As I get older I’ve begun to obsessively monitor myself for evidence of mental deterioration. For instance, I cannot watch Match of the Day without reciting the names of as many Premier League goalkeepers as I can remember. I do it so often it has become a Pavlovian response. Another test is trying to remember every phone number I’ve ever had, starting with the first.
I wouldn’t recommend either as a means of reassurance. The satisfaction I feel on being able to remember a particular name or number is easily outweighed by the waves of anxiety when I can’t. I must have googled ‘Early Onset Alzheimer’s’ more often than my own name.
However, not all the signs of encroaching decrepitude are to be regretted. Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed a transformation in my attitude towards the elderly. Like Philip Larkin, I used to think of them as old fools, with their mouths hanging open and drooling, always behaving as if they’re crippled or tight. But not any more. These days, whenever I see an old lady counting out her change in Morrisons or an old boy inching his way up East Acton Lane I feel a surge of compassion. ‘That’ll be me in 30 years,’ I think.
It’s as if an entire segment of the population has suddenly become visible. It’s not that I didn’t notice old people before, more that I didn’t give them a second thought. I just lumped them all together in one big mass. I didn’t think of them as distinct individuals, not like me. They were members of another species — Little Grey Men from the Planet Scrotum.
Most young people share this prejudice to a greater or lesser extent and one of the benefits of getting older is that you’re forced to confront it. I feel a bit like a white supremacist who is slowly turning into a black person. A whole group of people who I’d previously thought of as belonging to a single type are emerging from the shadows as fully fledged human beings, with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? Actually, I haven’t tried that, but it seems probable.
In light of this, it’s sensible of the government not to cut state pensions. Not just because 16 per cent of the UK population is now over 65, but because people like me in their forties can empathise with them. As David Willetts pointed out a few years ago, the working population will only support the high levels of taxation necessary to sustain generous welfare payments if the beneficiaries are people like themselves. That’s why increased immigration has reduced public support for housing benefit, among other things. When people see new arrivals taking money out of a welfare pot they haven’t contributed to, they don’t think, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ They think, ‘That’s unfair.’ Not so when it comes to OAPs. Once you reach a certain age, you can see the justice of ring-fencing state pensions.
Which isn’t to say that the age at which people are eligible for a state pension should not be raised. As someone with a chronic fear of growing old, I like the idea of not being officially designated a ‘pensioner’ until I’m 65. I fully intend to carry on working until the day I drop, just like my father did. On the day he died he worked eight hours instead of the usual 12. I can picture him now, sitting up in his hospital bed, devising a scheme to teach the dinner ladies remedial English and trying to get the special adviser to the Health Secretary on the phone. He was 86 and suffering from three separate forms of cancer.
In ‘The Old Fools’, Larkin becomes less cruel as the poem goes on. He starts with a merciless description — ‘you keep on pissing yourself’, etc, etc – and asks why, if they’re even halfway compos mentis, the elderly aren’t screaming their heads off. But he ends on a note of empathy: ‘We shall find out.’ It’s as if the poem echoes our own journey from indifference to compassion. As extinction’s alp looms ever closer, we can all too easily imagine ourselves as old people and any comfort we’ve been able to take from thinking of them as different from us is gradually withdrawn. Not even the grace of God can stave off the inevitable.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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