You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It!

by Virginia Ironside

  When the pipes leak, when the bones creak,

  When the knees go bad,

  I simply remember my favorite things,

  And then I don’t feel so bad.

  Hot tea and crumpets and corn pads for bunions,

  No spicy hot food or food cooked with onions,

  Bathrobes and heating pads and hot meals they bring,

  These are a few of my favorite things.

  Back pain, confused brains, and no need for sinnin’,

  Thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinnin’,

  And we won’t mention our short shrunken frames,

  When we remember our favorite things.

  When the joints ache, when the hips break,

  When the eyes grow dim,

  Then I remember the great life I’ve had,

  And then I don’t feel so bad.

  THIS IS TH E SONG that Julie Andrews sang on her birthday for the benefit of AARP—the applause at the end lasted four minutes.

  When I was a young mum I would spend hours wittering on to other mums about diapers and bottle-feeding. Was breast best? Should we use disposables? I found both topics utterly gripping and could spend entire days droning on about them. Later came another subject, of interest only to people of my age with similar-aged children. Schools. I just had to hear the words Montessori and public or private and exam results and I’d be off (see “Boring for Britain”).

  Now, however, the words diapers or schools only have to be uttered in my presence and I am booking a plane ticket to Argentina. When you’re not involved personally, the topics are just so crushingly dull.

  But I have discovered a new topic of conversation that’s going to keep me talking and interested. And luckily this one will last until the day I die.

  Ailments.

  I mean, we all have them, don’t we? If you think you’re actually physically in peak condition, ask yourself now, honestly: when was the last time you popped a pill? Was it days ago? Last week? Last month? Or, as is most likely, this morning?

  Now when I go to a party, I don’t say, “And do tell me, what do you do?” I say, “And do tell me—what’s wrong with you?”

  I only have to see an old gentleman sitting with a walker propped up beside him and I’m in there, settling down for a good old chat about the state of his health, what he makes of hospitals, does he think mixed wards are a good idea, does he pronounce BUPA (the British United Provident Association, which provides private health insurance) as “Byewpa” or “Booper,” and what medication he’s on. And, most important, if he’s had an operation, which surgeon did it, and was he any good.

  I only have to hear the word pills whispered across the room at a party, and, with the speed of a character from a Warner Bros. cartoon, I’ve joined the group and started to discuss the merits and demerits of glucosamine sulphate and fish oil and whatever else is on the agenda. “Does your health authority send you a do-it-yourself bowel cancer test now that you’re sixty? Well, mine doesn’t—but I do get free flu shots. ...”

  Someone started telling me about her bad back the other day and then, halfway through the most fascinating story about discs and bone degeneration, she suddenly broke off apologetically, saying she must be boring me. “Boring me?” I said. “Not at all. What else would we be talking about? The state of the Middle East? Will the Internet mean the end of books as we know them? Those topics aren’t for me. Big yawn. You had got, I think, to the fifth vertebra going north to south down the spine. Pray continue. I am all ears.”

  (Speaking of which . . . but more about ears later.)

  These days, the best conversation of all is what a friend of my mother’s used to call an “organ recital.” Here are some topics to get you going.

  Digestion

  Hands up, those of you who have spent nights white with terror wondering if a) you have cancer of the esophagus or b) heart problems. And whose anxieties were triggered either by a burning feeling in your throat or an indigestiony feeling in your chest.

  And how many, I wonder, have discovered that the answer was simply acid reflux? This is something to do with some valve failing to work properly, which means that the acid in your stomach seeps up to your gullet during the night, and it’s easily controlled with a pill. Yes, I know that another way of controlling it is to drink less but, in my case at least, this is simply not an option.

