How I learnt to love grumpy old women

The American humorist David Sedaris spends much of his time in West Sussex – where he is so famous for going on long litter-picking walks that the council named a bin lorry after him. But during lockdown he has been in Manhattan, and walking across New York instead. He admits to being competitive – and clocking up a good tally on his Fitbit tracker has become a compulsion. He walks in two shifts, setting out on the second just after midnight, so that he can start the next day with six miles under his belt. On these late outings, he sees a different side of the city, when it is dotted with its most vulnerable – the homeless, the destitute, and sometimes the simply eccentric. “I was at Times Square at 1.30 in the morning, and there was a guy in a wheelchair who was pushing himself along and he said, ‘Look at that clown.’ I thought he was talking about me. But then I followed his eyes and there was a clown, with purple hair and a red nose.” He used to have the streets to himself. Now he finds himself joining in with huge crowds on Black Lives Matter marches. “The people are kind and thoughtful – always distributing snacks and water,” he told Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. “It’s nice to be part of a group, and I like walking down the centre of the street. Over time, I came to think of the marches the way I think of buses and subways. ‘I’ll just take this BLM down to 23rd,’ I’d tell myself. Later, I’d maybe get a crosstown BLM to Second Avenue, then walk home from there.”

Chrissie Hynde’s longevity

Chrissie Hynde is one of rock ’n’ roll’s great survivors. It’s more than 40 years since she formed The Pretenders. Two of the band’s original members died of drugs within a year of each other in the 1980s, but she has endured. She reckons that, as a woman, having children can give you longevity, “because you have to take time off to bring them up [she raised her two daughters alone]. And that way you don’t bore the public with yourself, and then if anyone’s still interested, you’re glad to get back into it again. Taking drugs and drinking and smoking – that can give you short-gevity. But if you survive, and you finally pull the plug on all that stuff, you feel like you did before you started, which for most of us was when we were 15, and that gives you a second wind.” She gave up everything at 60, says Jessamy Calkin in The Daily Telegraph. She has since written a memoir, and if it weren’t for lockdown, she’d be on a 60-date tour of the US. Instead, she has been at home in London, painting. She paints because she loves it, not for acclaim. “If anything, I feel like I’ve already had too much acclaim,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of respect – more than my fair share, if you ask me. So if anyone likes the paintings – great, but I’m not trying to make my name as a painter. Really, who cares?”

Female comics may have a hard time now, but when Jenny Eclair started out in the 1980s, comedy really was a man’s world, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. There were only four other women on the circuit – Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Jo Brand and Victoria Wood; and though they were very different, they were ranked as though they were competing in their own mini-league. “We were all scrabbling for this tiny window of opportunity, and as soon as somebody got through, it was firmly shut again,” Eclair recalls. “I really liked all the other women on the circuit, until they got more famous than me, then I hated them. That’s the truth of it.” In the 2000s, she starred in the BBC2 series Grumpy Old Women; and since then her live audiences have been made up of middle-aged women – which is fine by her. She reckons that as women get older, there is much more that they share – perhaps because they’ve had many of the same sorrows and losses, and if they haven’t, they have learnt more empathy. It’s palpable at her shows. “We toured the Grumpy Old Women shows in Australia; they were translated into Finnish, Icelandic. And it became clear to me, wherever you were, that middle-aged women laugh at the same things. There was always a joke about female-pattern balding, whether to shave it off or comb it over. And it didn’t matter where you were – the laugh would always come at the same point. You could time it.”