Old Git

 

I’m now in the countdown to my 65^th birthday, which is on this coming Monday. I have just taken over as head of department at my work. What am I playing at? I’m an old baldy guy. I look in the mirror and I see my dad. It used to be that you retired at 65. And my taekwondo instructor wants me to attempt to grade up to second dan in December. This means more stress, more sparring, more self-defence training, and more opportunities for my classmates to kill me. I could really do without this at the same time as taking on more responsibility at work. Linda says I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to (I didn’t reply, ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ as I want to live a bit beyond 65, so I’m not taking unnecessary risks). Anyway, it’s true in theory that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to, but…

I have no complaints about my age, not that there would be any point. Poverty and ill health go together, and there are areas in the UK, notably in the very deprived and marginalised communities in the north west of England, where if you live to 65, you are considered to have had a very good innings. The epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot says that he can get a bus from outside his home in North London, and within three miles, the area’s life expectancy has fallen by ten years.

In other respects, I am delighted to grow old disgracefully. As noted in a previous blog, since the first lockdown, I have been doing the hash (nothing to do with illegal substances, hash house harriers) run on Monday and on the extra one they have on the third Thursday of every month (touchingly and rather predictably referred to as Turd Tursday), although I still try to keep my head down at the rituals and singing and all that. I love the exercise at taekwondo, but not the fighting. And as regulations have eased, I have reclaimed my position as an excellent customer in the pub.

I would like to know more about history. It would be difficult to know less, my historical knowledge pretty much stopping at the story that Winston Churchill said it was OK to use your fingers rather than a knife and fork when eating chicken. For the rest of it, history is one big party at which Henry the Eighth rubs shoulders with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Lenin chats up Queen Anne. Indeed, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my old Latin teacher at school, Dopey Dawson, was personal friends with Cicero and Julius Caesar and all that shower.

What I would like to know is whether there is a historical precedent for taking on more pressure and responsibility when you reach the epoch of the free bus pass. Incidentally, how do you get the bus pass? I don’t particularly want to go anywhere on the bus, but I would quite like to have the pass. So I am going to go on Google and find out if shouldering new burdens and adopting ambitious roles at venerable ages is the done thing. I will be back in a few minutes.

It seems that there is something of a precedent. Mister Churchill, mentioned above, was returned to office as Prime Minister in 1951, at the age of 76. And he took a bucket, something of which I will frequently remind myself. As I get older, pretty much everything I eat and drink seems to be bad for me in one way or another.

Michael Foot remained a member of parliament well into his late 70’s, as did Glenda Jackson and Tony Benn. In the early 1980’s, when I worked at the Clinical Research Centre in Northwick Park, Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel prizewinning immunology/transplantation scientist, was still active in his late 60’s, despite being confined to a wheelchair. With his wheelchair and his eyepatch, he looked a bit scary, like the Mekon in Dan Dare, but his energy despite his ill-health was an inspiration.

One thing I have noticed in my internet searching is how short-lived were the giants of 19^th century literature. The Brontës all died young, Dickens only lived to 58 (amazing when you consider his prodigious output), and Thackeray only to 52. George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) made it to 61. Across the Channel, Balzac died at age 51 and Flaubert at 58. Zola managed to struggle on to 62. In the pictures I have seen of them, Flaubert and Balzac look rather portly. Maybe if they had done a bit of the taekwondo and the hash running, they might have lasted a bit longer, says Duffy with a complacent and superior curl of the lips. Mind you, maybe they took a bucket. We won’t talk about that.

In the previous century, Robert Burns died at age 37, leaving a poetic oeuvre that a centenarian would be proud of. And I am afraid he took a bucket.

To come back to responsibilities at a substantial age, according to the bible, Abraham was 99 years old when there was what PG Wodehouse referred to as all that unpleasantness over the cities of the plain, and when the angel announced that he and Sarah would have a son, this provoked much mirth. Hence the name of the son who has born when Abraham was 100: Isaac, which means laughter- think of the Hebrew form Yitzhak, it sounds onomatopoeic. Anyway, that’s not going to happen.

                                                          *************************

So there we are. Baldy head, specs, hearing aid, four of my teeth are false, and no retirement for a couple of years yet.

Here is a story I really like about John Mortimer, the Rumpole author. Mr Mortimer as I understand it remained quite the bon viveur into his old age. At some literary or social event, he remarked to his neighbour at table that he always started the day with a glass of champagne before breakfast. His neighbour was a psychiatrist, and was concerned at this evidence, as he saw it, of problem drinking. Some of these bastards can’t mind their own ****ing business.

‘How long have you been doing this?’ he asked of Mortimer, in the concerned tones of the caring clinician.

‘Ever since I could afford it,’ was John Mortimer’s reply.