  Feet

  I suppose at one time or other all our feet were soft, dimpled, pudgy things with toes like tiny buds, and soles as soft as velvet. It seems incredible that such delicate little paws, warm objects just made for kissing, could possibly turn into the two gnarled, horned bits of driftwood, underpinned by what seems like beef jerky, which we find sticking out from our ankles when we get old. Mine have developed grotesque bunions and yellowing nails that are more in need of trimming with a chainsaw than a pair of nail clippers. What makes it all extra unpleasant is that while feet appear to be hoary objects, protected by hard skin and corns, they become, as we get older, extra sensitive. Sometimes just walking up the street is, for me, absolute agony—unless, of course, I am wearing a pair of shoes or sneakers so ugly that I need to put a paper bag over my head before I can even leave the house.

  It’s gotten to the point where my feet are so painful that I’m starting to wonder whether it wouldn’t be worth risking the lives of a few blind people, rather than force the entire older generation to wince with agony as they step, at every pedestrian crossing, onto a surface covered in those large bumpy dots, like giant Braille.

  After a really long walk, far from feeling full of zip and buzz, I have to put my feet into a bowl of cool water, not only to ease the pain but also to reduce the size of my disgustingly swollen ankles.

  When I was young I never thought that the expression “Oh my poor feet” would ever escape my lips, but now I’m never really happy unless my feet are up—and I mean up, not just plonked on the ground, as they are when I sit.

  This pain means that before you know where you are you feel that you need to be shod, rather like a horse, and often you can end up visiting a private podiatrist. He can not only relieve your feet, but also your wallet, of hundreds of dollars, just to create some kind of orthotic, a curved piece of material to put in your shoes to raise your arches (which you can get just as easily from a good drugstore for a couple of dollars).

  And have you noticed that walking itself has become more difficult? I’m five foot seven and I was horrified to find a smaller, younger friend with stubby little legs managing, for some inexplicable reason, to walk much faster than me. Even with my longer legs and apparently bigger strides, I still lag behind. Weird.

  Addictions

  I have come across some poor people as old as eighty whose doctors refuse to prescribe them tranquilizers or sleeping pills on the grounds that they “might become addicted.” Now, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to be responsible for putting a person of twenty on a regimen that might result in their dependence on Mother’s Little Helpers for the rest of their lives, but at sixty or seventy? Why not? The minute I know that I’ve only got months to live, the first thing I’m going to do is to take up smoking again. Indeed, in some tolerant hospices, they even provide smoking rooms for patients, so when eventually you get carted off to what your relatives kindly call “another hospital” remember this. By finding out if it has a smoking room you will be able to ascertain whether you’re going to the place to be cured—or to die.

  As Kingsley Amis said, “There is no pleasure I could be induced to forgo by the prospect of two extra years in a nursing home.”

  I’m also looking forward to being able to start knocking back the G-and-Ts at ten in the morning, without a shadow of guilt.

  Talking to Yourself

  This is a great new pleasure if you’ve never talked to yourself before. “Hello,” you can say to yourself. “Sorry about not being in touch for so long. But I can let bygones be bygones if you can.”

  Talking to y
ourself involves, often, a constant commentary on life. “I’m going to get my spectacles . . . now where did I put them . . . spectacles, spectacles . . . I must have put them somewhere. Pity I can’t see well enough to find them. I couldn’t have put them on my head, could I? . . . Like those awful models . . . models, models, why was I thinking of models? . . . Now what was I looking for? Oh dear me, oh dear me ...”

  On your own you can conduct murderous—but utterly harmless—arguments with imaginary other people. “How dare you imply that I’m too old to drive! I’ll show you! You stand in front of the car, and I’ll get into the car, and you tell me my eyesight’s not good enough to mow you down with a single rev!”

  Drugs

  Don’t you just love them? At one point I took so many of them that I had to buy one of those strange gadgets from a pharmacy with little compartments with Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, et cetera written on them. Even then, the boxes weren’t big enough to accommodate the vast drugstore of tablets that I consumed each morning. One of the problems is, of course, that these days, being old, we in Britain are in the lucky position of being able to get our prescriptions absolutely free. I never go to the doctor without coming away with a free prescription, which I take eagerly to the pharmacist to cash in. I can barely resist waving my pills at every passing under-sixty-year-old and saying, in a gloating voice, “Look at these pills! They’re free! All free! And they’re mine! Because I’m older than you! Nah nah nah-nah nah!”

