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

by Virginia Ironside

  It’s not just that young people are nice to have around. As our old friends drop off their perches, we need young people, just to replenish the supply of friends who seem to diminish daily. Every day, new names are crossed out from our address books.

  In Holland, the Dutch are apparently building an entire town for the over-fifties. Senior City in Zeeland will have no schools, dance clubs, or tattoo parlors, and motorbikes will be banned.

  I have to say that it sounds like my idea of utter hell.

  12. Travel

  When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

  Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.

  In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.

  —John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

  LOTS OF US have lists of “things we want to do before we die.” The late Miles Kington wanted to learn how to yodel, whistle with two fingers, and how to pronounce both the words macho and chorizo. Others want to see the world and check out all those places they’ve always meant to visit but haven’t had time for. So, at the top of the list of things to do for most oldies, if they’ve got enough money and have retired, is to travel.

  It strikes me as an odd thing to do. Traveling is what we do best when we’re young—it’s natural for youth to look outward—and surely, like a dying leaf curling inward, it would seem to me to be more natural to travel less or at least nearer when you’re old rather than more and farther. But again, it seems there’s this desperate trend for oldies of my generation to refuse to acknowledge that they’re getting on. Far from relaxing into themselves and enjoying the fruits of their labors, they long to have a final fling, as it were, and fly till they die.

  However, oldies aren’t dumb. You don’t find many of them hitching around Europe or taking jobs as washer-uppers in Paris bistros and cattle-ranchers in Australia, as many young people do in their gap years. No, oldies like to travel in comfort.

  Cruises

  Cruises are just bursting with ancient people, all eager to squeeze through the Corinth Canal, float through the straits of the Bosphorus, nip around the Mediterranean cities, marvel at the fjords of Norway, or sail around Cape Horn before they die. Cruising also suits old couples. If he’s too old to master a boat trip of his very own, there’s nothing an old fellow likes to do more in the morning than stand on the poop deck, stuffed to the gills with a three-course breakfast, and watch other guys weighing anchor and splicing the mainbrace or whatever they do. And their wives, of course, can sit in the “well-stocked library” researching whatever pile of historic rubble is on the list to see that day.

  Anyway, the rub about cruises and old people is that so many other oldies have the same idea. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be trapped on a floating prison with dozens of people with crutches all over the place. People of my own age. On one cruise I went on—I was giving a talk—they actually had a mortuary on board, which, when we finally disembarked two weeks later, was packed to the portholes with fellow cruisers who couldn’t make the distance.

  (I also don’t want, incidentally, to sleep in a room the size of a small coffin in a bed the size of a schoolgirl’s pencil case, nor do I especially want to learn Flower Arranging on the lower deck portside on Friday afternoon, nor indulge in Scarf-Tying Class on Monday morning in the Royal Tea Lounge on the Promenade Deck—“Discover how to wear scarves effectively to suit your own style and enjoy the hands-on experience as you learn lots of chic knots and tying tricks.” Don’t get me started. ...)

  Some cruise lines are so anxious not to become floating nursing homes that they oblige passengers to sign a piece of paper in advance saying that they are fully mobile and able to take part in the visits and won’t hold anyone else up. But you can hear the grinding of the cruise line people’s teeth as they witness the crippled masses who lurch aboard waving their passes, all claiming that they had to have a hip operation, or slipped on a banana peel, after signing the contract. Life on a cruise hardly helps general mobility either, because you get so little exercise. And you do nothing but eat on a cruise, four meals a day. They say travel broadens the mind. But it also broadens the behind.

  I was told of one old lady whose feet, during the last years of her life, barely touched dry land. Between cruises she’d put up at a hotel in Portsmouth so she had time to cash in her vast collection of prescriptions, before sailing off to her next destination. (“Another truss, Lady Bonkers?” I can imagine the pharmacist saying. “And your usual bunion splint? That’ll be free for you, since you are over sixty. And by the way, I do like your new Chinese hat. Suits you very well.”) I think the cruise people were trying to get her banned, because you don’t want someone wandering off unable to remember her name when you’re trying to keep everyone together on a crowded visit, say, to the Taj Mahal. If she got lost, you would simply never find her again.

  Trekking

  When I heard about oldies going on trekking holidays abroad, I wondered if they weren’t the type of a slightly more adventurous nature. Apparently Dame Freya Stark was eighty-eight when she set off pony trekking in the Himalayas. But it’s not for me, for many reasons. First, I don’t really like walking (see below) and also, if I were to fall off the trail and break a hip (see Balance in “Ailments”), I wouldn’t really like my skeleton to be discovered years later beside some Yeti bones. But finally, when I investigated further, it turned out that my old friends didn’t really go trekking at all. Well, they did, I suppose, but they might just as well have been walking up and down their own living rooms for all the effort it cost them. Apparently, they had teams of slaves crashing on ahead to build little tents and make steaming suppers for when they arrived, and dozens of donkeys carrying their bags—not what I call trekking in the Himalayas; it’s what I call a Big Cheat, frankly. Next thing they’ll be telling me all about the perils and excitement of deep-sea diving and it’ll turn out that they haven’t been doing anything much more adventurous than going upstairs and having a bath.

