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

by Virginia Ironside

  2. Always keep your upper arms well covered. Those bits of flesh that hang down at the sides (known, apparently, as “bat wings”) are hideous—and so are those strange rolls of flesh that appear between your underarms and your body.

  3. To be honest, I’m not really too keen on glasses with strings. I know everyone has them, but they do look . . . well, a friend said they make people look deaf (see Hearing in “Ailments”). They always remind me of those little kids you used to see with string threaded through their coats to keep their gloves on.

  4. Get a new bra every six months at least and keep it well hitched up. You don’t want to be one of those people whose boobs touch their tummies when they sit down. Or, worse, when they stand up.

  5. Don’t disguise a lizardy neck with a scarf or polo neck. They look as if you have something to hide—and the imagination always conjures up something worse than the reality. I’m always reminded of neckerchiefs whenever I’m driving past a line of Leylandii trees. Rather than thinking, What a nice bit of greenery! I think, What monstrous building are they trying to hide behind that wall of pine? A nuclear power plant? A prison? The British branch of Guantánamo Bay?

  6. Always be spotless. It’s funny: young people can wear filthy old garbage bags and shoes with holes in them and still look great, yet an old man wearing an immaculately cut Savile Row suit, shoes sparklingly polished, a crisp white, starched shirt, but with a tiny speck of egg on his tie looks utterly repulsive. And if you have to wear pants, always check the bottoms of them. It’s amazing how the bottoms of trousers can catch a puddle when out in the rain, and by the gravity-defying power of photosynthesis (I think) the stain then creeps up the trouser till it’s nearly at the knee. (To be sure, I’m always droning on with my “spotless” line to people and then find later I’ve got some ghastly butter stain on my skirt.)

  7. Unless you really are superfit or some ancient athlete, don’t wear sports clothes. They just draw attention to your lack of muscle tone.

  8. If you feel you have to wear a copper bracelet to ward off rheumatism, keep it well hidden under long sleeves. Old crock you may be, but there is no need to advertise it.

  9. Wear comfortable shoes by all means but don’t wear shoes that look comfortable (see above), particularly anything that involves Velcro fastenings.

  10. If you’ve got any old Ossie Clark dresses hanging in your wardrobe or now-fashionable vintage bell-bottoms from the ’70s, why not try them on? If they’re too small, either lose weight or get them altered so they fit. You’ll look utterly gorgeous.

  11. Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing gown in the world. Because in the future, when you’re lounging around in an old people’s home staring into space, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in it.

  12. Have a face-lift. When talking about the joys of looking good when you’re old, I’m often accused of hypocrisy because I’ve had one. But I didn’t have it to make me look younger—honestly! I had it done because, after years of depression, I just looked so incredibly miserable. When I got up in the morning and looked at myself in the mirror, even I was brought down by what I saw staring back. It didn’t reflect the more optimistic person I now felt inside. Even when I smiled I looked miserable. I’d kind of cried my face into shapes of gloom that depressed myself and other people. And when I’d had the operation, no one told me how young I looked. They all said simply how well I looked. Much nicer.

  13. Try not, unless you have a figure like a sylph, to wear pants. As they age men tend to appear more feminine, while women, with deepening voices and hairs sprouting out of their chin, tend to appear more masculine. Don’t encourage the slide by dressing to look like a guy. If you’re a woman, I mean. The older you get, the more feminine you must try to look.

  14. If you’re a woman, don’t skimp on the makeup. Not only does your face look better with it, but it declares to the world that you’ve made an effort. And that is flattering to everyone who spots you, even total strangers in the supermarket or those odd people with whom you connect briefly when you spot them at the wheel of the car next to yours. (Speaking of makeup, have you noticed that even though it makes no difference at all now, because your skin is so nonelastic, you still make that funny pulling face when you put on your eye makeup?)

  15. If you are a man, please, I beg you, do not grow a beard. They look like small sheepdogs hanging on to your chin. They also announce a) that you have a problem with your masculinity and b) that you have no interest in giving oral sex. Also, I do find that every gray-haired man with a beard does, these days, bear a remarkable resemblance to the notorious serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman.

  16. If you’re a man and your hair is thinning, emphasize it. Either shave your head completely, or just get a normal haircut. (Do not ever, ever be tempted to drag a piece of hair over your head from one ear to the other, with a parting just over the tip. It may look reasonable to you in the mirror but, I can assure you, from the back it looks repulsive.) Also, never grow your hair long when you’re old. There is something immensely depressing about the sight of long, straggly gray hair on a man, especially when dragged back into a sad old ponytail. Far from looking like a cool old groover, you look like something from the ’60s washed up on the beach, something that’s hung around in a rock pool for a very long time.

  17. Never wear anything that looks as if you are going on safari.

  18. If you’re a woman and your head looks like one of those old scrubbing brushes with only a few bristles left that you occasionally find down the back of the fridge, for God’s sake swallow your pride and get a wig. After a long course of steroids, my hair was thin and peculiarly curly, so, sweating with embarrassment, I visited a wig shop and took the plunge. I even wore it a few times. They’re not vastly expensive—you don’t need real hair—and, although they are excruciatingly hot and uncomfortable, and feel rather as if you are wearing a bathing cap (an odd experience as you sit in a nightclub at two in the morning), after a while you do get used to them. Joan Crawford wore them. And if she can, you can.

