The worst thing about getting older, isn’t the getting older part. It’s the watching everybody else getting younger. The London Underground is unforgiving for that.
When I take a look down the carriage, I see that, not only am I alone in having white hair, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who can whistle the theme tune to Dick Barton, Special Agent.
Worse than that, I know for certain I’m the only one who can remember (albeit very vaguely, because I was only four) a life-sized effigy of Hitler being burned on a huge bonfire celebrating VE Day.
Sitting there on the train, usually because someone young and polite has embarrassed me by giving up his seat, and, despite my protests, insisted I take it, I find myself wondering if I look like a denim clad Methuselah to the other passengers.
Until, that is, I remember that there’s another side to this equation. I’m also probably the only passenger not paying for his Tube train fare. That’s cheering. Free travel all over London. What’s not to like?
Actually, I sometimes feel a bit of a cheat about that, anyway, because I’m not really old at all. Clint Eastwood is old. He’s 85. I’m more the Harrison Ford generation. He’s 73. I don’t think Harrison has an oyster card.
But that’s how I see myself, 74, the Han Solo of the laptop. In terms of years, I might be in the autumn of my life, but mentally, even physically, give or take the odd Gaviscon at bed-time, I’m enjoying a prolonged Indian summer.
Just the other day, well, decades ago, actually, Simon and Garfunkel sang something about ‘how terribly strange to be 70’ on their 1968 Bookends album. At the time, the possibility of any of us of that generation ever reaching our eighth decade seemed almost disgustingly unthinkable.
But there they both still are, although, admittedly, not together, and here I am, very together. And, I’m finding, it’s really rather good to be getting on, as they say, as I study the gardening pages of the newspapers just as carefully as I read the film reviews. I know I want to see Inside Out. That’s an easy one. But what species of lavender should I buy to edge the garden path for next summer? That could be an important decision.
The thing is, while getting older can in some ways be limiting, in that it inevitably casts a cloak of invisibility over all those of us in what academics like to call the Third Age, it’s also a period of great liberation. It frees you up.
Not, in my case, as in being freed from work, as I still work every day because I’m lucky enough to have made my hobby my job, but in attitudes. You hit seventy plus and you just don’t have to pretend about yourself anymore.
You’re not looking for a job, and you’re usually not trying to get off with someone new. You are who you are. And happy, or, at least reconciled, with yourself, you just don’t care what people think about you anymore. You can be as eccentric as you want to be.
Take clothes. I’ve only recently realised that I don’t own a suit. Why would I? As I always work from home, where would I ever go that requires a suit, except, I suppose, to another funeral – when, a vaguely matching dark jacket and trousers suffice? It’s the same with ties. There have been no new ones for decades.
There the old ones hang, forlorn in the wardrobe, everything from old school, to bootlace, kaleidoscope-coloured kipper monstrosities, and finally the thin strips of demure silk, all probably moth-eaten by now.
I must have once thought I looked the bees-knees in one of those, a real tarted-up dandy who was trying to make a good impression. Why I’d ever wanted to make some kind of phony impression of myself, I now can’t imagine.
But that’s how I was, like everybody else, trying to look right and sound right and fit in. When I was a student, on the eve of the moment rock became culturally fashionable in the Sixties, I used to hide my copy of the New Musical Express inside the Guardian for fear of being thought a bit thick. Only classical music or jazz was good enough for universities then.
Now, as I approach my second teenage, and a friend, a former banker, has been liberated enough to set up his own rock and roll band in his retirement, Chuck Berry still rules for me. I don’t care if I’m thought thick or past it or just plain pathetic. I still love those records.
It’s the same with art movies. I can’t tell you what a pseud I once was, seeing symbolism where there wasn’t any, and convincing myself that I wasn’t bored to distraction by the plodding pace of virtually anything moody and pretentious.
It’s such a relief now to buy a monster tub of popcorn and take my grandson to see Jurassic World – even though it was miles too long; and, at £9.99 for him as a ‘teen’ and £9.29 for me as a ‘senior’, I left the cinema feeling as though a raptor had ripped open my wallet.
As for theatre: brilliant though it sometimes may have been, mind cripplingly boring is often what it usually was. Well, not any more for me. It has to be a fully certified work of near genius before I’ll submit myself to the risk of an aching bottom, and that crush to get an interval drink in a bar roaring with inanities from an audience that has paid an arm and a leg for a theatrical experience and is determined to enjoy itself.
By now you might have decided that I’ve evolved into just another grumpy old man, like those guys on the TV who seemed irritated by change of any kind. But, actually, I’m not. At least, I’m not whingeing about anything that’s new. I like change. It’s the veneration for hangovers from the past that I can’t stand.
There’s so much about the modern world and modern life that I love, that I prefer. We’re living at the most blessed time in human history and I want to enjoy it, to look around more at the now scrubbed and sanded sparkling cleanliness of so many of our towns and cities, and see them as their long dead architects imagined them.
I remember the blackened soot covered buildings and suffocating smog in the London of my student days in the early Sixties. Everywhere then was coated with a crust of coal dust to the extent that you couldn’t lie down on the grass in Hyde Park to enjoy a sunny afternoon without your shirt quickly looking as though you’d been wrestling with a chimney sweep.
Now the parks are beautifully kept, not only in London, but all around the country, and filled, like all our gardens, with more exotic shrubs and trees and dazzling flowers than I ever remember as a boy. After the bulldozing and jerry-building that went on in the Fifties and Sixties in the name of progress, we are now beautifying our own environments, dressing our streets with more and more trees. What could be more civilised?
Most of us are healthier, too, staying younger and living longer, which, we know, will be a problem for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in years to come, but is a stroke of such pure good fortune for my generation that it makes me feel almost guilty to be enjoying it.
I remember my grandmother, at about the age I am now, when she was a worn out old lady. ‘Would you like to have your life again, Grandma,’ I asked her one day when I was about twelve.
She hesitated for just a moment . ‘No. Not my life,’ she said quietly.
I can see why now. Born in 1877, put into service at thirteen when her mother died in childbirth, she was married at seventeen to a violinist. He gave her ten children, two of whom died as infants and another as a teenager in World War 1, and then left her to run a theatre three hundred miles away and possibly to start a second family. The only secure and comfortable part of her life was in old age when her daughters took care of her.
Nor was it that much easier for my mother, a war widow with two young children at thirty by 1944.
By comparison, my life, and the lives of most of my peers, has been like a waltz across a slice of angel cake. Ours really has been the luckiest generation in history, with no world wars to fight, free health and dental care, and free education, right through university.
Just imagine that! We were paid to go to university. It’s hard to believe.
And now, look at us, the Harrison Ford generation, war babies and baby-boomers alike, getting used to the idea that the time of life we once feared, is turning out to be really rather good fun.
That, with our major responsibilities in terms of family mainly behind us, the invisibility of getting older offers a whole new kind of freedom – a chance to finally be ourselves. That’s the best part of getting older.
Remember how we used to sing: ‘Hope I die before I get old.’ I’m jolly glad I didn’t.
