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

by Virginia Ironside

  It’s also a time to count who is left, who is still there on your side of the river Styx. Dreary old relatives, whom you might have taken somewhat for granted in the past, suddenly look warm and sparkling. They may not be soul mates, but at least they are still here. They are alive, they’re not dead, and they probably love you, as you love them, in that peculiarly loyal and doglike way that relations love one another.

  I like the music, the hymns (except for when the organist strikes up some tune other than “Crimond” for “The Lord is my Shepherd”), I like the speed—cremation services, particularly, usually last no longer than half an hour—and I love the cadences. Funerals usually start off sadly, and then build up to a rousing finale, when we all look around at one another congratulating ourselves on having survived and secretly wondering at whose funeral we will all be meeting again in the near future.

  And we all leave saying effusively to one another, because we wonder if we’ll ever see them again, “I love you.”

  The Downside

  Let’s put aside the grief, which is not the correct subject for a book that’s supposed to be celebrating the great things about being old. Apart, then, from the non-Crimond music there are only two things I dislike about modern funerals. One is the habit of organizing one’s funeral in advance, thus taking all the fun out of it for your bereaved relatives. I got a letter the other day from an insurance company.

  “Dear Ms. Tronsde,” it began.

  It’s never easy to imagine the time when you’ll no longer be here to help and support your loved ones through life’s ups and downs. But the simple truth is that one day, there’s one challenge they’re going to have to face without you. Arranging the funeral of someone you love can be difficult and distressing. As you try to come to terms with your loss there are suddenly endless practical arrangements to make, such as finding a funeral home and arranging the wake. And the cost of it all can be unexpected. It’s the last thing your family will want to deal with, yet it has to be done.

  I screwed up the letter and threw it into the waste basket. Total trash. Arranging a funeral isn’t difficult or distressing. On the contrary, it’s a real pleasure to organize things when someone dies. It gives you a sense of control, a feeling of doing something for the person who’s gone, and it also gives you something to take your mind temporarily off the disaster that has just befallen you, so that you’re not completely overwhelmed.

  Poring over previously unread Bibles, searching for suitable quotes, telephoning vicars to ask about hymns, discussing tunes with organists, making out the guest list and wondering whether to ask an aunt loathed by the deceased but who would be mortally hurt not to be invited, discussing with undertakers which size of coffin to buy—all these may be interesting, therapeutic, and even amusing. (I won’t forget the undertaker who came to visit us before my father’s funeral and who, on being told my father had done some designs for glass engraving in his time, nodded his head; so used was he to the jargon of his trade that he commented, “Grave englassing? That sounds interesting.”)

  Bickering—or agreeing—about the music and the readings and the venue is a great way for families to get back to normal life. Uniting in hatred of some harmless figure in the whole scenario—often the poor old vicar or fatuous organist—helps make everyone feel a weird kind of togetherness when a family structure is damaged.

  The second thing that ticks me off about modern funerals is when there’s a funeral dictate that says: “No flowers.” Or, worse, “No flowers, but contributions to Charity X.”

  The one thing I am going to say in advance of my funeral is that there are to be no “No” anythings. If people want to dance on my grave, fine. If they want to sacrifice young goats on my funeral pyre, that’s up to them. If they want to say the Lord’s Prayer backward as they throw earth into the hole, let them. And if they cover my coffin with masses and masses of cut flowers, well, that would be best of all. How people pay their respects to the dead person is up to them, not up to the puritanical wishes of those arranging the event.

  Aren’t flowers at funerals lovely? To ban them makes it seem as if flowers were an unseemly display of fun or attention seeking. The grim old coffin can be covered with them and, at its best, you’ll find every variety there, from grand florist’s bouquets to the wild roses plucked from the dead person’s favorite bush, to the touching bunches of weeds contributed by grandchildren. And surely, aren’t cut flowers to do with sacrifice, part of a pagan urge that we all have to give something to the dead person purely as a gift, something that is no use to anyone else? Flowers are like that mindless spraying of a champagne bottle after a Grand Prix victory—an offering up, a giving with no receiving. A check to the Red Cross, decent as it may be, just gets in the way of what should be a private, loving gesture from you to the one you loved.

