—Francis Bacon, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher
Seven ages: first puking and mewling,
Then very pissed off with your schooling,
Then fucks and then fights,
Then judging chaps’ rights,
Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.
—Robert Conquest
I’VE DISCOVERED SOMETHING rather odd about time. I was going away for a week to Scotland, and when I said to friends that I was dreading it—the older I get, the more stressful I find going away from home, notwithstanding that like a child at a party, I often “love it when I get there”—they said, “But it’s only a week! Now that we’re older it passes in a flash!”
In one way they’re right because a week is only ⅓328 of my entire past life—rather short. But when I see it in terms of my
future life (say ten years) it’s ⅕20—incredibly long.
When I think that I’ve already experienced sixty-four Christmases, it seems crazy to get into such a tizzy about it, and worry about where I will spend it or who will spend it with me. And yet when I think in terms of there perhaps being only ten more Christmases left, it doesn’t seem as foolish to regard each Christmas as important.
Regardless, before you know where you are, spring is here again, summer seems to be upon us, autumn is only a few days away, and Christmas does seem to come around with alarming frequency. As I’m still sweeping the old pine needles from the cracks between the cushions in the sofa, I can’t think why I didn’t just get a tree in a pot and keep it up, decorated, for the whole year. The prospect of clambering up a ladder and putting up those wretched old decorations yet again, only to pull them down two weeks later, seems dotty. Then there’s the entire crib carved out of balsa by my father to assemble, not to mention the irritating little brass Austrian tinging thing with angels going round and round when you light the candles. Or not tinging. Or going around backward.
When I said to someone in 2010 that 2011 was around the corner, he replied, with an agonized sigh, “Oh dear, is there no end to it?” I knew exactly how he felt.
Time goes extremely fast when you’re old. It’s about the only thing that does, because in all other respects you yourself get slower and slower.
When Are We Of ficially Old?
“Oh, you’re only as old as you feel!” trill some of my more ancient friends. But who do they think they’re kidding? They must think like Jack Straw does, apparently, that they’re “somewhere between eighty and thirty-five, depending what’s happening that day. If you were born in the ’60s you think you have a divine right to go on feeling young.”
When we get old, all of us have that peculiar sensation of being at once quite childlike and at the same time utterly ancient. We’re like one of those 3-D postcards you get in Greece, which, when you look at it from the left, shows an immaculate Parthenon decorated in gold and adorned with statues; when you look at it from the right, it’s a crumbling old ruin. Other people’s perceptions don’t make anything any clearer either. In my experience, the young see you as old, but the old see you as a spring chicken. When I’ve told people of seventy the title of this book they’ve chuckled and then, putting a withered hand on mine, exclaimed, “But my dear, you don’t even yet know the meaning of the word old!”
Every year that passes, time gets more confusing. Jean Rhys said that “Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.” (As I well know; see “Sex.”) And, I’d add, backward reverses as well. Anyway, isn’t “old” not just how far you are from the beginning, but how close you are to the end?
My definition of getting old is when you can’t do the seat belt up in other people’s cars without fumbling and when you can’t get out of them without using your hands on the side of the door to lever yourself upright. It’s when you surreptitiously buy yourself a folding cane to keep in your bag “just in case” and when, if your papers haven’t been delivered, you dare to shuffle down the street to the corner store in your slippers, with only a coat buttoned over your nightie.
In Germany you know you’re officially old when you’re offered a special menu. Apparently over there if you’re young, you’re offered a normal menu. If you have kids, you’re offered a normal menu plus a kids’ menu, a Kinderteller—beans and chips, probably—on the side. But if you’re old, you’re offered a Seniorenteller. You can imagine what that is. Very small portions. Mushy. And you’re probably given a straw to suck it all up with. If you ask for a chewy steak or crunchy celery, you’re no doubt told that “Sorry, you’re too old.”
Do You Tell?
When asked your age you can, of course, be enigmatic like Cary Grant. When someone sent his agent a telegram asking, “How old Cary Grant?” he sent back the reply, “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”
Or you could just sigh and say, “Well, put it like this. I won’t see sixty again.”
But I don’t like keeping my age secret. I always worry that someone knows how old I am and will then tell everyone behind my back. Much better that I should be the person to tell them first. My date of birth, just in case anyone wants to know, is February 3, 1944. No earlier and no later. It’s all down there in Somerset House or wherever they keep birth certificates now (probably online, in a vast data center available to everyone in the world if they only knew the password).
What Do We Call Ourselves?
I like calling myself simply “old,” but we can all facetiously describe ourselves as “oldies” or “wrinklies.” When I phone to book tickets for a film or show, I sometimes ask, “Are there discounts for this?” And when the person at the other end says, “And what kind of discount are you?” I’m never sure whether to answer “Senior citizen” (or, as I once said, getting a bit confused, “Senior sitting room”) or “Old-age retiree” or, as I usually do, in a quavering voice, “I’m just incredibly ancient, my dear.”
