Is it nice being old?

‘I keep thinking I could have made the outcome different,’ my cousin says. I don’t know how she could have stopped her father dying last year, but I know the feeling. ‘If only…’. Penny is in Sydney, we’re talking on WhatsApp, and in my inbox is a message from Mikhail who lives in rural Belarus. Different continent, different world in so many ways, but Mikhail writes: ‘Mother, I still miss her.…I sometimes bury my face into her favourite woollen jacket and inhale her scent and cannot hold tears.’ 

Mikhail cared for his mother for years, the last few of which she was bedridden – in Belarus they do not operate on broken hips. Penny phoned her dad every day, met up with him at least once a week, tried to reach out to him in his sad old age. Like my father with me, neither parent behaved kindly to either child. But still there’s the guilt – at the frustration you felt at the time, at your failure to help, at your inability to prevent their death.

It is over a year since Mikhail’s mother died, and almost 5 years since the death of my father. I think of the therapist who said ‘I know you don’t want to think like this, but in all honesty, would you want your father alive again, as he was – old, sick, unhappy, unkind to you and your sisters?’ I miss him constantly and his death tore our family in two, but I know if he came back I could change nothing. He would still be disappointed in me, my sisters, the world. I would still strive for a closeness we couldn’t have, he’d still be making impossible demands. The outcome would still be the same.

I’m only in my early 60s, but loss is a part of life now in a way I could not have imagined in my 40s. A friend writes ‘There seems to be a lot of dying right now…’. Also, I’m finding, a lot of knee and hip surgery. How did I reach an age at which my friends get together to discuss joint-replacement options? 

‘Is it nice being old?’ our 5-year old neighbour asked when she came round to make biscuits with me. And a few days later I found myself having the same conversation with someone who was regretting the approach of 40. At the risk of stating the obvious, the answer is that it is different for everyone. A family friend a generation older than me told me more than once in my early middle age how much she had loved her 40s and 50s. It made me feel as if I was somehow failing. My 40s were tortured, my 50s dominated by work. But my friend, Jennifer, had had a quite different life from me. Her husband was the breadwinner, she brought up their son, but she spent a great deal of time gardening, reading, studying art, making things, doing yoga. Not engaged in horrible relationship crises or racing to get the 6.48 to Paddington.

I spent much of those two decades feeling time was running out and fearing the ageing process. But it’s like those big birthdays. As 40, or 50, or 60 approaches you spend so much time feeling bad about it that by the time it arrives it’s just another day. And although I am not sure I’d describe ageing as ‘nice’, it has its good points.

In Miranda July’s novel All Fours the nameless narrator panics when she realises she is approaching menopause. She finds a graph from the oh-so-authoritative Google images that shows oestrogen levels plummeting after a certain age, as if off a cliff, and a friend who tells her she feels ‘kind of numb’ about sex post-menopause. Only after a lot of frantic behaviour about loss of looks and libido does it occur to her to ask her older friends ‘What’s the best thing about being post-menopausal?’ She gets a flurry of responses listing better mental health (no more monthly mood swings, reduced anxiety), better physical health (no more migraines, no more endometriosis pain), better body shape, and a sense that their body is now their own. One woman writes ‘I feel like my true self. Like I’m 9 years old and can do whatever I want.’ 

A friend of mine who is slightly older than me echoes this. There’s a relief, she says, in not being wildly attracted to, distracted by, men any more. It’s like going back to being a child. Returning to the time before all the adolescent hormones kicked in, when you spent whole days discovering the world, learning, creating, collecting – but with more disposable income, a clearer sense of self and a more flexible bedtime.

This friend also says ‘There’s a lot of acceptance.’ Of who we are and what we are and where we are, I guess. There’s less to lose somehow. It’s easier to say no to the things you know you won’t enjoy, to understand why you are the way you are, how much of that you want to celebrate, and how much of it you would still like to change.

But all of this depends on you and how you approach ageing (and, it goes without saying, on the state of your health, wealth and relationships – old age is not equitable). I’ve seen this with my parents, relatives, friends. To go into older age looking backwards is not going to make it any easier. You have to be engaged with the present, interested in the world and the people around you, still learning, still active, still seizing the day. 

