Then there was the duet from La Traviata and soon I found that I could sing along with both parts, man and woman, pretty spot-on. I realized that I had a rather good range. And although I never asked for singing lessons, I secretly longed for years to be an opera singer. (About ten years ago, when I was fifty-five, I did have a singing lesson and have to say I was rather crushed when the young girl teaching me, clearly clueless, didn’t seem to be remotely impressed by my voice.)
All through my life I’d had yearnings to be things other than a writer or journalist. When I was twenty-eight, I longed to be an academic of some sort. I applied to college, but halfway through the second term I cracked up completely, was carried out of the library by men in white coats, and was put into a nursing home in Primrose Hill. Then I got it into my head that I’d like to be a teacher. I signed up for the course, and dreamed of giving up journalism and running a school, as my great-aunt had done in the ’40s. But after ten days, I dropped out.
About five years ago, when I was sixty, I found I was still wondering what I would do when I grew up. Obviously, when people asked me what I did I answered that I was a journalist or advice columnist or writer, but I never really believed it. Suddenly I looked back on my life and realized that over the years I had written millions upon millions of words. I had had, in my time, produced more than a dozen columns in magazines and newspapers, and written more than fifteen books. Could it be that all this time, while I was dreaming of another career, I was actually a writer, all along? A real one? Not just someone pretending to be a writer?
It is only now that all those other career options have finally dropped away. As I feel the burden of guilt for not following those paths roll away from my shoulders, I experience an incredible sense of relief. I know who I am. Or, rather, what I am. At last. I’m not going to start changing anything now. Coming to terms with one’s present life is, I promise you, far more fulfilling than starting off a new one.
Take a First-Aid Course
You may wonder what might be the point of this, but remember that as we get older and older we also get sicker and sicker and it would be nice, when your companion suffers a seizure, or is suddenly unable to heave himself from the bath, or chokes on a fishbone, or complains of her left arm becoming paralyzed, to be able to leap into action and save your companion from certain death. Who knows, you might actually be lucky enough to be around when someone experiences “the Drop” (see “Ailments”) and wouldn’t you be the hero if you knew all about the recovery position and could perform a tracheotomy with a humble ballpoint pen?
SKling
SKIers are those people who spend their old age Spending the Kids’ Inheritance. Oh, it’s all very good fun, isn’t it, the idea of squandering all your wealth so your kids can’t get their hands on it, but—excuse me while I purse my lips into a narrow line of disapproval and get serious—I really don’t think it’s right. The welcome thud of a dollop of cash going into your bank account when a parent dies certainly takes some of the edge off the loss—though I suppose if you had the sort of people who are SKIers as parents, you wouldn’t feel a hell of a lot of loss anyway. Myself, I wouldn’t advise this course of action. I would prefer to Save for my Kids’ Inheritance, and fantasize about them in the future setting up vast empires based on the humble sum that I have managed to scrape together to leave them in my will. But then I just can’t help being nice, responsible, and noble. Sickening, isn’t it?
Dive into the Past
If I so much as started to try to sort all my old photographs into albums, it would take me at least a year. (And oh dear, I just haven’t got time, you know. What with the charities, the Residents’ Association, the gym ...) But some old people absolutely love getting their histories in order.
And researching the family tree can use up an inordinate amount of time. I have friends who are so taken up with discovering that their old relatives were knife-grinders in the fifteenth century, or butlers in the sixteenth, that they slave away even on weekends to discover ancestors who, to be honest, often sound just as boring as they are.
Recently a friend of mine called me and asked if she could pop over because she had something really interesting to tell me. I welcomed her over, made her a cup of coffee, chatted of this and that, and then leaned forward, all ears, to hear the latest tasty bit of gossip.
“Well,” she said. “You’ll never believe this, but I’ve just been down to the Family Records Office and I discovered that my great-great-grandmother lived in a small village in Lincolnshire and took in dressmaking!”
I have to say that the old jaw didn’t exactly drop. And what would the correct reaction be to that extraordinarily uninspiring piece of news, anyway? Sometimes an old relative will take me for a tour of the family tree and we leap from branch to branch with him (it’s usually a him) explaining marriages in 1548 while I try to pinch myself awake.
The other day a relative I’d never met traveled all the way from Edinburgh to see me and have a cup of tea, armed with charts, trees, marriage and death certificates, and all kinds of paperwork that he wanted to share with me. I thought I would die of boredom. But then all he would have done is just note the date of my death and add it to his wretched tree.
Just because I don’t have the same enthusiasm for ancestry that some people have, however, doesn’t mean I should knock it. It may well be your thing and if so, good luck to you. After all, there is an old Chinese proverb that goes: “To forget your ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.” But what do they know?
Graveyards these days are simply heaving with couples with clipboards, searching for the remains of their old rellies, and when I have, on occasion, been forced into the Family Records Office in London, I’ve marveled at the sight of row upon row of oldies, all in Windbreakers, staring at computers (the man is usually the one with his hand on the mouse; the wife is usually squinting at the screen as he scrolls through pages and pages of old relatives). The scene in the FRO is reminiscent of a Moonie mass marriage. Or a rally in North Korea. Or some vision summoned up by a kaleidoscope, a never-ending vista of oldies staring into their pasts.
