats commented about the weather, but didn’t offer to get up. I sighed in relief. He thinks I’m a young one, I thought. And then a genuine young one got on. Very pretty and a short skirt. He jumped up to allow her to sit down. I became apoplectic. And then I realised, I can’t have it every way. If I want a seat I’ll have to let the hair go grey, don the tweeds and twin sets, because, let’s face it, I will never again be the one in the short skirt. Maybe I’ll just walk home and save myself the pain.