The fear that younger people have about ageing is the fear of changing themselves

I’m glad the latest Census form was still in a paper format. Not because I don’t like tech, but because if it had been online I would have had to spend an age scrolling back to find the year of my birth. I’ve been doing that a lot lately when filling in various online forms, and I can’t help wondering if the designers think that only older people have the patience for the amount of time it takes to scroll through six decades. Marty McFly in his 1985 souped up DeLorean travelled through time faster.

There’s something quite sobering about watching those individual years flash by as numbers, knowing that every one contains highs and lows, delights and disappointments, happiness and sorrow.

Each decade has its own stand-out year and occasionally I pause to remember some of the good times and the bad.

Nonetheless, flicking back more than 60 years on a digital screen is more of an exercise in repetitive strain injury than an existential stroll along memory lane.

I’m someone who prefers to look forward rather than back. But when I filled in that last digital form I was reminded that there is more time behind me than ahead; something that was brought into sharp relief by hearing an old song playing in a store later that day.

It was the Paul McCartney composition, When I’m Sixty-Four, from the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – an album I bought sometime in the 1970s, when being 64 was in my own very distant future. Now that future is my present.

Even though my current life seems to contain an awful lot of scrolling backwards, I’m glad the here and now is very different to the one McCartney envisaged when he asked his lover if she’d still need him and feed him when he was 64. Although my husband and I don’t send each other Valentine’s cards (sorry Paul) I still cook for him, although he’s perfectly capable of feeding himself (and me) when necessary.

Deciding to remain childless was a decision I made in my 20s, but even my friends with grandchildren spend more time running around with them engaging in multiple physical activities than sitting with them on their knee by the fireside while knitting, as the song suggests. The young

Paul might have been astonished to know that in later life his girlfriend would be playing competitive sports, or walking the Camino, or making a fool of herself on social media, as my friends and I do.

Interestingly, though, while envisaging the nirvana of domestic bliss for the woman in his life, he saw himself staying out until a quarter to three and having to deal with a locked door as a result. It made me laugh, albeit cynically, that he reckoned he could still be having a late-night social life while his partner was at home knitting furiously as she waited for him to fumble with the lock.

It also struck me, as the song ended, that the fear younger people have about ageing is the fear of changing themselves. Of becoming someone who’s satisfied with domestic things instead of new horizons.

Physically, change is inevitable – even if you’ve spent your youth slapping on the hyaluronic acid and serums to keep those fine lines and wrinkles at bay. But inside, most of us are still very much the people we were at 20, just with lots more experience and understanding.

As so often happens when something draws your attention, I was jolted into it again the following day when the store I’d been shopping in emailed me a customer survey that began by wanting to know how old I was.

Thankfully without a scrolling menu of years this time, but instead using a grouping of decades to choose from.

Marketing executives clearly believe that from 64 onwards most people engage in some kind of groupthink because the final range was 65+, thus lumping a potential three decades of older people together in one amorphous block.

I probably don’t have exactly the same concerns as people 30 years younger than me, so it’s reasonable from a marketing viewpoint to differentiate us. But nor do I have the same concerns as people 30 years older than me, even though I’d like to believe the differences between us all are not as great as we might think.

The focus of my world, at 64, hasn’t become Paul’s staid future of weeding the garden, cooking meals and knitting by the (now environmentally hazardous) fireside. It’s much wider than that.

I won my first competitive badminton match of the season last night.

I’m meeting someone about a new project tomorrow.

I’m off to a friend’s book launch this evening. My husband is making his own dinner. He definitely won’t lock the door if I’m out until a quarter to three.

What Eden Did Next by Sheila O’Flanagan is published by Headline and available now

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