NO COUNTRY FOR OLD PEOPLE

Is this a country for old people? Not really. All those images of families wishing Gran happy birthday through a glass window, they smacked of guilt. While intergenerational living had a catastrophic impact on the spread of coronavirus in China and Italy, it also reminded us that other countries do things differently when it comes to looking after their parents in old age. We tried to compensate with Zoom calls, with mixed results. Let’s just say introducing video calls to someone in their 80s comes with its own challenges — that sound you heard was someone screaming, “No, Mam, stop putting it up to your f**king ear”.

There was a shift in the public mood when a few older people said, “Shag this cocooning, we’re going out for a walk”. The initial reaction among some was, “Get back in your house old person, you’re putting frontline heath workers at risk”. This morphed into, “Fair play, I’d do the same thing myself”. (Particularly since we knew it wasn’t really putting frontliners at risk.)

If you’re young or middle-aged, lockdown put our older loved ones into focus. It reminded us that there is no ‘us and them’. Older people aren’t some kind of different species that would be better off in a home. Old people are just us, 40 years further down the road Coronavirus didn’t just isolate older people for three months, it also highlighted the level of loneliness involved before all this came along. It’s hard to know if younger generations will slow down a bit and find more time for their elders — but at least now we can’t pretend there isn’t a problem.