Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional!

People boast that they want to grow old disgracefully – as the poem says: 

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

However, there is a fine line between a charming eccentricity and dementia.   I think that I shall err on the side of caution and aim to grow old gracefully, whilst still getting the most out of life.   So many of my contemporaries are total Luddites refusing to engage with computers or smart ‘phones, in fact they take great pride in telling you this.   But I think that modern technology is wonderful and I try to embrace it as far as I can.   I love my computer and happily use internet banking and Apps for parking and train tickets.  On the other hand one must be careful not to appear ridiculous.   I have no wish to wear ‘old lady’ clothes or to have a blue rinse on my permed hair but then I certainly wouldn’t wear a mini skirt or expose my midriff in public – I wouldn’t want to frighten the horses.   Tik Tok (something I find hugely time wasting and addictive) is full of make up tutorials that look wonderful on young, line free skin but I would find it inordinately depressing trying to achieve anything like the same effect on my face!!!   I remember seeing Dame Sybil Thorndike (who, older readers will remember, was a very famous actress who died aged 93 in 1976.) who lived in Chelsea and when she was in her 80s I was having dinner in the same restaurant as her.   She was with her grandchildren and they were having the best time.   She wasn’t a great beauty but she had amazing presence and whilst she didn’t appear to be wearing any make up she looked terrific because she was animated, laughing and smiling with her family.   After a certain age a smile is worth far more than face cream!   Plastic surgery certainly has a lot to answer for.   Many films today are made almost incomprehensible as many of the leading actresses can’t move their faces.   They take the news of their husband’s murder or large payout from a life insurance policy with the same impassive face.   Did she kill her husband is that why she appears unmoved?      Is she angry, curious, sad, happy?   We can only guess.  

After a certain age there is often a division in the way we live our lives.   When our children were young, many of us were wildly competitive, “Oh isn’t she walking yet?  Coriander has been doing that for ages!”   “Of course, Persephone was potty trained by seven months”.   How important it seemed but in retrospect most people learn to talk eventually and are potty trained before they start work!   But then it all starts again.   “My mother’s 87 and she’s just done a parachute jump.”   “That’s nothing my father’s 90 and he’s training to run the marathon.”  And of course there is the slow descent into second childhood.   Our grandchildren come out of nappies just as our grandparents are going back into them and while our grandchildren are getting their first teeth our grandparents are losing their last ones.  I remember my mother, never the most tolerant of women, being furious when a younger friend couldn’t manage to climb a couple of flights of stairs without getting out of breath.   And my grandmother (equally intolerant – sadly I think it is probably genetic) fell out with a lifelong friend who cancelled a cruise because she had broken her hip.  My grandmother said to me “Daphne’s always been the most frightful hypochondriac,” which seemed a bit harsh!    I don’t think they ever spoke again.

The fatal flaw in my desire to grow old gracefully is I don’t think that I’ve lived very gracefully thus far.    During the 60s I shared a flat in Chelsea and they say if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there.  After all we were the generation that invented sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll.   For my part I always gave drugs a miss as I knew I was quite capable of getting into all sorts of trouble without them.   As a very wise cousin of mine once said “The trouble with drugs is that they convince every idiot that they are a genius and they turn every genius into an idiot.”  A strong streak of self preservation meant that whilst I might have paid lip service to the hippy movement at the weekends I managed to take the flowers out of my hair in time to go to work on Monday morning.   You can take the girl out of the home counties but you can’t take the home counties out of the girl.   So, I think that I was probably fairly sensible (most of the time) if not necessarily gracious but I’m working on it.