I have considered calling myself a “New Age retiree,” but then maybe they’d think I was one of those ancient long-haired, gray-haired people, wrinkly wrists covered with metal antirheumatism bands and grimy pieces of colored string.
We could call ourselves “elderly” or “senior,” but I quite like “over the hill.” Why? Because once you’re over the hill you get a much better view of everything than when you are struggling up it. You can enjoy the grand panorama as you sail down. It’s also an easier ride.
Seen It All Before
A friend once said that she got very depressed being alone day and night. Every day was the same, she moaned. But I pointed out that every day couldn’t be the same because each new day she had more similar days behind her. It was this buildup of those same days that might, one day, push her into doing something to make tomorrow different. Time also gives us a completely different take on everything. It’s difficult, quite honestly, to experience much as completely new because everything reminds us of something else.
I went to Venice recently. Extremely lovely. Very beautiful. But because I’d been before when I was young, what I was doing was retracing my steps from the last time I was there, remembering restaurants I’d visited and art galleries I’d seen. One of the things you can’t do when you’re old is see many things for the first time.
Time’s Changes
Time changes people, too. It’s in old age that leopards really can change their spots. I know several people who were lousy mothers who now make brilliant grandmothers. I know men who, once bright and clever and innovative, have turned into crabby old codgers who moan about “the youth today.” I know an elderly woman who, during her later years, has softened completely and who is now a twinkly-eyed charmer whereas before she was terrifyingly critical and acerbic. And I know another woman who was stoned (no, not like in Pakistan; the other kind) most of her life, left each of her five husbands, had four kids by different men, but who now teaches yoga in a country village, is the pillar of her community, and is never absent from the church fete or the local charity run.
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And isn’t it great when time changes old boyfriends? From being golden gods at whose shrines you once worshipped, you meet them now and you can hardly hear what they say for the sound of the scales clattering to the floor as they fall from your eyes. I actually met an old boyfriend recently whose hair was two shades darker than when I’d known him in the ’70s.
Then a couple of years ago I went to a party and saw a small, elderly figure with white hair, and I was stunned by a pang of recognition. For this was a man who, when I was in my twenties, I had simply doted on for about five years. When I say “doted,” it’s an understatement. “Idolized” would describe it better. I’d dreamed about him, I’d gotten pregnant by him, had an abortion . . . I’d even become a drug courier for him when he ran out of some unspeakable substance in his country cottage, and I thought he was absolutely the only man in the world for me. After a disastrous split, I’d never seen him again. Until now.
It took only a few minutes of listening to him burbling on about his belief in the power of Nordic gods, his new theory about Glastonbury, and the fact that he appeared to have done absolutely nothing except stay exactly in the same place since I last saw him, to realize that this was not just a man I no longer loved but a man whose company I should actually actively seek ways to avoid.
“I must go to the loo,” I said, interrupting his flow, and I turned on my heels and left, breathing a sigh of relief. I was delighted to find that time had changed me and my feelings completely.
Time’s New View
Time is a great educator. It teaches us to take the long view—one we could never have had when we were young and the past was only about six inches deep. These days we can cast our eyes over great mountain ranges of past, full of rivers and deserts, and get a much better idea of the whole. We slowly see life as a long continuum rather than a series of individual events strung together by periods of sleep.
The sweep of my past actually includes meeting my great-grandmother (I know I am at risk here of “Boring for Britain,” but I’m old and I like it). She lived with a companion in a Gloucester Road hotel. She wore, I remember, a long skirt of black bombazine, a buttoned black top over a white high-necked blouse. On her head she wore a black hat with a veil, and in her hand she carried a silver-topped stick.
I’ve known times when no one had a car, no one had a television set, and the stores were closed on Sunday. E-mail, texting, and cell phones were unknown (see “Boring for Britain” again). The amount of change people of my generation have experienced in their lifetime is, I suspect, much more than anyone of thirty today will experience in their lifetime. It’s astonishing that, in view of all this, we have managed to stay reasonably sane.
And as you age, you slowly start to realize that the world didn’t begin with you and isn’t going to end with you. You understand that you are part of an ongoing cycle—and this realization has a profound effect on how you live your life. When I got my first cat I never thought of it as my “first” cat. It was simply my cat. Now that I have had so many cats, I can understand that we come and go in just the same way as cats do—the only difference is that we usually live longer.
A friend of mine told me that when she became a grandmother and was photographed by her own children, she remembered that it seemed like only the other day that she, too, was photographed as a baby on her own grandmother’s lap.
