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

by Virginia Ironside

  I would recommend if you’re good at work and want to use your own skills, be admired, interact with other people, but never feel under too much pressure, that you become a local dogooding busybody. If there isn’t a Residents’ Association on your street, set one up. If there is one, join it and push your way up to becoming the chairperson. Sit on the local police committee. Involve yourself in Neighborhood Watch. Keep your eyes peeled for unsuitable planning applications and, if everyone agrees, object to them, and set up petitions, marches, meetings, and demonstrations. Be a pain.

  Write to the papers. Challenge parking tickets. Buy a litter stick and go down the street every Sunday, picking up trash and ostentatiously putting it into the garbage cans. Watch from behind your curtain to take down the van numbers of builders who come and dump trash on your street. Pressure the city for a recycling bin. Pressure the city to remove a useless recycling bin.

  By setting up our own antitram group in Shepherd’s Bush and combining with other groups along its proposed route, our residents’ association managed to help stop a plan for a tram to run down our main thoroughfare, a plan devised by our then mayor, Ken Livingstone, not a man who was usually thwarted in his ambitions.

  You may become something of an irritation, even become known as a meddlesome old fart, but you will find that it’s a great way to get to know everyone on your street, to wield some influence, and, however much people resent you in some ways, your role can only be a force for good in that you will encourage everyone to get to know one another and feel “part of a community,” as they say.

  It’s not work as you knew it—but it’s work.

  9. Downsizing

  Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no wind!

  And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one

  does without them!

  —Paul Claudel, Journal

  WHEN YOU GET OLDER everything diminishes. Or should diminish. And it’s rather a nice feeling. Instead of having a desire to conquer empires, you long to reduce yourself and your surroundings. You don’t want to expand, you want to contract. I don’t see it as something depressing. I see reducing as being like something you do to a wine sauce. From being all sloppy and tasteless to start with, after you’ve simmered it for ages, it eventually turns into a delicious, pungent concentrate.

  Not for us oldies the idea of shopping till we’re dropping. Not only are we, if we’re lucky, reasonably replete both materially and emotionally, but we also know from long experience that buying more stuff won’t make us any happier. It will just mean we will have less room to move and more things to dust.

  I couldn’t help but note, when I recently went on a cruise (see “Travel”) that when all the oldies poured off at the ports, they avoided the souvenir shops and sellers of trinkets around the harbor. “I have,” said one of them to me, sighing, “enough Russian Matryoshka dolls. I have enough castanets. I have enough pottery peasants with pottery straw hats sitting on pottery donkeys. My aim is to bring absolutely nothing home with me at all except the clothes I brought with me.”

  Ask any oldie what they’d like as a present, and nearly always their answer is either a consumable or something with a short life span. Flowers. Bath oil. Tickets to the theater. Marrons glacés. Plants. Room spray. Candles. A useful can of moth repellent. What you just don’t want is something to keep. Because this is an age when, curiously, you realize that it’s true that you “can’t take it with you.” As a result you have far less attachment to things. And having spent most of your life acquiring things, it’s tremendously exhilarating, now you’re old, to get rid of things. Quite honestly, when one of my grandsons breaks some precious ornament, I’m secretly rather relieved. It means that another bit of baggage (as one’s past is now known) has been thrown into the garbage can. And, as a result, some of the burden of owning possessions has been taken from one’s shoulders.

  I have an idea that Buddhists eventually want nothing but their prayer mats, and I find discarding things rather a freeing exercise, myself.

  I used to take photographs of everything. I have two whole drawers bursting with albums all marked with dates and years. These days I can hardly be bothered even to pack my camera, far less actually get it out to take a picture. I honestly can’t see the point.

  Now, this is the moment when you may think of moving. Of course you may have to downsize because you’re releasing capital by moving into a smaller, more manageable, place. (But for pity’s sake, beware of moving to a bungalow. A bungalow can knock years off your life. Doctors say that the best place for a retired person to live is in a very thin eighteenth-century house positioned at the top of a steep hill—walking up and down keeps them fit.)

  But where to move? When they were younger, lots of my friends imagined that when they became older, they’d retire to the country. A few of them have indeed done just that, but not as many as those who’ve lived in the country all their lives and who decide to spend the last years of their lives in cities or large towns. In urban areas there’s more efficient transport, more friends who live nearby, and the medical services are usually much better and closer.

  Once you’ve found your smaller house or apartment, you can start to get rid of things in a big way. Perhaps it is now time to throw out that funny old massage machine you bought at a “Mind and Body Show” twenty years ago. To get rid of the rusting extra bike you have in the shed that you’re keeping for a guest to ride. To realize, now that your fingers are starting to seize up, there’s really no reason to keep that ancient Spanish guitar you bought in the ’60s hoping to impress your friends with flamenco songs. And now’s the time to start transferring, if you have the expertise, all your old singles, EPs, and LPs onto CDs at last.

