Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, pp. 213–4.
19 Times (2005), 6 Aug.
20 Diana M. Jelley (2006), ‘Which patients with which needs are leading the patient led NHS?’, BMJ, 332; p. 1221 (20 May).
Don’t waste my skills and experience
The right to work
It is now a generally accepted fact that old age stinks, and in some ways it does. I know because I’ve seen my mother go through it and now I’m getting there: my top lip is disappearing, my whiskers are growing, my hair is grey, my moles are mushrooming, I’ve lost what good looks I ever had, and when I had them I didn’t really know it and now they’re gone for ever, but would I give a toss if beauty wasn’t so vital and wrinkled women were all over the papers?
Michele Hanson, Guardian, 30 August 2006
The internet is not just for people in their twenties … I was pretty ancient when I got my first computer. Dear old ladies like me can take it up.
Jacquie Lawson, who became the market leader in online greeting cards at the age of 62
One of the things my mother used to say she hated most about getting old is that she didn’t like the way she looked. My mother had been saying she had the worst legs in London right through her life. Now that she had the most terrible wasting disease, which made her lose a great deal of weight and made her legs extremely painful, she looked down at them, and said – with a twinkle in her eye – that they were finally ‘improving’.
I tell this story because it illustrates a little of just how conscious older people are about their appearance. My mother’s legs gave her a great deal of pain, but she was able to derive some rueful satisfaction from the fact that they were finally a little slimmer.
Nor is she alone in this. If you look at some of the books of advice about getting old, there is always a great deal there about appearance, and the importance of ‘not letting yourself go’. This is advice aimed particularly at women, but it also applies to men, who find themselves all too easily in a combination of trainers and track suit bottoms, just because they are easier – for them or their carers – to put on and take off.
Older people feel that appearance is important, and they are right. Partly this is about self-respect, partly it is some protection against being treated like some dotty old biddy. This chapter is about work in the broadest sense. It is about being out in the world. That might seem a million miles from the question of appearance for younger people, but for older people the two are very much intertwined. Being active in the world, and appearing to be active in the world, are both prerequisites for self-respect, and for respect too in a society which is deeply biased against the old. That means underpinning your life by having a purpose and a reason for getting out of bed every morning, and looking as if you do too. Of all the aspects of life for older people in this book, these are the most important for them, and the most likely to keep people healthy for longer: looking as if you deserve respect, as well as having a role that brings respect.
In fact, of all the areas I talked to people about when I was researching this book, the issue of physical appearance probably provoked the most discussion amongst family and friends, not to mention the variety of experts. Actually, most of them agreed. On the one hand, most people felt it wasn’t a good idea to let yourself go. On the other, there was a clear view about how important it was to keep your self-respect, which meant staying looking good, being attractive to other people.
It did not just mean something sexual. It was also important to look good to be attractive to nurse, visit or simply be someone to be wheeled out for the grandchildren. But it was an opinion that was widely shared among older people themselves. The fact that their own definition of ageing well involves looking good suggests that this is hugely important to some older people, if not all of them. Some undoubtedly feel that being older means you can give up on the diet, abuse the body and wear tracksuits day in and day out. But it is hard to escape the bombardment from images of older women having botox injections, of plastic surgery for both men and women, and of tanned older men with younger women on their arms. It feels important.
Worse, the opposite – the popular view of older bodies – has always been rather gross. ‘Sans teeth,’ was Shakespeare’s view; ‘wrinklies’is hardly a term of endearment, and everywhere we look there are pictures of wrinkles being ironed out by botox, flab being surgically removed, Fonda-esque body improvements by exercise and surgery.
It is easy to be puritanical about all this, but that is to ignore just how deeply ingrained our resistance is to this aspect of getting older. The broadcaster Joan Bakewell, once described as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’, wrote a thoughtful article about being over 70 in the Guardian in 2006, describing herself as ‘vain by nature’, and missing the admiration which no longer comes her way.1
‘While old men are thought to be ruggedly attractive, old women are deemed to be beyond allure, devoid of sexual chemistry, a worn husk of their juicier former selves,’ she wrote. ‘I remain true to my inner self: I still enjoy clothes … I still love high heels, have my hair tinted, watch my weight. I confront the mirror less often than I did, and when I do I make a harsh appraisal, and do my best with what’s left.’
The publisher Diana Athill says something similar about the experience of ageing:
The most obvious thing about moving into my seventies was the disappearance of what use to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being, a condition which had gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but which had always seemed central to my existence.2
Then out of the blue, at the end of 2005, a series of advertisements for Dove soap included a woman in her nineties, admittedly a model, advertising the soap as much younger women were doing. The point was being made that we have to love and respect our bodies, fat, thin, young or old. For many people, the image of a nearly naked woman of this age was deeply shocking. For others, it came as a welcome relief from the constant bombardment with images of young, thin, ditsy blondes, resplendent on the arms of men, the bonnets of cars, or simply wearing gorgeous clothes that are manifestly unsuitable for older women.
The other side of this debate is why we need to be quite so ashamed of our older bodies. Michele Hanson wrote about catching sight of herself (aged 60 plus) with horror in the mirror in the changing rooms in Marks & Spencer.3 ‘Of course I tried things on,’ she wrote. ‘But if you are a repulsive old crone, no garment can help you, so I sat down on my ghastly sagging bottom and wept.’ Why does it have to be that way, at least so much?
The fear of wrinkles are such that those supermodels over 40, with their botox-smooth skin, risking cancer with their human growth hormone, prioritize