If you’ve already found out who all your ancestors are from Year One, then don’t despair. You can start on your house. I have found out, by consulting the 1911 census, that my house used to be lived in by two waiters and their wives, and a dressmaker who was married to a steward, with a couple of children. Not sure quite where it gets me but it is, briefly, interesting. (What is particularly odd, it struck me, is that my house doesn’t actually belong to me. It is an illusion. It is actually something I lease only for my lifetime, as it were. When they were living here, the dressmakers and stewards thought it was their house, and when I’m dead someone else will imagine it is their house. I felt rather irrationally cross with my house after this discovery, like I imagine it would feel if you found—and read—dozens of love letters written to your husband before you married him.)
Look over Old Amstrad Disks
Recently I was asked to update a book I’d written around fifteen years ago. Unfortunately I’d written it on an old Amstrad, a computer that dates back to the time before computers were invented, which had long been chucked on the trash heap. Struck by a wild hope, I wondered if by any chance I’d kept the old Amstrad disks I’d written the book on originally. And there, in a dusty pile under the long-out-of-date prescription goggles and some shriveled diving flippers, I found in an old plastic box a three-inch disk: a copy of the entire book.
How I blessed myself for not throwing it away! But how could I retrieve the information? How could I get it to yield up its secrets? It was only a matter of moments before, on the Internet, I found an amazing company, a one-man outfit in Cornwall whose motto was “Clinging to the trailing edge of technology” and promised, for a mere five dollars, the transfer of all my old information onto a sparkling new state-of-the-art Microsoft Word disk.
Talking to the man who ran it was like entering a lost
world. We discussed LocoScript, CP/M disks (the ones no one ever used because that turned the whole thing into a computer and we didn’t want any of that monkey business), ASCII files, and the dreaded Limbo. We reminisced about the Start of Day disk and the “daisy wheel” printer. I told him of the time, before I turned into the granorak I am today, that my son insisted I get an Amstrad and wrestle with new technology.
And he told me his strange life in the land of Amstrad—the veritable Morris Minor of the computer world.
It’s incredible to think that some people are still using them. Like finding there are still airship services to Le Touquet, daily. Okay, the assistants at the computer store may look at you goggle-eyed if you mention the word, but there are still users in the outback of Australia, there are one or two in the United States, and (tellingly) a large concentration around Norwich, a cluster in Cumbria, and quite a few in the northeast of Scotland up toward Cromarty. And who are these strange users? They are ministers of religion who, desperate for ideas, need to sort through the archives for something to serve up, reheated, on a Sunday; they are novelists and poets. Some elderly people want to retrieve information on LocoScript files because they’re writing down memories for their families, and some younger people, after a parent has died, want to discover what the hell their mums or dads got up to on their old computers.
The discovery of those disks really says something for hoarding. Indeed, sometimes, swamped by spam and pop-up windows, I even wish I’d still kept the loyal old Amstrad itself.
I’m waiting for the day when I have time actually to trawl through all my old disks, file by file. To rediscover your past self: Wouldn’t that be a whole lot more interesting than finding out about other people?
Which brings me to . . .
Write Your Life Story
They do say that everyone has at least one book in them, so where’s yours? Writing your life story is a wonderful activity that includes everything I’ve mentioned so far—family research, old Amstrad disks, sorting out piles of old photographs, and even talking to contemporaries you’d forgotten all about. It’s not dry, like genealogy; you can try your hand at fine writing if you wish, and you can not only give bouquets and leave tributes at the feet of all those exceptional people you’ve known all your life, but also get revenge on boorish schoolteachers or bosses. You could even design your own cover.
Added to this, you have all the fun of self-publishing (sorry, don’t kid yourself that any publisher except one you pay will be remotely interested in your life unless you have had a hundred boob jobs, discovered you are the secret love child of Elvis Presley, been on a reality TV show, or murdered several prostitutes in your time). Presto! All your Christmas-present problems solved in one fell swoop.
And channeling all your energy into writing your life story will prevent you from boring your grandchildren sick as you tell them about What It Was Like Just After the War (see “Boring for Britain”).
Leave Your Partner
Oh, I know, I shouldn’t even suggest this, should I? But it could be your very last chance for happiness. Particularly if you’ve found a gorgeous younger model. Even if you haven’t got a young stud or studette waiting in the wings, you can read the chapter “Alone Again” and find out the advantages—and disadvantages—of being single.
Reexamine Old Hates
When I was young I had a complete prejudice about three things. If anyone said that they admired mime or puppetry or Marcel Proust, I would go to my address book and cross out their names with a black felt-tipped pen. Those areas all spelled, for me, the last word in pretension.
Age has changed me. Nowadays I’d far rather go to see mime than a play, puppets score higher than American movies, and as for Proust—well, have you actually read him? He is totally wonderful! He’ll take up a good year of your life, anyway. Recommend him to your Book Club and that’ll shut them up for a while.
It’s surprising how many childhood prejudices can turn into huge pleasures when you’re older. Not just sprouts.