This relentless ongoingness came home to me sharply when recently I went to an Al-Anon meeting, the twelve-step group for friends, relatives, and children of alcoholics. I’d last been to this particular group about ten years ago, and, for about four years, had been heavily involved. In my time I’d been treasurer, secretary, publications officer, chair, and expected in some peculiar way to be welcomed back as some old, venerated Al-Anon sage. I climbed the same stairs. I smelled the same smell of cabbage. I entered the same room, with the same chairs. But there the similarity ended. The room was full of strangers! They greeted me warmly, as a complete newcomer, and it was hard to explain that I had been engaged as an integral part of that group in the past. And yet now I was completely forgotten. And all these people who were now carrying out the same positions, the same rituals—they, too, would one day be forgotten, just as I had been. Made me think.
As we realize we’re part of this chain of humanity, we see that “the future” isn’t just a matter of how many years we’ve got left, but that it is also our children’s future, and our children’s children’s future. (Does this contradict my previous views on global warming and so on? Yes, it does. I contradict myself. Whatever. It’s a perk of old age.) There was a moment when I thought that I’d just spend the rest of my money until I died (see SKIing, in “Spare Time”) but now I keep working—no longer for myself, because I could live quite frugally, but for the prosperity of my son and his family when I die, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren. When I’m asked how much I charge for a talk or a piece of writing, whereas a little while ago I’d simply be grateful to be asked to do anything at all at my great age, and hang the fee, I now think, No—that might help toward a down payment for a grandson’s flat, or Maybe that would help a great-granddaughter through college.
There is a curious way in which us oldies can find pleasure in trying to beat time; already trying to contribute, and matter to someone, and make a difference, even after we’re dead.
18. Never Again
One of the delights of being older is being able to control
ideas. I have suffered all my life from a disease called Brains
in the Head . . . in youth you keep bubbling with ideas.
They may be foolish but you can’t stop them. I’ve learnt
not to suffer too much from the Brains . . . As you get older
your judgement develops. One of my joys is having my
mind stirred by a good book, and not feeling I have to go
to the typewriter afterwards. There is nothing nicer than
nodding off while reading. Going fast asleep then being
woken up by the crash of the book on the floor, then saying
to yourself, well it doesn’t matter much. An admirable
feeling.
—A. J. P. Taylor
IF THERE EVER comes a time when you’re bemoaning your lack of youthful prowess, console yourself with the knowledge that listed below are the many things you will never have to do again in your whole life:• Lose your virginity
• Go hitchhiking
• Have another period
• Sit on a committee
• Berate yourself for not having ever read Freud or Sartre
• Have a boss
• Go on your first date
• Fall in love for the first time
• Get pregnant
• Have to ask for a raise
• Have to please anyone else to keep your job
• Feel obliged to get drunk to keep up with the others
• Worry about being too hairy (or not being hairy enough)
• Wait to be picked for a sports team
• Wait for exam results
• Go on an interview
• Go to school
• Cook your first Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner
• Hear yourself saying that John Lennon really had something when he sang “All You Need Is Love”
• Dance the Twist
• Get your ears pierced
• Have an IUD put in
• Have an IUD taken out
• Be flashed by men in
raincoats
• Learn how to ride a bicycle
• Do homework
• Learn how to swim
• Climb a tree
• Have an argument with your teenage children
• Get enraged by a daughter borrowing your clothes
• Be shocked or surprised by anything—you’ve seen it all
• Believe that a witch might be hiding under your bed
• Consider becoming a lap da
ncer
• Feel compelled, when faced with some kind of Italian campanile or clock tower, to walk up the five hundred steps of the stone spiral staircase to the top
• Try to make the Olympic swimming team
• Attempt to become prime minister
• Recite a poem in front of your parents’ friends
• Submit a curriculum vitae
• Think Bob Dylan is a kind of god
• Discover that you can’t clean brushes covered in high-gloss paint with water
• Make a fool of yourself by declaring that Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield were two entirely different people
• Mind if you make a fool of yourself by declaring that Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield were two entirely different people
• Sacrifice comfort for style
• Paint a ceiling
• Give two hoots for troubled pop stars in rehab
• Run up or down escalators
• Think about giving your seat up
• Rummage around in Topshop
• Go to an open-air rock festival or, come to think of it, an open-air anything
• Think twice before walking out of a film or play that fails to come up to scratch
• Defer to your elders
• Worry about what the world will be like in fifty years’ time
• Do last-minute revision
• Attend a workshop
• Think about getting a tattoo
• Worry about the white-slave trade kidnapping you
• Go out on the prowl
• Be surprised by the evidence of corruption in politics
• Impress your friends at college by climbing up a tower in your town and hanging your underpants from the top
19. Wisdom
And now, every fresh day finds me more filled with wonder and better qualified to draw the last drop of delight from it. For up until now, I had never known time’s inexpressible wealth; and my youth had never entirely yielded itself to happiness. Is it indeed this that they call growing old, this continual surge of memories that come breaking in on my inner silence, this contained and sober joy, this light-hearted music that bears me up, this spreading kind feeling and this gentleness?
You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It! Page 16