  Warfarin. Statins. Beta-blockers . . . small doses of aspirin . . . vitamin supplements . . . arthritis pills . . . calcium . . . zinc . . . milk thistle to cope with my overworked liver. I take seven pills, every morning.

  Oh, and fish oil of course. In fact I take so much fish oil I’m thinking of joining an aquarium.

  Speaking of drugs, though, what about the other sort of drugs? You know, the illegal ones. The ones that you “do”? (Funny how you never “do” glucosamine sulphate. You just “do” cocaine, dope, heroin, etc.)

  I used to, in the ’60s, try the odd drug. I smoked a lot of dope, snorted a bit of cocaine, and even smoked heroin once (well, didn’t we all? Oh, sorry, perhaps we didn’t), but Ecstasy hadn’t been invented then and I never dared try LSD in case I went bonkers.

  Now we’re all going bonkers anyway, perhaps this is just the moment to try them—not to mention crack cocaine, ketamine, and that weird South American jungle drug, ayahuasca, which apparently introduces you to God. Actually, I’m still a teensy-weensy bit scared of that experience, so I think I’ll try that when I’m seventy.

  PS: Just read in the paper that a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother was jailed for trying to smuggle $1 million of cocaine into Britain. Oh, what larks lie ahead.

  Anxiety

  Lots of my friends no longer dare to drive on highways. Single women who hitched across the Gobi Desert when they were thirty and who, in their forties, drove across India and America in cars piled high with small children, now find that, faced with a highway, they are reduced to quivering Jell-O.

  And when I was young I couldn’t understand why my grandmother always wanted us to be at the train station what seemed like hours before the train. Now I behave exactly like her. I get the suitcase out from under the stairs about a week before I go away, and start packing in a desultory way. Spare pills, extra pairs of glasses, bottle opener, and quarter bottle of brandy just in case my hosts turn out to be the sort of people who unlock the drinks cabinet only after 8:00 p.m. Or, worse, don’t even drink. Nail clippers, blow-dryer, Band-Aids (just in case), bunion splint, spare hankies (see Drips under Runny Nose, later) . . . the suitcase is pretty much full by the time I start packing in earnest, two days before I’m due to leave.

  Every older person I know gets into a total panic before they go away. They’re unable to sleep and have to leave trails of notes for whoever’s left at home, with foreign phone numbers, emergency numbers of neighbors, burglar alarms, rules about security procedures. . . . My whole rationale these days is one of “Better safe than sorry!” and “Just in case!”

  Some oldies, I gather, even buy portable bath handles that somehow stick onto strange bathroom walls, just in case they can’t get easily out of the bath. And speaking of baths, when did you first get a rubber mat to put at the bottom of the bathtub to stop you slipping? I’ve got one. It’s blue and covered with raised patterns of dolphins and starfish.

  Recently, my grandson came over and, to my—and his—dismay, discovered that the back was alive with a slimy black mold. (It reminded me of the day I was looking for a saucepan in my own grandmother’s house and came across one with the remains of scrambled egg still dried on inside. I felt sick.) I dare you to look underneath yours. Go on!

  Balance

  Why you should fall over more often when you’re old than when you’re young is a mystery to me. But unless you do, as I do, constant exercises that involve your standing on one leg like a flamingo for minutes at a stretch each morning, you may find you have a tendency to stumble in the street and evoke in your companions an unwelcome hand hovering under your elbow for the rest of the journey. If it’s a man, he will probably take your upper arm in a painful grip, and try to steer you across the street as if you were a recalcitrant supermarket cart.

