Bleak view for old folk but at least they’re on top of the mountain

OURS was once a society that gave great place to older people. Children were exhorted to respect them. They were widely sought out for their reflections, wisdom and experience.

Even in the 1980s, great personalities in their 60s and 70s – Lord Hailsham, Denis Healey and others – confidently participated in frontbench politics.

A century earlier, William Gladstone formed his last administration at the age of 82. Just two decades back, the late Queen Mother capped her 100th birthday with a night out at the royal Ballet.

And, even in some unexpected realms, age is but a number: Martina Navratilova was in her 47th year when she won her last Grand slam tennis title, and Edna O’Brien published her latest, acclaimed novel in her 90th year.

But, according to a chilling new survey by Age scotland, only one in five of scotland’s over-50s feels valued in our society. More than a third believe they are a ‘burden’ – and 34 per cent feel life is getting worse for older people.

It is not so in my own immediate experience. In many respects my 50s have been the best years of my life.

I am fortunate still to have very alert and active parents – with whom, of late and thanks to you-know-what, I have spent a great deal of my time – and lucky that, thanks to happy genes, I look a good deal younger than my 55 years.

And, God willing, I hope to spend two or three decades in this sweet spot of life before I start forgetting things and tumbling down stairs.

But we are indubitably in a culture that grows annually more indifferent – even hostile – to the usefulness and perspective of our older citizens.

IN a host of workplaces and professions they are bundled into retirement, regardless of alertness or aptitude and when they would be really quite happy to carry on. They have been held collectively to blame – often in the cruellest language – for the survival of the union in 2014 and our departure from the Eu.

In recent weeks, too, older folk have been assailed as an unconscionable fiscal burden on those of working age (though it is not true) and, too often, silly old men and ga-ga grannies are ridiculed in comedy and advertising.

And in a still more sinister development, there is the ongoing and seemingly incorrigible campaign to legalise ‘assisted suicide’.

In just one walk of life – broadcasting – there is manifest, shameless hostility to older women. Gnarled male veterans of television still get to front quiz shows, or go round the land doing whimsical documentaries about trains.

The mass of women, even extraordinarily talented women – the Jan Leemings, the Anna Fords, the Marian Fosters, the sue Lawleys – seem simply to disappear.

And in another sphere of public life, the cult of youth – the desperation for figures who are ‘relevant’ and ‘contemporary’ – has done active harm.

Ten years ago, British politics was dominated by three men widely regarded as consummate professional politicians – 40-something, trim, tanned, with independent and no less professional wives.

Few dared to point out that David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg were, by past standards, grotesquely inexperienced.

Cameron was not a decade in the Commons when he became Prime Minister. Clegg had only become an MP in 2005. None had ever worked outwith the media/Westminster bubble.

And what did they accomplish? Cameron ended up taking Britain out of the Eu by accident; Miliband ingeniously delivered Labour into the maws of the deep Left; and Clegg all but destroyed the Liberal Democrats. so much for consummate professionals.

But a society that has for decades vaunted youth, glamour, vitality, sex appeal and sporting achievement over the gentle, the reflective, the enduring and the consequential is apt to get the leaders it deserves.

The Queen fascinates because she has been around for so long, sits serenely above it all and is – in her values and emphases – in stark contrast to the whiney ooh-look-at-me theatrics to which so much of public life has been reduced.

she has reigned for so long that she was on the throne before four of her recent Prime Ministers were even born.

she keeps her opinions to herself – wisdom inherited by William, though it has unfortunately skipped a generation – and, in most of her duties, consciously draws attention to others, not herself. Those who served in her Armed Forces, the tireless toilers for charitable causes, the tens of thousands in our voluntary sector, those who spend themselves for their communities, peacemakers of every hue – these are those she would honour.

BUT the Queen was raised in values really rather typical of her generation – duty, diligence, punctuality, selfeffacement, doing one’s bit.

Critically, she was under strong scottish influence – her nursemaid, her governess and, of course, her mother were all scots – and she grew up in the shadow of one world war and, as a teenager, in the privations and terrors of another.

Older people live not merely in fear of being consigned to some quietly awful care home, or of being entangled in the tender mercies of an NHs where, by and large, time and resources are concentrated on those of working age.

They look on helplessly as the world they knew goes increasingly to the dogs. A country of mounting corruption in public life and grotesque levels of remuneration for the fortunate few. A culture, increasingly, of foul-mouthed vulgarity, of mounting political incompetence, and where even their churches have too often been taken from them by selfconsciously ‘relevant’ and ‘contemporary’ clergy.

And they are also increasingly, desperately lonely – and the past 18 months have delivered but loneliness on stilts, not least for those trapped in hospitals or incarcerated in eventide homes.

Loneliness kills. Loneliness increases your chance of a heart attack by 40 per cent; of premature death by 50 per cent. Loneliness messes with your diet, personal hygiene, exercise and, in short order, your head. Yet how many older scots live with no better company than daytime television?

And that is before we even address the mounting embarrassments of faltering health in a creaky body: as Bette Davis had embroidered on a cushion, ‘old age sure ain’t for sissies’.

Yet to win the gift of serene old age is, at its best, to stand on the mountaintop. ‘You climb from ledge to ledge,’ mused the film director Ingmar Bergman.

‘The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become – but your views become more extensive.’