Showing how ‘old’ can be the new young
Getting Old: Deal with it
Mensch Publishing, £9.99 Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
OLD” WAS once synonymous with pain and frailty. It was a glum, largely housebound state relieved by visits from relatives bearing soft sweetmeats for nocturnally removable teeth.
No longer. Lee Janogly, 81, a fitness instructor, diet counsellor and author, is the poster girl for an infinitely more alluring new dotage, known in Japan as “young-old” as opposed to “old-old”.
On the cover of her new book, Getting Old: Deal With It, Janogly appears in scarlet boxing gloves, a lithe and sparky figure knocking hell out of the “l” of her title. She can whatsapp and takes her grandchildren to the theatre She has her roots touched up every five weeks, is learning the piano and teaches, or takes, up to eight exercise classes a week. Janogly’s elan is extraordinary, but do not dare even think of adding “for her age.” The word “still” as in: “Are you still teaching?” is only marginally better. “Yeah!” Janogly will reply. “Are you still breathing?” Her spirit age, she reckons, is 32.
And so can ours be, with a little help from her vademecum for veterans. Suffused with humour, sometimes sad but always realistic, Getting Old distils countless conversations with friends (mainly women) and experts on assorted topics from managing memory (learning a new skill does more for your brain than sudoku) to getting the most out of your doctor (who’s best avoided if you can).
Don’t trawl the internet with ailment symptoms (or you may contract Googleitis Neurosa). “Grief is love unwilling to let go”, Janogly writes in a bittersweet chapter about her late husband, his passing, and the promise she made him to stick around until the grandchildren are grown.
Among the ageing stereotypes that Janogly would bust is that all oldies are the same: unproductive, forgetful, inflexible, and big on complaining. It’s time, she says, to turn the tables on jokes about incontinence and deafness that we older people may internalise as self-fulfilling prophecies. If so, you almost expect to rattle with pills and wince “oof” when rising from an armchair.
In 2020, Janogly observes, there will be more people on earth over 65 than under five. Best, then, to embrace the age we are with all its rewards and challenges.
Wear your jeans but preferably indigo and not with stilettos. Plan ahead: join a choir or your local University of the Third Age. Janogly recognises that, while the mirror may reflect a fair enough face one day, it will offer up “a raddled, puffy old hag” the next.’
Toenails thicken, knees grow wider than your calves (ouch) and upper arms continue waving even when your grandkids have turned the corner. So eat healthily but allow yourself one “trigger” day a week when you can indulge your personal food fetish — cheese, ice cream or crisps. Eat slowly and never “take orders from a biscuit”.
Find a form of exercise you enjoy – anything that is a passport to strength and balance and no excuses. Don’t worry yourself into life-spoiling misery with dark “What Ifs” that might afflict your family in these testing times. Reality check: right now, this minute, they’re fine. And so can you be. “You may be old,” Janogly says, “but you don’t have to be old. As Jane Fonda put it, there’s a whole new landscape to discover over the hill.”
Madeleine Kingsley is a writer and counsellor