Knitting
There is a fashion for sneering at knitting. I heard an interview with the author of a knitting book on the radio last year and the way the presenter patronized her completely enraged me. “But you could be ...” she exclaimed, flailing around in her effort to think of things that would be better to do than knitting. “You could be going to the gym!” “Or,” chimed in a smarmy guest, “you could be reading a book!”
Can you think of anything less productive, more self-indulgent, or time wasting than reading a book or going to the gym? This knitter was producing, over the months, sweaters, socks, hats—she’d even knitted an apron—blankets, vests . . . while what would the gym-goers and readers have to show for their efforts? Precisely nothing. I have to say I rather sympathize, when people go on about the marvels of reading, with my grandmother’s mother who used to fly into a rage when she found my grandmother curled up in a corner with a book. “Reading a book!” she’d splutter, furiously. “Why aren’t you out there, doing something!”
The roasting that this wretched knitter got from the two liberal feminist ladies on the radio galvanized me into racing up to the department store, finding a knitting pattern, wool, and needles, and sitting down immediately to get clicking. I knitted some tiny socks for my grandson—on four needles, no less—a hat, and my current project is a sweater. Knitting is one of the most soothing, creative, meditative, and useful ways of occupying yourself in the whole world. You can even listen to the radio—and fume—while you do it.
Exercise
My exercise routine involves getting out of bed, going downstairs, having a bath, going upstairs to sit at a computer, going downstairs for a cup of coffee, and occasionally walking to my car. But lots of old people I know actually spend a couple of hours a week at the gym.
The last time I went to a gym the air was thick with the smell of testosterone. My eyes were blinded by the light glancing off well-oiled biceps and the noise (of some kind of music that I wouldn’t dream of trying to identify) was deafening. Since I can barely lift anything heavier than a pencil, I felt utterly ashamed to be unable to lift the appropriate weight, and if I’m going to gasp and sweat I’d prefer to do it in the privacy of my own home rather than in front of row upon row of lissom young bodies. Going to the gym undoubtedly made me fitter physically, but mentally I felt like a crushed worm as I crawled home to jump into a bath to wash off all the gymmy smell. As for swimming . . . as W. C. Fields said, about water, “Fish fuck in it.” Who knows who uses my local pool as a lavatory, but since even I have, on occasion, when much younger, relieved myself slightly in a pool when desperate, I can’t believe that others haven’t been known, just occasionally, to do the same.
The other thing is that it’s so boring. As a woman, I like to do two—or sometimes three—things at once. I couldn’t possibly sit down to listen to a radio play, for instance. I have to be ironing or knitting (see above), or fixing something at the same time. Gardening is a much more productive way to take exercise if you’re lucky enough to own a patch of earth behind your home, or even walking to the local store—at least there’s a goal. And isn’t it funny how I’m able to lug back a couple of shopping bags stuffed with two-liter plastic cartons of milk, three boxes of orange juice, two sacks of potatoes, and a couple of gigantic melons with comparative ease, while a couple of tiny weights at the gym leave me frazzled.
Another favorite exercise routine for old people is the “aquagym.” The reasoning behind this, I gather, is that because of the pressure of water, you exercise your muscles really well without actually having to do anything weight-bearing, which might put pressure on your crumbling old bones. But the sight of a group of old ladies trying to walk across the width of a swimming pool like spacemen is so appalling that I’ve tried it only once. There is a limit to the humiliation one can suffer when one’s old. And aquagym is my own personal limit. Luckily, I am now confident enough (see “Confidence”) to say no to aquagym ever ag
ain.
Having said all this to put you off, I know some people do actually enjoy going to the gym, and come out feeling energized and ready for anything. Exercise is said to relieve depression. I just haven’t got the time or the desire.
New Gadgetry
If, like me, you have a phobia about new gadgetry, then resolve, if you have nothing better to do, to overcome it. I’m speaking here as someone who, when my son unveiled the mysteries of the new Amstrad to me, burst into floods of tears, had to be restrained from throwing the whole machine out of the window, and spent the rest of the week unable to go into my workroom for terror of the thing.
So if it’s possible for me to make a friend of LocoScript (and, later, to become reconciled to his younger brother, Windows), then it’s possible for you to become a granorak and go and get a new cell phone with a camera in it, become accomplished at re-designing your snaps on Photoshop, hurl yourself into the mysteries of a BlackBerry, learn how to configure a new flat-screen television (recording, no less, onto the hard drive of your DVR), and download all your old VHS tapes onto DVDs. I’m not saying I can do all these things. But if I had time, I would certainly hire a man (a young man, in this case) and force him to explain it to me step by step.
The Crossword Puzzle
Now, I won’t have anyone knocking the crossword puzzle. I’ve loved it ever since, as a child, I used to do it with my grandmother in the evening. Those were the days when the clues featured quotes from poetry with blanks in them, like “Season of _____ and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats) 5, and I would look them up in her Oxford Book of Quotations. “Mists!” she’d repeat, when I told her the answer. “How very useful. That gives us a very useful m in 7 down and a rather interesting s in 10 across. How clever you are, darling. What would I do without you?”
You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It! Page 6