  I like what my grandmother used to call a “good” funeral—big, dark affairs, with glossy black horses hired to parade from the dead person’s home to the cemetery—preferably with the words The Champion spelled out in flowers along the side of the coffin carried in a huge glass hearse. Splendid.

  Undertakers

  The last undertaker I had dealings with was dressed in a vest, tie, and black suit, and found it hard even to smile. I imagined undertaker-training classes in which they are tickled and bar-raged with jokes, and the first one to crack his poker face and smile is kicked out of the course. The moment we were in his parlor it was like being transported into another age, apart from a bizarre bright metal coffin in the window.

  (“There’s a sprung mattress inside,” he assured us.) No computers here. Everything was written down laboriously in longhand. Words like catafalque and committal were used, and I remembered a time when I’d been asked to write a client brochure for a large American funeral company entitled How to Arrange a Funeral. There were only two problems. They didn’t want the word body to be used. They preferred the deceased. And they recoiled at the mention of ashes. “What word should I use instead?” I asked, baffled. “Cremains,” was the memorable reply.

  At that point I put my foot down.

  Leafing through a brochure in the funeral parlor, I saw that we could order a coffin with a photograph printed on the side—a country scene, golfing paraphernalia, a rocket, you name it, there was one. There was a rock ’n’ roll one, a jazz one or even—really creepy—a coffin that was painted entirely with the Union Jack. Apart from a vaguely heathery one with a picture of the Highlands, there didn’t seem to be one appropriate for the middle class. The problem is that it’s only after you’ve signed and sealed the whole ludicrously expensive package—around $6,000 inclusive of limousine and hearse—that you remember the Natural Death Centre, who’ll organize a woodland funeral in a biodegradable coffin. Next time, I always say to myself, rather ghoulishly.

  Memorial Services

  If you really want to gild the lily, you can, a month or so after the funeral, organize a memorial service. This can be worked on for much longer by the family, who may have been too dazed to choose much more than a kind of Chinese set meal of a funeral from the church’s menu. “Crimond”? Yup. “Love Divine”? You bet. John 2:23-6? Sure, whatever you say. And some prawn crackers and a pot of jasmine tea while you’re at it.

  A memorial service is usually a celebration of a life rather than a mourning for someone who’s gone. After it you all come out thinking what an enormously good fellow he was, the one who’s died—and aren’t we incredibly lucky and, of course, clever, to have managed to have been his friends? As we leave we can, as we do so often when we’re old, congratulate ourselves.

  My Fantasy Funeral

  I’m torn between wanting a ceremony in Westminster Abbey featuring a choir of white-robed eunuchs who, after the service, release flocks of doves from cages and announce a public holiday, followed by burial in a vast mausoleum topped by a giant marble obelisk; or the Alison Uttley (the British author) version, in which my body is laid in a mossy woodland grove in a hand-painted ca
rdboard box under a weeping willow, where rabbits and squirrels and birds, peeping out between the daffodils and tulips, will weep at my passing.

  Oh, Gawd. Sobbing at the idea of my own funeral. How delightfully self-indulgent can you get? Pass the Kleenex.

  14. Boring for Britain

  When I am an old man I shall bore people.

  When I am an old man I shall bore people—

  Strangers on trains, in pubs, on street corners

  In all weathers, with rambling accounts of how life used

  to be.

  I shall rehearse to all in earshot my hard-won prejudices,

  Or boomingly declaim odd scraps of half-remembered

  verse

  By Kipling, Housman, Tennyson, and Larkin.

  Clearing crowded carriages with rant,

  Banging on about the young and the dead and

  The gilded dullards who populate the present.