  Walking

  Proper walking is frightfully popular with oldies in England. Appropriately enough, it’s called “rambling.” Loaded up with special sticks, stout shoes, and clipboards and compasses hung around their necks, their backpacks stashed with provisions and water bottles, they stomp around in the Lake District wearing out the land with their hobnailed boots. Of course, I have to bow to their crazy doggedness, their delightful Englishness, their utter devotion to total pointlessness, but I myself have never really understood walking as an occupation in itself. It’s rather as if someone told me that they went “breathing” for a fortnight.

  Gap Years

  I have heard of a Web site for real oldie adventurers, called Gaps for Grumpies; the idea there is that fit old people take gap years (gap between what, I wonder—retirement and death?) and buzz off to African villages or Peruvian farmlands, and help with such things as painting schools, building wells, and teaching people to read. Now, this appeals. Because it’s not just a way you can travel if you want to, but also a way you can actually use your age and your wisdom to do something useful. I haven’t tried this, but when I am less busy I plan to give it a go. No, really.

  The Panic of Flying

  Of course, there might be a slight problem for me. How do you get there? That seems to me another disadvantage to foreign travel when you’re older. Forget the ethical problem—I’m a non-believer when it comes to greenhouse gas
es, carbon footprints, and global warming—I don’t want to fly simply because these days I get too flustered. Being flustered and being old seem to be synonymous. It’s a funny thing, but alongside the huge and increasing confidence in many areas that comes with age, in other areas lots of oldies, I in particular, can become gibbering wrecks.

  The last time I drove to Stansted to catch a plane, I missed the highway exit and had to carry on to Cambridge and back before I could find it again, adding thirty miles to my journey and, worse, a panic-stricken hour eating into the check-in time.

  More recently, having arrived at Terminal 5 (which had hidden itself in ill-signed networks of roundabouts and slip roads), when the woman at the check-in desk said, “And how are you today?” I simply burst into tears. And I mean tears. I couldn’t speak and had to sit on a bench gasping and choking with misery, holding my head in my hands. And when, on another occasion, at Gatwick, I was told to “check yourself in,” I simply had a nervous breakdown.

  “I can’t!” I said. “I’m too old and I don’t understand!”

  Luckily a kindly man in a uniform did it for me, but he admonished me, as I thanked him. “You’ll have to get used to it,” he said, severely. “This is the future.”

  Well, if this is the future, that’s the last time I go abroad, I thought.

  Like all old people I get muddled at security, often putting my water, nail scissors, and little pocketknives into a plastic bag in full view of the guards who always confiscate it, and taking off my skirt instead of my boots at the X-ray machine . . . and the last time I went through I actually tried to put on someone else’s belt and shoes after they’d come off the rollers.

  Hotels

  We oldies need to be in charge. Which of course makes staying in hotels so problematic. Whereas when I was young I could check into a hotel, throw my suitcase into my room, and then hurtle down to the beach, now every time I stay in a hotel, I have to spend about an hour tidying my room after breakfast and doing a bit of light housekeeping. The day I check in, I put all the hotel gunk—plastic folders, little cards saying “No Smoking,” and unwanted electric clocks—into a drawer, rearrange the chairs, unpack (but don’t put anything in drawers in case I forget it when I repack), make sure the towels are arranged in the way I like them, check the heating system and the phones—and usually tear all the bedclothes off the other single bed, if there is one, and pile it onto mine so that I’ll be warmer at night. Each evening I do my washing and hang it to dry on the shower curtain. The last time a friend of mine visited me in my hotel room she said it was like entering a Turkish bazaar, everywhere draped with tights, swimming costumes, slips, sarongs, and underwear.

  Trains

  Of course I could travel the smart way: by train. And a year or so ago I did manage to go from London to Moscow entirely by train (never again). Sadly, trains are a grisly form of transport these days; the last one I went on had a guard speaking sententiously on the intercom before we left. “I would like to point out that this train has special facilities for your feet,” he said. “It is called the floor.” While I’m normally tolerant about other people’s behavior I find that just being in a train car turns me instantly into an old grump. Why is he speaking on his cell phone in a Quiet Carriage? Is the seat beside him really taken, as he claims, or has he just put his baggage there to give himself more room? Train cars induce a kind of incandescent fury.