  And while you’re at it, now’s the time to spend a bit of money on getting an appraiser to come to your house and find out what everything really is worth—sparing your offspring the ghastly task of doing the same when you die. You can give your children things in advance, too, things that might prove a bit of a liability when the probate comes. And you make sure that you’ve destroyed all those embarrassing letters and disks that have evidence of a life you might not wish them to come across when you’re dead.

  Do they really want to know quite how much you missed them when they left home? Or how painful you found it when they forgot your birthday? Would they appreciate finding love letters from a woman who wrote to their father after he was married rather than before? Would it be useful or kind to allow them to find the birth certificate of a baby you had given up for adoption when you were young and foolish? Or the fact that you had once had cancer, got over it, and had never told them a thing about it? Now you can rake over the old traces and leave the past a pristine area, devoid of skeletons in cupboards.

  And isn’t it just wonderful not to have that awful possessive anxiety that you used to have about objects? The very phrase “Mine! It’s mine”—a phrase that, I’m ashamed to say, has been constantly on my lips from the age I first could speak—is one that I hear myself saying far less frequently, and certainly less stridently. “It’s mine . . . well, sort of mine . . . well really, it’s ours . . . what the hell, why don’t you have it? Who cares?” I find myself saying more and more often to my younger relations.

  I never thought that to give more often than to receive would ever bring me such unconditional and easily achieved pleasure.

  10. Looks

  Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,

  Takes off her artificial Hair:

  Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,

  She wipes it clean, and lays it by.

  Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,

  Stuck on with Art on either Side,

  Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,

  Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.

  Now dextrously her Plumpers draws,

  That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.

  Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums

  A Se
t of Teeth completely comes.

  Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop

  Her flabby Dugs—and down they drop.

  Proceeding on, the lovely Goddess

  Unlaces next her Steel-Rib’d Bodice;

  Which by the Operator’s Skill,

  Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill,

  Up goes her Hand, and off she slips

  The Bolsters that supply her Hips.

  With gentlest Touch, she next explores

  Her Shankers, Issues, running Sores,

  Effects of many a sad Disaster;

  And then to each applies a Plaister.

  But must, before she goes to Bed,

  Rub off the Dawbs of White and Red;

  And smooth the Furrows in her Front,

  With greasy Paper stuck upon’t.

  She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;

  And then between two Blankets creeps.

  —Swift, “A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed”

  I’M A REAL LOOKIST. I’m not saying I look great all the time, but I do think it is one’s moral duty not to look too ghastly. Looking good lifts not only your own spirits, but also other people’s as they see you walking down the street. So, in my book, looking one’s best is actually good manners.

  There’s no excuse, when you’re old, to “let yourself go.” And yet so many people do.

  Visit any service station along the highway and what do you see? Hordes of old people who’ve simply not bothered to do anything about their appearance when they got up that morning. The women have opted for a frightful kind of cropped haircut, which needs no more maintenance than the odd clip, like a hedge, possibly by the local council; they haven’t bothered to put on any makeup and, often, they’re wearing the asexual uniform involving some kind of amorphous “top,” a Windbreaker, and underneath a pair of tracksuit bottoms, socks, and the ubiquitous sneakers. Some women just seem to have given up being women completely—they look just like lumps on legs.

  I know what they’d say if I criticized them for looking so utterly dreary. They’d say, “But I just want to be comfortable.” But it’s perfectly easy to be comfortable in a much more attractive getup.

  And anyway, however comfortable you want your clothes to be, you don’t want to look as if your clothes are comfortable. I remember a member of the audience, a friend of an actress appearing on stage in a play, who had to visit her in her dressing room after what was an excruciating performance. After wondering whether to lie through his teeth or tell her the truth, he settled on a line that got him off the hook. “Darling!” he said, kissing her on both cheeks. “You looked as if you were having a marvelous time!” In other words, “You were thoroughly enjoying yourself! But everyone else in the audience was bored stiff.” So whenever anyone says of your shoes or your clothes, “They look as if they’re really comfortable,” it’s time to rush back home and change into something that looks as if you’ve taken a little bit of time and trouble.

  And the men—what’s happened to them? Presumably when they were young they took some kind of pride in their appearance. But now nearly all of them have tummies the size of space hoppers, some of them haven’t even bothered to shave, and it’s not because they want to achieve some kind of fashionable look. Go to France and you’ll find a completely different picture. Whatever age anyone is, the vast majority take care with their appearance. And it shows.

  Friends of mine have asked me, “What’s the point? I’m completely invisible now that I’m older. I’m all wrinkles. I’ve lost my looks.” But I say that a good-looking oldie can have the time of his or her life, particularly in England. The standard of looks in England is, like the standard of food except in the cities, so low that with only the minimum of effort you can stand out as some kind of ancient Marlene Dietrich figure. Or Tina Turner. It just takes a bit of flair and courage.

