YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN OLDIE IF...
From fat ear lobes to still phoning friends on a landline, ESTHER RANTZEN’S laugh-out-loud guide to ageing
At a recent conference about longevity, a man, trying to be kindly, told me: ‘Cheer up, 70 is the new 50.’
I found that irritating. Why do we have to pretend that we are 20 years younger to explain the fact that we can still put one foot in front of the other, or remember our nine times table?
as far as I’m concerned, 78 is the new 78. But then I started thinking: ‘Is 78 actually old?’ I don’t feel it. and I’m not alone. When exCommons Speaker George thomas, Viscount tonypandy, was 90, I asked him how old ‘old’ is, and he said: ‘ten years older than you are at any one time.’ Which is comforting, but is it true? are there warning signs which I should look out for?
Searching my own reflection, and my mental capacity, I found ten symptoms which tell you the bad news . . .
1. YOUR EAR LOBES HAVE PUT ON WEIGHT
OBVIOUSLY we are prepared for wrinkles and there are troutlips and windtunnel cheeks to remind us of surgical remedies. But does anyone warn us about the other insidious physical changes? the way our chest outgrows our bra? the hair that disappears where it once was, and transfers itself to new places, chin, nose, upper lip?
and oddest of all, the way ear lobes get fat. Who tells us? Who warns us that we may grow out of our earrings? What is the earthly use of fat ear lobes?
2. ALL SEX-SCENES IN MOVIES ARE INTRUSIVE
tHERE was a time when the lovers would kiss, and the director would immediately cut away to fireworks in the sky or gushing waterfalls and trust us to use our imagination. not any more.
actors have to chomp their way through each kiss and their hands go everywhere. Maybe the young enjoy it, and regard it as sex education. But we oldies find all those sweaty closeups get in the way of the poetry.
also, in these #Metoo days, why insist on the actors having to hump and pump to win an Oscar nomination?
Forgive me, Olivia Colman, but for me, and oldies such as me, the Favourite was just another example of a male director creating girlongirl action to cheer himself up when, in real life, poor old Queen anne was nursing her sick husband Prince George.
3. YOU FIND STRICTLY ROUTINES EXPLICIT
I’VE always thought stockings and black suspender belts were designed for people who can’t dance. But the professionals on Strictly can, and do, so why make them twerk and floss with silly underwear on?
Or is it the BBC economising, since underwear is cheaper than pretty sparkly dresses?
I suppose I should be grateful they wear anything at all. although, as the actor Sir John Gielgud once pointed out, the difficulty of dancing nude is that not everything stops dancing at the same time.
4. YOU’RE BORED WITH BAD GRAMMAR
WHat has happened to language? Why do the young these days ‘ meet up’ or ‘park up’. Who needs an extra preposition? and why are they ‘ bored of ’ instead of ‘ bored with’, and ‘fed up of’ rather than ‘fed up with’. this is incorrect grammar up with which I am extremely bored.
5. YOU EITHER HOARD OR DECLUTTER
BY nOW you have decades of clothes, photographs, objects gathering dust, all of which mean something to you. Or, alternatively, you have embraced the philosophy of the Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo and thrown everything away if it doesn’t give you a spark of joy. I wonder what would happen to most marriages if we applied the same rigid rule.
So you have to come to a decision: either to live with all the tat, or give it to the British Heart Foundation, who will very kindly collect it all. When I downsized, they came to my rescue and I accidentally gave them a load of stuff which included a solid gold champagne bucket which a kind and overgenerous friend had given me. When I realised what I’d done, I was too embarrassed to ask for it back. So I hope it paid for some valuable research into heart disease. When my late husband had his stent, he recuperated with the help of a machine he had fundraised to install in the hospital, so it can happen.
6. YOU DISREGARD SELL-BY DATES
I aM in a constant battle with my children. they regularly attack my fridge, claiming that I am suffering from food poisoning due to the excellent sixmonthold eggs I eat for breakfast.
My wartime memories in the Forties include eating wrinkled apples we kept wrapped in newspaper all winter, and even older eggs. So I have been brought up to disregard labels and still do. (Sorry, tummy.)
7. YOU COMPLAIN THAT ALL ACTORS MUMBLE
I BLaME television. I can hear actors who have been properly trained in the theatre perfectly well. But in tV drama there’s a fashion for so much extraneous noise, on the grounds that the real world is full of tweeting birds, mooing cows, police sirens and lowflying aircraft.
So they artfully add all those sound effects, plus music.
My children blame my refusal to wear a hearing aid, but even they put subtitles on tV dramas, especially americanmade ones where the actors mumble at a speed nobody can decipher.
8. YOU FORGET YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S NAME
tHERE’S a bit of your brain dedicated to proper nouns which fills up when you’re around 40. So you can remember all the names of people and places you came across before then, and nothing afterwards. I agree with Marilyn Monroe who said that to remember something new, she had to forget something first to make room for it.
9. YOU CHAT AT SHOP CHECK-OUTS
MY GRandMOtHER used to spend a whole day shopping for groceries, because everywhere she went she would be asked how her family was, and would exchange news with the shop assistant. now, if you pause for a moment at the checkout to admire somebody’s false eyelashes, as I did last week, you get shouted at by the rest of the queue. One lady said: ‘Get on with it, I haven’t got all day!’ I asked her what calamity was going to cut her day short. She halfsmiled. But I know for some older people that is the only conversation they’ll have all day. So don’t tell me about unidentified objects in the bagging area, I’m talking to a real person at the till.
10. YOU STILL USE YOUR CHEQUE BOOK
EVEn though the young think you are crazy, and your grandchildren try to explain that online banking is actually safer because there’s a trace of every transaction, that online news is faster, that you can read anything you like on a kindle without having to carry heavy hardbacks, and that nobody uses a landline these days, except conmen who try to pretend they are investment advisors.
and you know they’re right, but still you feel safer and more confident with what you know, and you’ve used for years.
and you tell yourself (and your grandchildren if they are listening) that when we run out of electricity, or a foreign power brings the internet to a shuddering halt, you’ll have the last laugh.