  Biking

  I would go on a biking holiday, but since I was told by a cycling instructor that now I was so old I couldn’t turn my neck as far as I used to be able to and therefore biking was, for me, rather dangerous, I’ve put my helmet and yellow jacket away. Though I suppose if I were brave enough I could buy a trike. I see fearless oldies triking away—although now their form of travel is more likely to be those reckless little buggies used only, it seems to me, not by the disabled but by the hugely fat. (Can anyone tell us, what is the law on those things? Are they really allowed to travel both on the sidewalk and the roads?)

  Driving

  So it’s the car for me. I don’t actually own, as my great-aunt did, an old Ford, with little yellow indicators that flicked out on either side when you were turning left or right, and a cranking handle to wind up the engine; hers was so old that she actually had to reverse it to go up steep hills. Nor do I posses such a thing as a driving hat, and there isn’t a driving blanket in the back. But I don’t yet have central locking and my windows are wound up and down by hand.

  My only indulgence is a brilliant gizmo, installed following the frightful disaster driving to Stansted and Terminal 5: GPS. Not only can I now get from place to place without risking a heart attack (see “Ailments”) but also, if by any chance I am driving with a loved one—and I do have loved ones, despite my insistence on spending most of my time alone—there is no risk of incurring the most almighty row that usually, as far as I remember, resulted in night after night of the silent treatment when we actually arrived at our vacation destination. Women have always wondered why men don’t ask for directions when they lose their way. Now neither of them has any need to. They are told where to go as they go along by a disembodied voice sitting on their dashboard.

  England

  I’ve made an extraordinary discovery since I’ve gotten older: there are dozens and dozens of absolutely sensational places in England that I haven’t been to before. Someone said that “at sixty, a man learns how to value home,” and I’m starting to realize exactly what he meant. Why go to Italy when you can go to the Lake District? Why trek in the Himalayas when you can walk in the most beautiful scenery in the world, in Invernessshire? Is there really anywhere more staggering than the Cornish coast? Anywhere with more amazing birds than Norfolk?

  Travel of Another Kind

  Finally, for us of a certain age, there is a kind of existential Proustian travel that appeals to me most of all. You do this from the comfort of your own bed. You wake up, having endured the long journey of sleep the night before, and then, hour after hour, you trace, with your index finger, a slow and meditative path along your sheets and quilt, acutely aware, wherever you are, of the changing colors, whether you’re going up or down the folds in the coverlet, occasionally glancing up at the ceiling to check out the cracks, and sometimes, on a hill of pillow feathers, glancing around to take in the view of a glass of water, false teeth, unreadable book that you couldn’t get beyond two pages of (leave that Book Club!), stack of pills, dressing table, hairbrush, mirror, wallpaper, and so on. Some people have managed to travel like this for weeks on end.

  Try it.

  13. Funerals

  Lately there’s nothing but trouble, grief, and strife

  There’s not much attraction about this bloomin’ life

  Last night I dreamt I was bloomin’ well dead

  As I went to the funeral, I bloomin’ well said,

  “Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  And look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ’andles

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!”

  Some people there were praying for me soul

  I said, “It’s the first time I’ve been off the dole”

  Look at the mourners, bloomin’ well sozzled

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  Look at the children, bloomin’ excited

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  Look at the neighbours, bloomin’ delighted

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  “Spend the insurance,” I murmured, “For alack,

  You know I shan’t be with you going back”

  Look at the Missus, bloomin’ well laughing

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  Look at me Sister, bloomin new ’at on

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  And look at me Brother, bloomin’ cigar on

  Ain’t it gra
nd, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  We come from clay and we all go back they say

  Don’t ’eave a brick it may be your Aunty May

  Look at me Grandma, bloomin’ great haybag

  Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!

  “Ain’t It Grand to Be Bloomin’ Well Dead!”—

  written and sung by Leslie Sarony in 1933

  AREN’T FUNERALS FUN? Apparently there are many people who enjoy funerals and memorial services so much that they pretend to have known the late lamented just in order to go along to the bash afterward. Victoria Coren wrote about this gang who tried—and succeeded—to gate-crash the memorial service of her father, Alan Coren. I’m tempted to hire this lot in advance for when I die, plus, perhaps, a few actors who will be paid to droop around the place, sniffing their misery into hankies and occasionally emitting the odd wolflike howl.

  It’s interesting that I haven’t noticed anyone clamoring to get into anyone’s wedding.

  And I know why. I’ve worked out scientifically—yes, scientifically—why funerals are so much more fun than weddings. If you take a handful of marbles and lay them out on a table, and then add another handful, which is what happens at a wedding when two families meet at the reception, all the original marbles are spread farther apart. But take the same group of marbles and remove one from the middle—as happens at funerals—and everyone gets closer together. Funerals are warm, affectionate affairs with everyone thinking good things about the person who’s gone, feeling closer to those who are left behind and, often, quite smug that, for the moment at least, it’s not them in that box over there.