Eighty, eh, so how does it feel?” It’s a question to which I have had to reply too often since “that” birthday. I have now lived two years longer than my father, eight years longer than my mother, a full decade longer than the good book anticipated and if the demographic pundits are to be believed, as a resident of the soft south I have another 4.7 years to go.
I belong to the generation that created easy debt, junk food, retail therapy, snacking. A generation that commodified the most intimate of life’s activities, a generation whose brick-wealth has so skewed the housing market that our grandchildren will never have a secure nest; a generation that voted, in a fit of faux-nostalgia, to ignore John Donne’s cautions about islands and continents; a generation, finally, which in its appetite for comfort, convenience and consumption has intoxicated the air, poisoned the seas, vandalised the land and abused the creatures that live on it.
The past record hardly warrants applause. The future is even less deserving. I live and work among elderly people. I understand what’s in store should I have the misfortune to live to celebrate another Bible-defying decade. I have seen the humiliation in their eyes as I guide her fork into Gladys’s mouth, help Derek out of his commode, reassure Charles that his long-dead wife will be waiting – you never contradict people with dementia – persuade Ann for the nth time to wait indoors for the taxi to arrive.
With my own marbles disappearing, I have already crossed the “lost spectacles” red line. I now drop things as well as lose them, forget appointments as well as names and for this column for instance, typos are graduating to misspellings, inappropriate words becoming commonplace – I’m already using the thesaurus immoderately. The great danger for us crumblies on the last lap of life’s circuit is that we will devote our energies to complaining about the state of our vehicles, the tyres, the track, the other traffic. I intend to pimp my ride, to share my adventures and enjoy the scenery.
As I regress from wearing purple and sitting on pavements to stealing flowers and spitting, the process will reveal how I coped with, confronted and challenged the demons that by day taunt us with our incompetencies and haunt our nights with panic. I will have identified how to lighten this encircling gloom, to salve the cerebral bruising, to comfort the accumulated confusions. With the reaper just round the corner, altruism tends to concede to the Darwinian reflex. So one selfish outcome is that perhaps by the time it’s my turn to be on the receiving end of support in the community centre, those delivering it will be better informed than I am today on what I need. That seems a respectable purpose.
And I will know better when to get out of the way and let younger people through.
• Stewart Dakers is an 80-year-old community voluntary worker