Of course how you seize the day depends on you too. I knew a couple who drove to Hungary in 1999 to meet up with friends and watch the full eclipse of the sun. They were in their mid-80s at the time. I’m not going to be doing that. But I might try acupuncture. And buy myself a new teapot.

Two walkers

Stories from everyday life, no. 86

This week in year 10 careers lessons my nieces have to do mock job interviews. Their mother says: ‘How can they interview someone with no knowledge or qualifications for a job that doesn’t exist and they don’t want?’

Stories from everyday life, no. 85

Thames Valley Police object to the council installing new bike parking on the grounds that encouraging cycling in the city means more bikes, and therefore more bike theft.

Stories from everyday life, no. 84

I cycle to the gym with my kit in a small backpack. The woman changing next to me has a wheelie suitcase. And that’s just for her beauty products.

Bookmarks

For a long time I’ve been looking for a phrase that I knew I had written on the edge of a bookmark years ago. Two words that describe the worst of family get-togethers, presenters who read out every word on their congested PowerPoint slides, parties where neighbours talk about house prices and kitchen extensions. This week I accidentally found it, while searching for a different bookmark. The phrase, from who knows where, is ‘sadistic dullness’.

On a morning of wandering – dripping tulip trees in the University Parks, extraordinary insects in the Natural History Museum, the smell of ground coffee in Cardews, a taste of Ibérico curado at the Oxford cheese stall – we find ourselves in the Weston library. There’s a tiny exhibition  – a glass case – on the subject of bookmarks, inspired by the diaries of Mary Whitehouse. If you’re younger than 40 the name will mean nothing to you, but from the 1960s to the early 90s she waged war against the BBC, reactionary prudism personified, objecting to anything she saw as obscene, from war reporting to the Daleks in Dr Who. In return she was relentlessly mocked by writers and comedians. Whitehouse’s cheap A5 diaries came to the Bodleian swollen with news cuttings and letters clipped to the pages. These were removed and catalogued, leaving the pages marked with rust stains shaped like paper clips.

The little exhibit pulls together other marks in books – ink spilt by a clumsy Bodleian reader 100 years ago, embers from tallow candles, fifteenth-century pilgrim’s badges stuck into a book of hours – and bookmarks woven, printed, found, repurposed by artist Alice Fox in response to all this. I came out of the library into sudden sunshine feeling I’d had an injection of life.

Back home I opened Love in the Time of Cholera and read:

 She made a long and detailed tour with no planned itinerary, stopping with no other motive than her unhurried delight in the spirit of things. She entered every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live.

I started rereading this book after deciding, not for the first time in my life, to give up on mediocrity. One morning I discarded a dreadful ‘Sunday Times bestseller’ lent to me by a friend, and a contrived contemporary audiobook that was giving me nightmares, and started reading Márquez and listening to Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Impatient as I am, both of these are novels I have had to grow into. The lack of any ‘plot’, the endless detail, the way you have to let the prose flow over and around you, relishing its richness, its mystery, everything it says about the experience of being alive.

The English patient himself, of course, has his own book of marks, his copy of Herodotus’ Histories in which he has written notes, made drawings, glued other papers. The book he manages to keep hold of even in the fire that burns his body. And the novel is not, any more than Love in the Time of Cholera, a love story (despite the film version). Like all great fiction it’s about far more than that. Death and loss, obsession, belief, wonder, pain, our misguided relationship with the world.

Everyone has their particular story to tell, the story they tell again and again. Mine, I think, is about how to live. The way life lurches from greyness, sadistic dullness, the essential pointlessness of all we do, the fear of falling into nothingness – to that overwhelming richness which comes from nowhere, when suddenly the world seems too much to take in, the possibilities endless. What tips it over, from greyness to colour, from work to play, from dullness to magic? I wish I knew. 

It can be anything. A morning of solitude, a Bach partita, the red leaves of the Virginia creeper covering the garage across the road.

Stories from everyday life, no. 83

The sign in the Bodleian exhibition states: ‘this glove was found in a book…read by the revolutionary Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley after his early death.’