  In ratty egg-stained tie, half-mast trousers, undone fly,

  Unkempt, unshaven, eloquent and right—

  About whatever subject takes my fancy.

  I’ll blather on contentedly about

  The weather, noisy music, gormless telly,

  The price of fish, the lack of common courtesy.

  Slurping discount gin and gobbling pills

  And telling all and sundry of my ailments

  In graphic, unscientific detail.

  Buttonholing the unwary passerby

  With unverifiable monologues

  Of how things were in my day.

  I’ll garrulously repeat off-color jokes,

  Blasting my interlocutor with rancid breath

  The spittled punch lines wheezily forgotten.

  Then droning on about myself, myself, myself,

  Knowing what licence folk will grant old age

  When howling rage seems sour grapes merely.

  I really ought to get in training now,

  So friends who know me won’t flinch in dismay

  When suddenly I am old, and start to bore people.

  (With apologies to Jenny Joseph, author of “Warning”)

  WHEN YOU’R E OLD you reach, at last, your anecdotage. This gives you permission, as far as I can see, to bore anyone within hearing distance completely rigid for the rest of your (or possibly their) life. A curse for them but, no question, a great pleasure for you.

  I used to be rather wary about boring people. Too much rested on my being entertaining and listening and making the other person not only feel that I was interesting, but also making them, with the aid of a lot of “Ohh!”s, “Aaah”s, “You don’t say!”s, “My goodness, that’s fascinating”s, and “You certainly have made a really good point there”s, feel interesting. But occasionally now I sense those polite inhibitions breaking down. I get that old Ancient Mariner feeling creeping over me, hold whatever poor sap has come into my range with a glittering eye, and start on a subject—probably something that happened in the old days—and I go on. And on. And on.

  The joy is that there’s so much that young people don’t know these days! They show a distinct lack of curiosity in things that predate themselves. ( Just the same as I did when I was young.) Did they know that George Formby was big in the Soviet Union? Did they know that Norman Wisdom was renowned in Albania? Did they know that Jimmy Clitheroe was huge in Africa? “You don’t know who Jimmy Clitheroe was. . . . Well, let me tell you . . . he was a little guy who dressed up in shorts, with a cap, and he pretended to be young and he had a voice like this. ...” The eyes of your listener may glaze over, but there’s no stopping you. Imitations of every old comedian you can remember start pouring out of your mouth. I even “did” Max Miller for an unsuspecting young person the other day, even though Max was long before my time. And I have no idea what he sounded like.

  Most young people don’t know anything about anything, barely know who Anton Chekhov was, and certainly haven’t read any Leo Tolstoy. And if you describe a figure as Rubenesque, they look at you goggle-eyed: “Yer what?” And this means you can drone on for ages about topics not only that they don’t know about but also, if you’re lucky, that you don’t know anything about at all either.

  You can start quite honestly: “When I was young we didn’t have computers, we had things called typewriters—you put the paper in, rolled it up, and at the end of a line—ting! And we didn’t have photocopiers either, oh no. We got these huge bits of waxed paper and typed on them and if we made a mistake, we had to correct them with little spots of liquid wax . . . and when I was a child I had to go to the fishmonger’s and collect huge slabs of ice to break up and put in our icebox, we didn’t have fridges then, and when I was a girl, a man would come around every evening on a bicycle holding a stick with a spark on the end of it to light up the gas streetlamps. . . . I remember the day when the only fruit for sale were oranges and apples, and you had to buy your olive oil at the pharmacy. Garlic was unheard of, and there were no microwaves . . . oh, the fog! And of course no single woman was allowed to take out a mortgage in those days. . . .

  “You won’t believe this, but there were people called bus conductors in those days, and they punched little colored tickets . . . and no cell phones or even answering machines. If we expected a call, we just had to stay in and wait for it. . . . There were no supermarkets, no highways, no tea bags, no instant coffee, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavored potato chips, no vinyl, no CDs, no Pill, no sneakers, no Starbucks . . . can you imagine it? Of course you can’t.”