  Sleep

  Well, sleep after sixty is all gone to pot, isn’t it? I’ve taken, sometimes, to having a snooze in the afternoon. And that means that although I can fall asleep at night straight away, I often wake, riven by panic about why I was born and whether death will be quite as jolly as I usually predict it will, at about four in the morning. I used to put on the BBC World Service and be comforted by interviews with Morris dancers, or documentaries about raffia-making in the Congo, but ever since it got political I now risk hearing about child abduction in China and boy soldiers who are forced to perform clitorectomies on their AIDS-RIDDEN mothers—all very upsetting. I don’t find relief from the radio anymore. Sometimes reading a P. G. Wodehouse book will help. But I usually take a quarter of a Temazepam (Free! Free! All free!) and knock myself out.

  Don’t you think it would be a good idea if someone invented a kind of map, rather like those you used to find on the Paris Metro system, whereby certain spots lit up when you pressed a button? Only in this case it would show you which of your friends were awake and panicking in the early hours. Then we could call each other up and chat reassuringly till dawn.

  Failing this I have been known, before I go to sleep, to write, in a large felt-tipped pen on a piece of paper, “Virginia! It is the middle of the night! Stop worrying! It will all be all right in the morning!” and leave it on my bedside table. When I wake in the night, gibbering with anxiety, this message can often do something to calm me down.

  Arthritis and Mobility

  Every morning I get out of bed and I have to hobble to the lavatory. However restless I have been all night, I just feel seized up. It takes breakfast and a hot bath to unglue my joints. And if anyone suggests I go to a gym, I’m immediately reminded of the old joke which goes: “I was feeling old and out of shape, so I joined an aerobics class for the over-fifties. I twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down and perspired for an hour. But by the time I got my leotard on, the class was over.”

  Recently I actually bought myself a cane. Me! A cane! In the ’60s I used to write a rock column for the Daily Mail and interview the likes of Mick Jagger and the Beatles and be asked about why I wore my skirts so short. I was often consulted as a professional “young person.” Now I’m called up whenever any newspaper wants a quote on grannies or Alzheimer’s disease or the plight of retirees’ bunions. Now I give talks to the Colostomy Association and use my cane when I leave just in case I fall over, my balance—despite the flamingo-standing exercises—not being quite as good as it used to be. (Does Mick have these issues, I wonder?)

  Even putting on clothes can be a bit of a struggle. Have you ever gotten into a dress you just can’t get out of? (I’m addressing women here, obviously—or maybe not so o
bviously.) Recently I managed to wriggle my way into one, but when I needed to take it off, I just couldn’t force my arms sufficiently far to put them over my head and bend them downward, to pull the whole thing off. I had to get some scissors and carefully unpick a seam before I could escape.

  Then there’s putting on tights . . . I use the sitting-on-a-bed-and-then-rolling-back-like-a-hedgehog method, with my legs in the air before I pull the tights down. Pulling down seems, these days, to be easier than pulling up.

  At least I can still, just, put on my shoes.

  And I can still, just, sit on the floor. Though getting up is another matter. As for kneeling to do a jigsaw puzzle with a grandchild—ouch! What does happen to your knees when you age?

  And although I haven’t actually ordered my Stannah Stairlift, I am starting to consider the options.

  So far I haven’t yet lost any height. People always say, when they meet their former nannies or teachers, that they hadn’t realized they were so tiny. But they have almost certainly shrunk an inch or two. I wonder if there’ll come a time when we say to each other, “Oh, I remember you were this high!” But this time, rather than bending down to indicate two feet from the ground, we’ll be reaching on tiptoe to show six feet or so.

  And no, I’ve never had to use a walker. Yet. I take consolation from a friend who had to use one. She dyed what was left of her hair purple, and decorated her walker with flashing pink lights—keeping the battery in her pocket—with spectacular results.

  Sight

  Having been nearsighted all my life I’m one of the lucky ones who can now only read without my glasses—another old-age perk. But most of my friends can’t order a meal in a restaurant without putting on their specs. As one said, “Not only do I have to put on my glasses to read the menu, I need them to be introduced to my dinner as well!”