  You don’t want to aim for the BUPA look, of course. That’s the one cultivated by the couples who model for brochures for private patients’ plans. They usually look eerily young, and yet they both have full heads of slightly tousled graying hair, they often wear his ’n’ hers Windbreakers, and he always has his arm around her shoulders as they gaze unflinchingly into the hazy middle distance, as if on a mildly breezy headland. These pictures always give a sense of coastlines and imminence and a vague idea of Cape Cod and clapboard. He may have a windlass, suggesting access to yachts (and therefore to funds), while she may be gray-haired but wears just enough lipstick to suggest she still kicks up her heels when the urge takes her. Sometimes they are pictured on a golf course, or wandering through an autumnal wood (get the point?), eyes sparkling, their faces full of fresh hope and with rather stupid grins because, presumably, they know that when the need comes to have their hips done, BUPA will pay.

  Then there’s that picture of that immaculately permed lady on her stairlift. And that rather elderly model with the snow-white perm in the small ads at the back of the Telegraph magazine, who is always lying at the bottom of her staircase pretending she’s “had a fall,” clutching the emergency call button around her neck and hoping desperately that someone will come soon.

  I have never seen people like these “old” models in real life, and I certainly wouldn’t want to look like them.

  To a degree, of course, there’s not a lot you can do (apart from having major construction work on your face) about your basic look. For instance, like many people, I realize that the older I get the more I look like my mother. Oscar Wilde once wrote that it was every girl’s great tragedy to “become like her mother.” But my own mother looked pretty good. Even when I was a child, people used to say, “You can tell you’re mother and daughter! You’re as alike as two peas in a pod!”

  When I was older, taxi drivers used to take us for sisters. My mother would simper and fumble in her bag for an extra-large tip.

  We each fiddled with our hair; we have such similar voices that when I hear old tape recordings of the odd radio interview she gave, I could swear it was me speaking. We both have large breasts and a right-footed bunion. And we both have dark hair and drooping eyelids that give us a slightly Asian look; the same retroussé nose, the same big mouth. When my mother was fifty-four she had cosmetic surgery on her eyes—she was starting to look rather too Asian—and when I was fifty-four, after a friend at a party said that I looked like a Burmese princess, I had an eye-job as well. When my mother was fifty-six she had a proper face-lift, and got the incipient wattle (“the lizard look,” as she called it) removed from her neck. When I was fifty-six I had exactly the same operation.

  And now, after trying to get away from the boyish haircut that my mother insisted I wore when I was young—“It looks so French, darling,” “But I don’t want to look French! I want to look English!”—I have finally given up growing my hair, putting it up, curling it, wearing it in a bob; realizing she was right after all, I have resorted to the short gamine style that she knew suited me best all along. A cut just like hers.

  How can you improve your looks so that you can look even better in old age than you did when you were young? Some of my friends, it’s true, have certainly been dealt what in France is called a coup de vieux. One day you see them and they look halfway reasonable, the next you can barely recognize them. It’s as if builders had come in the night and suddenly removed an I-beam in their face. Everything turned to a pile of rubble. Total collapse.

  But their collapse is everyone else’s gain, because it means that those of us (yes, I’m that vain I include myself) who bolted themselves against the wreckers stand out even more. And, to be honest, even those with wobbly window frames and in need of a bit of repointing do look more “themselves” than they ever did. Their crow’s-feet and laughter lines and wobbling necks can conspire to make a face that looks a great deal more individual and original and approachable than it ever did in the days of peachlike skin and silk-spun hair. It’s all a matter of how you deal with the situation.

  Now, there is a line between look
ing an utter wreck that’s completely gone to seed and looking like a latter-day Joan Rivers, hair so well done and makeup so perfect that you suspect it’s been imposed by a fairy godmother and come midnight, the whole edifice collapses. Yet if you try, you can become as striking, outrageous, or subtly elegant as you like without too much cheating. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature but beautiful old people are works of art.”

  And you can, really, look much better when you’re old than when you were young. Many’s the old person whose striking looks have prompted me to think, Gosh, they must have looked wonderful when they were young, only to discover, when I see the photographs, that they were then just boring blobs, indistinguishable from other young people of the same period.

  None of us wants to look old in a horrible way, but we can look old in a good way. No one wants to look like a vandalized 1950s community hall in Hull, but I wouldn’t mind looking like Tintern Abbey. Or the Temple of Karnak, come to that. Indeed, a very fashion-conscious friend of mine even looks in shop windows for clothes that she might buy in advance of the moment when the going gets tough. She has a couple of what she calls “cancer hats” that she thinks she’ll look good in if she is ever forced to have chemotherapy. And the other day she came around in a newly bought coat that she wasn’t sure whether she liked enough to keep; as she twirled in front of me, she said, “But maybe I will keep it after all. It would be a very good funeral coat.”

  In order to look good when you’re old you must, however, obey some basic rules. I’m passing on the following tips, given to me by my mother, who knew what she was talking about because she was professor of fashion at the Royal College of Art in the ’60s and helped put people like Ossie Clark on the map.1. Never wear white, particularly near the face. It makes yellow teeth look yellower and the whites of your eyes will show up as slimy gray with streaks of red.