Plantime

We walk out of Waitrose into the thick damp warmth of the morning and I say ‘When I was working that was one of the best moments of my week.’ On the way home from work, exiting Sainsbury’s over-chilled air into the humidity outside, like walking into a sponge. Or coming alive. 

My friend Irmgard sends me a photo she took of me in the much-missed Jam Factory bar, 6 months before I left work. I’m 5 years younger than I am now, my hair is barely grey, but I look wary, sad, a little battered. ‘I think you do look much happier now,’ she writes. And who wouldn’t. My former colleagues have just been given 1 month’s notice of their office moving to a business park 40 miles away with no direct public-transport link. As they spend the weekend updating their cvs and contemplating suing for constructive dismissal I start having nightmares about office life all over again.

‘Did we sign a new contract when we last moved offices?’ one of them writes, and I get out my folder of P60s, payslips, patronising letters about ‘profit-sharing’ bonuses. I’m not a hoarder, honest, but I do find in this folder the offer letter from my first full-time job, a remarkably intrusive self-referral form for sick leave from the same job, and a 5-page list of rules about ‘Plantime’. This was 1982, and Pergamon Press was owned by the monstrous Robert Maxwell, who 10 years earlier had been declared unfit to run a public company. It was, in many ways, another world – we had an office typist, a canteen with a cook, a tea trolley twice a day, a great deal of boredom. And we had little yellow plastic keys with which we had to clock in and out of the Plantime machine four times a day. The list of rules is positively Orwellian, warning that misuse of the system is a criminal offence (really?) and making repeated references to ‘deductions from salary’. Point 12 states: 

To enable the Company to pay your wages accurately, even in the case of electrical failure which may affect the Plantime machines, the Company has instituted individual Attendance and Plantime Adjustment Records, kept by your manager or his [sic] deputy who, as you have been informed, is responsible for recording your daily attendance and any approved adjustments to your recorded hours.

We were not manufacturing widgets, or refining steel, we were publishing academic journals. But the whole place was run like a factory. We also had to record how many pages we edited a month. I think the minimum was 1,000.

But perhaps my favourite part of the Plantime rules is no. 8: ‘…you must key in after any cloakroom visits on arrival and key out before any cloakroom visits on departure.’ This applied to lunchtimes too, and memos were circulated as a reminder on a regular basis.

Of course we obeyed none of the rules. One colleague took the Daily Mirror to the toilets for half an hour in the middle of each morning. We got other people to ‘key in’ for us at lunchtime while we were still out at the shops or the pub, we took it in turns to make huge communal plates of toast in the canteen every day during working hours, and anyway spent much of the time on such boredom-fighting activities as standing on one leg or thinking of all the composers whose names began with B (quite a lot).

What a world apart this seems from the garden office, Teams meeting, email-on-your-phone culture of today. By the time I quit work 4 years ago I was working on the train, in the evening, even on my holidays. Clocking out would have been an absurdity, with the laptop under my arm.  Maybe all that’s changed is that we believe we have more freedom. You may be able to work from the other side of the world, or your garden shed, but the bastards still own your time, try to control your thoughts, can blow up your sense of self with a restructuring or relocation.

As I sit at my desk strewn with notebooks, bits of embroidery, electronic devices, I can hear in the street below the children walking to primary school on the first day of term. My sister texts ‘I can still remember the dread of going back after the summer.’ That feeling of waking up with a stomach full of stones. And however bad work gets, at least it is not like school. No-one shouts at you in the corridor that your skirt is too short, tells you off for moving your head during lessons, or locks the toilets between break times. That’s not my school days by the way, it’s my nieces’, now.

At the end of our street lives a little girl of four. She is a free spirit, a whirlwind of playful demands, inventiveness, energy. The first time I met her she chose to eat fruit rather than chocolate. ‘We never stopped her having sweets,’ her mother said, ‘and so it’s no big deal.’ This week, smiling for the photo, holding a huge cornucopia of treats in the German tradition, she started school. Will she sail over the surface of the rules, the timetables, the sitting still and keeping quiet, unabashed and true? And continue on into working life unbroken, still smiling? Or is that too much to hope for?

