Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2012
You don’t realise that you’re knocking on a bit until some delectable young woman on the Tube stands up and offers you her place, “What, me?” your smile tries to joke, as you pull yourself immediately more athletically upright. “No thank you. How strange that you should think I might be so old. It must be the white hair. A family trait. I’ve had it since…oh, just the other day when I was forty. And, besides, don’t you know that seventy is said to be the perfect age these days…”
Can that be true? The perfect life at 70? Well, that’s what a British Airways survey of financial advisers has found. With our pensions, free local travel, valuable homes with mortgages paid off, those of us who are around the three score years and ten mark are apparently the most fortunate generation in the country.
From a purely financial perspective – and remembering that there will be many without generous pensions, a good bus service or a home of their own – there’s probably some truth in this.
But what about life in the round? When in 1968 Simon and Garfunkel (now both 70) sang “How terribly strange to be seventy” in their song Old Friends, it struck a nerve with baby boomers everywhere. Yes, how odd it must be to be old, we all thought. Not “strange” so much as terrible and unimaginable.
Yet here we all are, and seventy isn’t strange at all. It isn’t old either, not any more, if we judge age by mental faculties and overall health. Actually, it’s terrific. I’m 71, but sometimes feel as though those numbers are back to front, in that the passions I enjoyed at 17 still guide and lighten my life. Indeed one obsession of my life back then, rock music, went on to become a major plank of my career.
I suppose, not having had a regular salary since I was 31, I probably haven’t stored up as much treasure for my dotage as one of those financial experts would have advised – so I still have a mortgage, although I’ve done all right. But, born absolutely at the right time, I’ve had, and still, have, like so many of my age mates, the luckiest of lives.
Nursed by the National Health Service, educated free of charge up to university level, with a student living grant included – this must sound like Utopia now to debt burdened undergraduates. And it only got better. With jobs available for the asking in the Sixties, I had my first Fleet Street column at 26 and was able to buy our first house at the same age. God couldn’t have been kinder.
I was even too young for National Service so I never had to fight any foreign wars, the only minor scars I’ve got being the easily fixed results of too much sun bathing on Mediterranean holidays.
I remember my grandparents. They were old and worn at seventy. But they’d had hard lives, never been abroad, and, by the time I was aware of them, shuffling around, exhausted.
This summer we’ll take our grandchildren once more on a bucket and spade holiday to France, where I will every day play football for hours on the beach with my grandson. He’s eleven so he’ll always beat me, and I know my knee will ache a bit, but if this is my second childhood, bring it on, because I’m hardly a case of Shakespeare’s “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. Actually, for those interested, I’ve got all my gnashers, bar one tricky wisdom tooth – a benefit, no doubt, of the rationing of sweets during the war.
Obviously there are some things you can’t do after 70, and every year I regret never having run in the marathon. I was always too busy (or lazy) to train, and it’s probably a bit late to start now. And I’m long used to being invisible when in the company of beautiful women – apart from the aforesaid occasional one on the Tube who takes pity on me.
But for every loss there’s also a gain. Youth can be hasty, all energy, instant decisions and quick judgements. It seems to me that age brings a greater tolerance, a wider perspective and maybe a rediscovered innocence.
As usual, for my generation, Bob Dylan (aged 70) summed this up best when he famously sang of a reflective maturity following his ever-protesting youthful days with his line: “For I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. Which is exactly how I feel – hopefully just a little bit wiser and more forgiving than once I was.
At 71 I’m not young, but certainly I don’t feel old, and, as I cross my fingers for continued good health, grateful that my generation have been the beneficiaries of the sacrifices of our parents, I hope to write every day until I drop.
The pensions and free travel aren’t bad either.
