How dare the Government label me ‘vulnerable’!
With older people facing an extended lockdown, John Simpson says millions like him aren’t anything like as frail as the policymakers would have us believe
‘So, we’re begging you – stay indoors,” declaimed my 14-year-old son, for an online exercise set by his school. “Especially if you’re over 70.” And he looked pointedly at me.
At 75, I’m in the “vulnerable” group the Government is considering urging to stay home once restrictions begin to lift in the coming weeks. But I’ve been more active than ever this year, reporting for the BBC from Beirut, Auschwitz and Qatar, and starting up a Youtube channel when this interminable lockdown began.
My days start with 100 star jumps, and I play football and cricket in the garden with my son. Soon, perhaps, his school will reopen, and I’ll have to find some other form of exercise.
My wife and I will continue to self-isolate, because it’s the right and sensible thing to do, and we’ll have to be a lot more careful if he’s mixing all day long with his teachers and the other kids.
Our stay-at-home conditions have their benefits; every few days, my son and I record a poem and post it on Twitter, which is surprisingly satisfying. Yet this is make-or-break time for those of us in our 70s and 80s. I’m lucky to have a garden and a young family, but what’s even more important is how each of us thinks about our lives and what we feel we can do: just remember the wonderful centenarian Capt Tom Moore.
Of course, there are large numbers of people over 70 who are frail, and need checking on and helping. But I have plenty of friends of a similar age who don’t fit the image the Government apparently has of us:
Dame Jane Goodall, fretting away in her Bournemouth lockdown at 86, furiously planning for the moment when she can get on a plane again and carry on promoting her “Roots and Shoots” initiative around the world; Sir Robin Knox-johnston, at 81, arranging his next sailing expedition; or Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 76, who said recently: “I don’t want to become a geriatric who is rescued while trying to do too much – and to avoid that I need to keep fit.”
It scarcely needs saying, but it’s all about the way we see ourselves. One of the country’s main experts on ageing is Sir Muir Gray, the funny, hyperactive author of Sod 70!. He told me: “The best current scientific evidence is that ageing in itself isn’t a major cause of problems until our mid-90s”. Most problems that occur before that age are, he says, the result of mistaken beliefs and attitudes, which bring with them disease, a loss of fitness, and negative prejudices. In other words, you’re only useless and incapable if you believe you are.
Does the Government really believe everyone over 70 needs to be treated as if we’ve got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin?
There is a great deal of ageism in our society; big organisations are especially prone to it. You only have to listen to the voice so many younger people put on when they speak to the elderly and infirm to realise they are projecting their own attitudes on to old people, infantilising them and patronising them. The old come to accept this treatment, and perhaps even expect it. Sir Muir believes that, just as men have learnt to stop using patronising and sexist expressions to women, so we should give up using limiting expressions like “the elderly”, “carer” and “growing old”. And, he says, we ought to phase out the word “retirement” and talk about “renaissance” instead; older people should be “encouraged to see that they maintain and increase their activity for the good of society as a whole”.
I agree: this is a real moment of opportunity – to remind the world and ourselves that we are a serious force. It’s less a question of age than a question of attitude. It really is our decision. There have been such advances in health and the way we lead our lives that for many people, being 75 feels like 55 used to feel, back in the Eighties. Things have changed in economic terms, too.
Recently, the Office for National Statistics noted that the spending power of people over 65 was now as great as that of people under 40. We no longer regard our 70s as purely a time of comfort, cruises and stairlifts.
These weeks of lockdown have been very difficult, and they’re not over yet. But they do offer a useful opportunity for those of us who are over 70 to work out ways of leading fuller, more satisfying lives when we are finally released from captivity. The key thing is keeping mentally and physically active, and we can start that right away.
If ever there was a time when the cliché “You’re only as old as you feel” applies, it’s now.
For many people, being 75 today feels like 55 used to back in the Eighties