The toughest generation deserves some respect

COCOONING is over, guys. It may have made sense in the depths of total lockdown — most older people and those with vulnerable immune systems were willing, if not always happy, to oblige.

Except now they’re starting to feel that they were locked up merely to keep them out of the way rather than out of harm’s way. That they don’t really ‘matter’ as much as everyone else.

That belief is strengthened when they note what happened in nursing homes: whatever the authorities may say, nursing home residents were effectively abandoned as being of little use to society.

What’s more, that attitude itself seems to be becoming institutionalised.

One recently reopened hotel is offering a “designated bedroom floor” to over-65s, with a designated dining area, and the added enticement of not needing to use a lift. The hotel undoubtedly means well; it also obviously feels that this will be a good business incentive.

But something tells me that the grandparent generation have had enough. They have been patronised and infantilised, with smirking references to how everyone understands that they’re longing to hug their grandchildren. I’m sure most of them are. But that’s not their sole purpose in life.

They’ve got things to do — and lives to lead.

Yes, there are older people who want to sit and stare at the wall or the TV. But they are the people who have always sat and stared at the wall, given the opportunity.

I have a friend in her late 70s who moved from the city a year or so ago to an idyllic cottage pretty well in the middle of nowhere. She has spent the pandemic creating her garden from scratch: it’s three-quarters of an acre, and on three different levels. Last time I spoke to her, she had spent the previous two days pushing barrowloads of rock around a steep incline in preparation for a waterside rockery. When I say she’s making the garden, I mean on her own, doing all the labour. She didn’t really notice being cocooned: she was too busy.

By and large, today’s generation of, shall we say, pensionable age, is a tough one. Many of them are in gainful employment, either by choice, or because a younger generation of incompetents and chancers wrecked the economy, wiping out the pensions they had budgeted for all their working lives.

The majority of them were reared in an era when only a privileged few went beyond primary education, most leaving school at the age of 14 — often forced to emigrate to unskilled jobs. In rural Ireland, they frequently walked many miles to school each day, in all weathers, and were often inadequately clad in the winter.

The question of foreign holiday or staycation was non-existent, because holidays were non-existent.

They fought savage diseases like polio and tuberculosis in a time of restricted treatments.

Discipline was administered via physical punishment, at home and at school, frequently at a level of beating rather than a mild smack on the bottom.

And they survived, learning tolerance and endurance along the way. Most were determined to ensure that the generation to come after them would have it better — with education and a decent living a right rather than a privilege.

And now their reward has been to have society build a psychological fence around them, cutting them off from normal life (or what has become normal). They’re to stay with their own, without the fertilisation of inter-generational contact and exchanges of views and ideas. Some might say they’re being told they can rot while the rest of society strides into the future, admittedly with renewed care.

But they don’t want “designated areas and times” in the park. They have a right to be in the park at any time. If they have restricted mobility, their zimmer frames have as much right to the pathway as any bike. It’s called equality, and not just of esteem.

They’ve worked and sacrificed all their lives so that their children and grandchildren can have expectations; and now they have a right to expect to be part of the new world — not its rejects.

‘They have a right to expect to be part of the new world, not its rejects’