  19. Mouths are particularly important to address when you are older. As far as teeth go, I wouldn’t encourage you having them whitened (see rule 1). But watch out for crowns. Sometimes your teeth gradually get yellower and yellower, leaving a few gleaming crowns, which only make the other teeth look worse. At least ensure your teeth are all the same color. Floss often. This is particularly important since, as our gums recede (hence the phrase “long in the tooth”), there are tiny gaps at the tops of our teeth just made for catching spinach, raspberry seeds, and bits of toast. Make sure, too, that your tongue is clean. Some old people have tongues covered with a kind of whitish gunge, which, while not noticeable to them when they admire themselves in the mirror with their mouths closed, is repulsive for other people to spot when they’re talking to them. Tongues can be cleaned by covering them with bicarbonate of soda and then giving them a good scrub with a toothbrush. And, finally, don’t forget to check the sides of your mouth. Some old people have little bits of dried spittle at the corners of their mouths. This is totally disgusting. If you have this problem, keep a hankie in your hand and wipe your mouth constantly.

  20. If you have a paunch, don’t worry too much. Everyone has a slight paunch after sixty. And no amount of sit-ups or exercises will make any difference. I once went to an exhibition called Age in London, knee-deep in Arrange Your Own Funeral Parlors, Time-Shares in Spain, splendid chairs that rose up and down and flung out footrests at the flick of a switch, forms for writing your own will, stands advertising private health plans, and men in suits eager to flog insurance of every kind. A saucy sideline was an exhibition of the oldest muscleman they could find. He was eighty years old, quite wrinkly, covered with fake tan, and with admirable biceps and pecs, but I was reassured to see that even he, who no doubt worked out every day of his life, had more than a slight paunch. However, even though paunches can’t be helped, it’s a good idea to conceal them as far as you c
an, even if you have to pour yourself into slimming panties when you go out.

  If you still think it’s impossible to look good when you’re old, listen to what Howard Jacobson wrote in the Independent about Leonard Cohen:a devilishly attractive man in his middle seventies. Some men do old age better than they do youth. Especially melancholy sensual men who can’t decide whether they’re happy or not. The not knowing, like the not eating, keeps them lean. He is fascinatingly attenuated, as laconic as a snake on grass, with a face lined and amused by a desperate indulgence of the appetites, by which I don’t mean wine, women, infidelity and betrayal, but also with rhapsodic spirituality alternating with ecstatic doubt.

  If you’re a woman and can’t face the huge effort required to look good in old age, you can, of course, simply give up and look totally bonkers—much better than being invisible. You can cultivate the Batty Look. Now you’re old, you can get away with preposterously wild colors, layers of silk and gold, flying scarves (as long as they’re clean), and enormous straw hats covered with a pyramid of flowers, apples, and pears. Don’t worry about being extreme. You’re confident enough, now, aren’t you?

  You may look crazy, of course, but you can also look incredibly pretty at the same time.

  11. Young People

  When I was young my teachers were the old,

  I gave up fire for form till I was cold

  I suffered like a metal being cast.

  I went to school to age to learn the past.

  Now I am old my teachers are the young.

  What can’t be molded must be cracked and sprung.

  I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.

  I go to school to youth to learn the future.

  —Robert Frost, “What Fifty Said”

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG I hated old people. I hated their wobbly old lips, their leaking eyes; I hated their smell and I hated their wrinkly old hands with all those rivers of veins. I also hated the way they dressed and the fact that they had nothing in common with me whatsoever. Not only that, but they were utterly baffled by me and my generation. Like all young people in the ’60s, I was a complete mystery to older people. We were, after all, a generation that had been pretty much invented by the ’60s. Okay, there were the bright young things in the ’20s, but they belonged, as far as I can gather, exclusively to a certain class. The new generation of “swinging” young people in the ’60s could come from any class at all, and preferably not that of the oldies of my acquaintance.

  There was a social revolution going on and the old were utterly mystified as to why I, a middle-class girl, was hobnobbing with criminals and sleeping with East End boys, who turned into designers, photographers, entrepreneurs. The media were also rather irritatingly fascinated. As a pop columnist for the Daily Mail in the ’60s I was constantly on hand to explain the workings of the Young Person’s Mind to anyone older than me. I remember having to do a Young Person’s Dictionary for the old geezers who read the paper, which gave explanations for words like square, cool, fab, trendy, and so on.

  I remember I’d be sitting at a party and some ancient old crock would come staggering up and sit down next to me and say, “Oh, hello! I so wanted to meet you because I do so love young people. Tell me—why do you wear your skirts so short and why do the Beatles wear their hair so long? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Ha ha ha!” and I could feel her secretly plugging an invisible socket into my side and sucking all my youth out.

  The first thing to be said about growing old is that nobody does it deliberately in order to annoy the young. I only understand that because now I am myself old. These days no one calls me to ask about why young people like to take drugs. They call me to ask what my views are on Alzheimer’s research, or whether sex is better when you’re ancient, or whether, as an old person presumably on the point of death, I approve of euthanasia.

