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February 09, 2006
Martin Newell on growing old
Martin Newell has this to say about the lost art of grow old in the traditional English manner:
I saw another authentic-looking old man, last weekend. He must have been the second I'd sighted in as many months. He had a big brushy-looking silver moustache, a tweed jacket, a cloth cap, some baggy cavalry twill-style trousers, some brown clumpy shoes and just to really make it perfect, he had a walking stick and was hobbling along in a highly endearing way. When he saw passing children, his eyes twinkled benevolently. He was like a cross between Gaffer Jarge in the Rupert books and the Werthers Original man ( only without the vaguely implied nonce-iness). I was so heartened by the sight of this properly 'old' man, I damn nearly went up and pressed a fifty pence in his hand and thanked him for doing a great job. Only the thought that I might ruin the moment or draw attention to him so that he became self-conscious, prevented me from doing this.When I consider the wonderful old men and women who used to surround me when I was a child , filling my little soul with wonder and fear as I regarded them, it perturbs me rather, to think what has become of us. Especially, as I muse upon today's 65-year old fellow, with his 40 year-old third wife looking furtively on, while he fits his I-pod onto a utility belt, prior to going out jogging. And as soon as he has gone,this third wife will rush with indecent haste to the overly-new Ikea bureau in the study, in order to look at her spouse's Alliance &Leicester Building Society pass-book. She herself may be a hard-faced post-rave era woman from a chubby Midland cheese-town. But she dreads his return home, followed, as it will be by a Viagra-bolstered, stand-up rogering-from-behind in the utility room, whilst the Whirlpool washing machine hums mockingly and the newly-bought Labradoodle yaps in frustration at them through the frosted glass of the garden door. "This is no way to grow old." the dog seems to whine, when our modern pensioner finally staggers into a hastily-placed ironing board, breathless and mired in his own post-coital introspection.
Yes indeed.--.where are those old men who whittled wood, sat incoherent on rough settles in country pubs and lay abed listening to radios too loudly prior to treating their own chillblains by immersing their afflicted feet in a 3-day old urine marinade, ulling high in the chamber pots beneath their sagging beds?.Where are those headscarfed old ladies, grimbling in steamy launderettes, the lust engrained in their wartime eyes, imagining filthy fumbles with the coalman on some fuzzy flashbacked, dolly-mixtures-down-the-back, Novembral sofa of their shrivelled wombs?
Ah but what have we got now? A rip-tide of vinegary 'new pensioners' convinced they're still teenagers. They can jog aerobic, sour in as many hopeful mornings as they wish but it will avail them naught.They have forgotten this: Some trees are more graceful in autumn for a thickened trunk and fewer leaves. Surrender your sad souls, I say. Go gladly and arthritic to your ovens and your sheds, you vain truants of Time itself. I am overcome. I must don the tweed. It is overdue. I will write to my tailor tomorrow. Perhaps I can apply for an Arts Council Heritage Grant?
Posted by daen at February 9, 2006 05:07 PM