Ro Cambridge

Ibehaved most shamefully in a cafe in Motueka this week. No-one else noticed, but somehow this only made me feel even more ashamed of myself. As I walked in, I noticed a large group of women, mostly grey-haired, clustered around a long table, talking and laughing happily with each other.

I ordered a scone and a flat white. The young thing behind the counter asked, not unreasonably, if I was part of their group. I glanced over my shoulder at them, turned back to the young thing and heard myself say: ‘‘No, I won’t be a part of that group for a few years yet.’’

The very second this treacherous disavowal escaped my lips, I felt deeply ashamed. There I stood, wearing a hearing aid in each ear, arch supports in my shoes and prescription sunglasses. My mousy grey hair was only invisible because of a (quite possibly ill-judged) application of henna.

In my wallet were a SuperGold Card and an appointment letter from the hospital for a stress echocardiogram. Though it was true that I didn’t share any personal connection with the women, I most definitely belonged to their age cohort. Why had I denied it?

The Freudian explanation would be that it was a deeply unconscious fear of frailty and death that prompted me to dissociate myself from the mortality I glimpsed in those ageing faces.

American novelist Philip Roth, who died this year at 85, called old age a ‘‘massacre’’, although this suggests something sudden, not the decades-long process it actually is.

So, let’s just say that living in an ageing body ain’t no picnic, even with the advent of Viagra, pacemakers, plastic hips, titanium kneecaps and laser eye surgery. Even cowards must accept and negotiate their way through what Shakespeare called our ‘‘strange eventful history’’ to its endpoint, which, in spite of modern dentistry, we may arrive

The individuals who make up the ‘‘ageing population’’ are spoken about as they are one great undifferentiated lump of humanity.