  Then you get on to the half-truths. “There were no antibiotics when I was young—you could die if you got an infection” (well, there were a few, when I was a little older than very young). “And of course the sound of bombs was deafening” (well, I don’t actually remember the sound, though I was born during an air raid). “And then when we were called up . . . oh yes, it was hard in the trenches in the war. I was in the Women’s Corps and the first night I found myself in no-man’s-land. ...” (entirely untrue, but irresistible now the audience is quite spellbound). “And it was there that I had my first roasted rat. ...”

  The young seem to think of the past as a totally other country, and have no concept of the difference between the two world wars. I sometimes feel I could claim to have been at the Battle of Hastings, leading a troop of archers, and the innocent faces of the young would still be gawking up at me, thinking, She must be very old . . . but still, it’s amazing. . . .

  And of course, those who know perfectly well that you’re talking complete nonsense will be far too polite to dream of correcting you, simply putting you down as a loony old fart.

  You can indulge your grumpiest and most curmudgeonly of feelings and tastes simply because you’re old. You can go on for hours about whether the best way to Basingstoke is on the A40 and then down past Stonehenge—“dreadful what they’ve done to it—I remember when you could go up to it and wander around touching the stones”—or whether it’s quicker via the M4, taking the Salisbury exit. When you stay away, you can insist on having the same breakfast every morning on the grounds that “that’s what I always have for breakfast.” You can insist on arriving at opening time at the post office and forming an orderly line. You can salute the drivers of AA vans and get irritable when they don’t respond as they used to in the old days.

  You can say, “I never go to McDonald’s,” or “I never sing in church,” or “I never send Christmas cards,” or “I never buy the Daily Mail,” or “I never watch television,” as if these are principles that actually make up an unswervingly upright character that, whatever happens, could never, ever change. (My own feeling is that the rigid views of the old arise simply from fear. If they stick with the views they’ve always had, they believe, then they won’t get carried away by the terrifying eddies and pools of what they see is the chaos of the modern world.)

  Even the comparatively young Cosmo Landesman said, in his memoir Starstruck, having made some rather grumpy comment:It’s when I write things like that th
at I start to wonder: Am I being nostalgic for an age that never existed? Am I talking about the state of England or the state I’m in? Maybe it’s just me getting old and becoming a grumpy old guy who thinks everything is getting worse. But if this were true you could never make any critical judgements about aspects of contemporary life, because you’d always end up accusing yourself of being a grumpy old guy or woman when, in fact, you could be dead right about what is really going on.

  This is precisely why it’s such fun being an old bore. Because there’s always a chance you might just be right. The world really might be coming to an end. If I had a hot dinner for every time I’ve heard, over the last few months, people declaring that we are behaving like the people in the last days of the Roman Empire, I’d be so fat I’d have to be winched out of my window on a hoist every time I wanted to go out to get my free pills at the pharmacy on a free bus.

  As for the perennial topic of young people, possibly top of the list in the Old Bores Subjects charts, you just have to read part of the Reverend Henry Worsley’s prize-winning essay, “Juvenile Depravity,” written in 1849—though, to be honest, it could still be used perfectly well by an old bore of 2010. Juvenile depravity is, he wrote,a bane to society, which like an ulcer on the body is continually enlarging, and distributing far and wide its noxious influence—a general and latent depravity, which a large extent of juvenile depravity seems to indicate, is a state under which the manufacture of a nation must eventually decline, agriculture languish and commerce disappear. The number of juvenile offenders, whose precocity in wickedness is subject of grief and alarm to every well-regulated mind . . . the overwhelming mass of vice and crime, now deluging our land . . . the increase in degeneracy of the juvenile population . . . the current of iniquity which at the present sweeps through our streets . . .