  I’m in an odd position. Because on the one hand, the old really are different now. There may be an element of self-deception going on here, but I know that the cultural gap between me and a young person of thirty is far smaller today than it would have been between myself as a thirty-year-old and someone of sixty-five when I was young. In fact, I have probably done more drugs, slept with more men, and, crucially, experienced far more change in my lifetime than any young person born in the ’80s or ’90s. At the same time I remember the days of trams and when businessmen wore bowler hats and carried rolled-up umbrellas. My generation has witnessed a huge cultural shift, which means that we are in a special position of being able to understand the very old—those of ninety or so—as well as understanding the young.

  I can’t deny that I am, at the same time, an old geezer; there are things about the young that I just haven’t got a clue about. Nowadays when I hear the word hip, I don’t think of some cool groover in tight jeans, but more of the possibility of a fascinating operation that I can learn something from. (Though I was rather amused in a shop when a very young person, to whom I gave the right change, replied “Fab.” I stared at her, wondering if she wasn’t actually someone of my age who’d had several face-lifts, but no. She was twenty. Apparently fab is coming back. Cool. But you have to be very careful of what old slang you revive. If you describe yourself as square and the young person you’re with as swinging, I think you’d soon find they were looking at their watches. Or whatever they use for watches these days. Cell phones. Chips in their wrists.)

  The fact that this distance between young and old, while it still exists, has narrowed since I was young, makes relationships with young people far easier than they used to be. And the presence of young people in our lives means that the horizons of our friendships are immediately widened. When we were young we couldn’t have relationships with younger people because we were all young. But now I love having a semimaternal role with anyone young. Even when I was fifty, young people could be seen as a slight threat, but now that I’m sixty-five not only are they no threat to me, I’m no threat to them. I’m not going to steal their boyfriends or their friends or betray them by repeating gossip. I’m safe. And, embarrassing to admit, I just love them.

  Now, some old people can’t stand the young. When comedian Frank Carson, who is now eighty-three, was asked what he thought of today’s comedians, he replied, “I hate them all—particularly Jack Dee and Jimmy Carr. Because they’re funny, much funnier than me, and so young.” And the actor Richard Griffiths said he thought everyone over fifty should be issued by the post office every week a plastic bag with a wet fish in it so that “whenever you see someone young and happy you can hit them as hard as you can across the face. When they say ‘What was that for?’ you’ll say ‘For being young, handsome, and successful.’ ”

  But I just love young people. And it’s so incredibly flattering, too, to be liked back by a young person—any young person. While I used to boast that Mick Jagger had once kissed me (on the cheek, admittedly, but a kiss all the same) I now boast about the ages of some of my friends. I was asked to go to Italy last year and when people inquired about it I said, “Sicily . . . but you know the person who’s invited me is very young. She’s thirty-four. She’s a friend of mine, you know. . . . Yes, and she asked me to stay. She likes me. She’s very young—younger than my own son, and she’s this thirty-four-year-old, did I mention her age?—and she’s asked me, so much older, to Italy to stay with her. ...” I behaved like someone who’d been invited to dinner with some rock star. I felt flattered and flirty and lucky.

  The young are like a drug to the old. And it doesn’t matter how young, either. When I was young I’d be wheeling a carriage down the road with a baby inside it minding my own business and out from behind a bush this frightful old bat would leap. “Oh, coochie-coo! What a lovely baby! Isn’t he bonny! Or is it a she?”

  These days, I find myself behind a bush, minding my own business, when down the road comes a young mother with a baby in a carriage and I’m the one who leaps out crooning, “Oh, coochie-coo, girl or boy? What a bonny little person!”
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  The great thing about being old is not just that I can have young friends, but that I still have friends who are older than me. And when I’m with them, I feel like a little girl. I sit at their knee and ask them about their youth, and I’m genuinely fascinated by their stories.

  Howard Jacobson, himself no spring chicken, wrote in the Independent:Myself, I love the company of people who are ‘past it.’ Doesn’t matter what the ‘it’ is, particularly. Being past anything is enough. The commonality of self-irony is what I like. The absence of any of that competitiveness that mars the lives of the active . . . I like being with people who weren’t born yesterday . . . The acceptance that we are among the ruins . . .

  Then there’s also the fact that we can hear the most interesting young, those who spend their lives in noisy clubs; they tend to shout quite naturally because their ears are already damaged with exposure to overly loud sound. And those less interesting, of course, are still delightful. As someone said, “What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?”

  I have friends of my own age, my peers, whom I can talk to as contemporaries, but now there’s this new type of semiparental relationship I have with young people. I don’t think any young man knows how deeply flattering it is for an old person to be deemed worth spending more than half an hour with. When she was old, my mother used to come to life whenever a young man crossed her path. She turned embarrassingly girlish and flirtatious, completely energized by the presence not just of a young person but a young fellow. Humiliatingly, I find it hard not to act the same. I only have to catch the eye of a young man in the car next to me, and if he gives me a smile, I find that when I finally reach my destination I am dancing on air.