Observing the tremulous travails of Joe Biden, I reflected that we’re in two minds about old age. On one hand we pay stiff-upper-lip-service to the stoicism of old people; on the other they’re a warning about what awaits us. (I say ‘us’ out of habit; I got used to always being the youngest person in the room having won my dream job when I was just 17, but I turned 65 this month so I’m officially old.)
Perhaps because I so thoroughly got what I wanted, I’m not sad to see the back of youth
Not wanting to see the gory details of what we can expect, we (understandably) stash them away – like out-of-date CDs we’re too emotionally attached to to actually bin – in storage centres called ‘care homes’. The pandemic highlighted this sad situation; in her brilliant Janet-and-John-style book We Do Lockdown the artist Miriam Elia has the following exchange: ‘We can’t see Grandma in person for at least another three months – I’m heartbroken!’ says Mummy. ‘But we haven’t seen her since Christmas last year,’ says Susan.
Perhaps to assuage our guilt, we like occasional stories which show senior citizens breaking the rules and going rogue; think of the 89-year-old D-Day veteran Bernard ‘Great Escaper’ Jordan, who scarpered from a nursing home just a few streets from me in Hove, wearing his medals under his mac, determined to pay his respects to the fallen on the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. Brittany Ferries, his chosen mode of transport, subsequently offered him free crossings; upon his death the following year, the Royal British Legion said that his excursion to France highlighted ‘the spirit that epitomises the Second World War generation’.
We’re also keen on ancient love, be it between ‘childhood sweethearts’ who finally re-find each other while adjacent bed-blocking at the local hospital or who share a lifelong devotion – as was the case with Mr Jordan and his wife Irene, who died within a week of each other a year after his outing. True, we might not like to linger too long on what these couples get up to after lights out; the coy phrase ‘a kiss and a cuddle’ will generally suffice.
But when a senior manages to evade capture completely and struts about on the world stage for a sustained period, there’s something both comic and vaguely indecent about it. It’s both personal and political; we fear being laughed at by countries with more virile leaders (sometimes Donald Trump and Joe Biden seem not like two bald men fighting over a comb, as was said of the battle for the Falklands, but like two impotent men fighting over a condom) but we also fear the spectacle of disinhibited masculinity in the raw. Think of Biden sniffing and stroking women’s hair (contrary to his trans-pandering, he certainly seems to know what a female is at such times, as he doesn’t do it to boys) or Trump saying that he would date his own daughter if they weren’t related. We call them Dirty Old Men for a reason.
Rogue oldsters – what I once called the YOLOAPS – are having a (senior) moment right now. The ageing population and the decline in births means that the spectre of a senile population haunts us; a nightmare vision of millions of bottoms needing wiping and no one to do it.
There is no group in society whom we demonise as much as the old, sitting pretty on their triple-locks and luxury pensions in houses they bought for a fiver back in the 20th century while their grandchildren can barely afford to rent a shoe-box in Shoeburyness. During the election campaign, Labour vowed to retire inmates of the House of Lords at 80 even though this would hit them hardest; meanwhile, the Big Issue fretted recently that ‘The UK’s Ageing Population Is A Crisis Keir Starmer Can’t Ignore’:
‘The UK had 9.3 million people aged over 65 in 2000, today the number is 12.5 million – the UN predicts this number will reach 18.7 million by 2050. The relative share of old people as a part of the UK’s total population will also leap from 16% in 2000 to over 26% by 2050. This trend is even more dramatic for those aged over 80, who over the same period are predicted to increase from 4% to 10% of the total population.These changes will place a huge strain on our already creaking welfare and healthcare system. The elderly generally require substantially more healthcare expenditure than the young, with the Nuffield Trust calculating that the average 85-year-old costs the NHS roughly eight times more than the average 25 to 30-year-old. On top of that, more retired people means more state pension costs for the government to fund. In 2023 the government spent £141bn on state pensions, substantially more than all government spending on defence, transport and overseas aid for that year combined.’
Ooo, naughty old us! But I’ve never taken a state benefit of any kind, so when I do finally fill my boots with that state’s largesse, I’ll see it as justified returns for the vast amount of tax I’ve paid since I started my working life at the tender age of 17. Though I became famous – in a very small way, in the media world – when I was a teenager, I’m coping well with being old; perhaps because I so thoroughly got what I wanted, I’m not sad to see the back of youth.
How distant the sun-kissed Obama years seem now
I met a woman recently who literally wouldn’t tell me her age whereas I mention mine a lot and say ‘An old lady like me’ frequently. I’m not fussed by losing my teeth or feeling achy in the mornings, as I see putting up with wear-and-tear as another kind of toughness; as Bette Davis said ‘Old age is no place for sissies.’
Perhaps because I often showed up on celebrity death-bet lists in my 40s, it’s been both enjoyable and odd to grow old. Now I have my own stories of vanished delights; I used to roll my eyes when my gran eulogised outside toilets (‘It’s dirty to ‘ave it in the ‘ouse!’) but I now come over dewy-eyed when recalling the day in the 1970s when a telegram came from the New Musical Express telling me I had won my first writing job. I can see in my mind’s eye the boy on his motorbike pulling up outside my parents house and my mother’s anguished cry; we’d never had a telegram before, but in films they always meant bad news. In the 1980s, my typed columns would be picked up by another boy on a motorbike from the Mail On Sunday; when I bought a fax machine in the 1990s, my friends came round to stare at it. The release of Sergeant Pepper, on the sleeve of which the Beatles wore costumes inspired by the military bands of World War One, is now closer to World War One than it is to the present day, as is my birth. I am one of the past people, now.
But then, my days are private ones, composed of writing, volunteering and lunching – OK, with the occasional bar-crawl and card-game – in the soft haze of a seaside town. I’m not strutting on a world stage – or rather, trying to find my way off of it. I can’t imagine that a woman of Biden’s age who behaved as he does would have been allowed to do so for more than five minutes before she was shuffled off to Buffalo; remember the snide claims that Mrs Thatcher was doolally when she was simply a bit miserable about her husband Denis dying? There’s no chance that a doddering old lady would be still tottering around like this; those wet liberal women who still support Biden reveal not just their stupidity on this matter bur also their sexism. Once more, one is forced to face the fact that all the Handmaids are to be found on the Left these days.
How distant the sun-kissed Obama years seem now; ‘Yes We Can’ has become ‘No We Can’t, The POTUS Is Napping.’ As Biden is shunted between his power-loving wife and his ambitious deputy, he increasingly resembles a confused care-home inmate being handed from one brisk nurse to another. With Trump ascendant after his Iwo Jima moment – and Biden now being hauled over the coals for his ‘bullseye’ remark – the fear is that the president may be tempted to make ever more hawk-like gestures to prove his virility. But would you trust a hand on the nuclear button which had trouble raising a cup of Complan without spilling it? For those remaining strange Democrats who believe that they can strap their candidate to his horse one more time to lead them into battle – in the manner of Charlton Heston at the end of El Cid, a reference which very much shows my age – they might consider that all they will really be doing is delivering a victory directly to The Donald.
Catch up on the latest Coffee House Shots:
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