Stories from everyday life, no. 82

‘Have you got thinner?’ Beatrice asks.

‘Probably. I haven’t had a piece of toast since the kitchen renovation started. It’s too much effort when the bread’s in one room, the butter in another, the toaster out in the shed.’

‘Maybe it’s a new diet. How to lose weight fast. Get rid of your kitchen.’

Middle-class discomfort

How long does it take to face the inevitable and have a new kitchen? In our case, until the door has fallen off the grill, the cupboards are an eyesore, half the lights no longer work. In other words at least 10 years after we should have done it. And now I’m in the midst of it, I think we were right. It’s not an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

Several of my friends were rapturously excited about the idea of my new kitchen. I was not. (It turned out at least one of them imagined it would be like Lego – you pop out the old one and slot in the new. If only.) My lack of interest in worktop finishes, door colours, current trends in kitchen drawers, reminded me of the summer before I started university when it was my mother and younger sister who acquired the kettle, saucepan, crockery they thought I’d need. Like the sulky teenager I was then, I’d rather be reading a novel, making a minuscule lavender bag out of scraps of silk, writing a letter to a friend in Australia than thinking about the finish on a tap.

So far I’m not sure which has been the worst part of it. The agonising 90 minutes in the kitchen supplier’s office trying to correct his measurements and get a result that did not give us less space than our current battered cupboards. The week spent emptying the old kitchen and packing everything into a surprisingly large number of cardboard boxes. The day the electrician drilled chasings into the brickwork and the noise and dust were intolerable for everyone in the street. Or the realisation that not only the entire ground floor but the upstairs too was to be taken over by plumber and electrician, with carpets and floorboards up, dirt everywhere and cupboards hastily emptied.

The whole process brings out the child in me in more ways than one. I’m like my toddler nephew when his fingers got trapped in the folded pushchair and he held out his hand screaming ‘I don’t want it’. Who does want pain? But this is not horrible injury, life-threatening disease, eviction, displacement, loss of a loved one. It is just a few weeks of inconvenience, middle-class discomfort. So why those moments of breathless panic, of wanting to disappear, to hide under the covers until it’s all over, and at the same time to control everything?

Part of the trouble is that I don’t like sharing my space with anyone, let alone a stream of strangers who have to have all the doors open. Another is the mess. My houseplants are so thick with dust they look as though they’ve been fossilised. The front room, stuffed with furniture and ornaments, is like some insane Victorian parlour. The smell of wet plaster is not one any perfumier will be trying to recreate.

It’s not all bad though. The reality is that the builder, the plumber, the plasterer are all skilled, pleasant and as keen to get the job done as we are. We are still managing to eat surprisingly healthy food, and even practise some yoga now the floors are back in place, one of us in the bathroom and one in the bedroom. Our Osney neighbours have surpassed themselves, inviting us to dinner, offering use of their washing machines or a quiet space for a few hours. Two different households, neither of whom are close friends, have even loaned us their entire house while they are away on holiday, so we can cook proper food, catch up on laundry, sit in the garden. Life has become something of a logistical exercise, transporting food and wet washing up and down the street, but then it always feels a bit like that to me.

And to my surprise, although I miss quiet mornings at my sunny kitchen table, although cooking and washing up in the shed is a matter of extreme precision and contortion, although I can envisage weeks of cleaning once this is over, it makes me appreciate the small things. A clean tea towel, a quiet supper in the garden, that big bottle of all-purpose surface cleaner we had the foresight to refill in the little shop in the market. And I rather like the simplicity of life with no proper kitchen. It’s like playing at houses. Two forks, two plates, two mugs. A flask of coffee, a picnic lunch in my study, a one-pan dinner. No energy wasted on choice, on recipes with 27 ingredients, on recipes at all. It is freeing when all your cookbooks are packed, baking is out of the question, the wok and the griddle pan and the blender are at the bottom of a box. I’ve always believed the best food is the simplest. Then again, I did keep out, in my camp kitchen, such essentials as the lemon squeezer, the quinoa, the loose tea and the Parmesan grater.