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Thursday 4 December 2008

Living longer, living more miserably

The good news is, we’re all living longer; the bad news is, we’ll be miserable

The ideological dimension to life expectancy

I discovered this by means of a random analysis of the obituaries pages in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian; those people who, having passed away, were subsequently honoured for their lifetime achievement by the Telegraph lived, on average, a full eight years longer than those similarly honoured by the Guardian. Now at first sight this seems to be one of those false correlations I mentioned last week; right-wingers tend to be better off than left-wingers and it is their greater affluence which provides them with a longer life. However, I’m talking about ‘notable’ people — pretty much all of the people whose deaths are commemorated in the Guardian are, like Polly Toynbee Herself, both high-born and fairly well-heeled, so that usual caveat simply doesn’t apply. I suppose you might argue that given the tendency to become more right-wing as old age digs its teeth deeper into your neck, then my thesis is a tautology: it is during those later years that individuals do or say stuff which endears them to the editor of the Telegraph. But I don’t think this quite accounts for the marked discrepancy, either.

The typical Telegraph obituary will be of some bewhiskered old fascist who held off 5,000 darkies at Rorke’s Drift, formed an organisation called The League Of English Patriots in 1927 after an epiphany upon visiting Rome, and spent the rest of his life on the board of various arms dealers and his local Neighbourhood Watch committee and was an expert on something arcane — Victorian tram tickets, say or golliwogs. Let’s be honest: he was always of a somewhat rightish hue. The typical Guardian obituary will be of some forlorn and ugly woman who wrote a groundbreaking, non-verbal play about lesbian cattle in 1972 and spent the rest of her life in some sinecure at the ‘university’ of Potters Bar Non-Verbal Drama Department. Incidentally, as I mentioned earlier, the lefties tend to die of cancer. Right-wingers are struck down by strokes and heart disease. So, hey — don’t internalise that anger, you socialists; let it all out.

This is a pregression. The real news this week is that we are all likely to live a bit longer, both those of us on the left and those of you on the right. We are still not living quite so long as those blank-eyed, drunken, Scandinavians — nor even our old enemies, the Germans. But we are now well up in the late seventies, both men and women. And — incidentally — that historic gap in life expectancies between men and women is at last narrowing a little. All of this, I would contend, is very good news. Very few of us wish to die; even when Patricia Hewitt was in the Cabinet I could still find it within myself to yearn for an extra few years on my statutory three score and ten.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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