if there is a class divide: those who can afford it chop themselves and stitch themselves up again to make sure they look no older than 30; the rest of us wrinkle.
There is a very long way to go before women start accepting their wrinkles, but there are signs of something happening. There are new images of beauty and maturity as advertisers begin to wake up to the possibilities of the older market. The issue is being discussed more openly and, in July 2007, even Vogue celebrated ‘ageless style’. The journalist Virginia Ironside, in her excellent book No, I Don’t Want To Join a Book Club, set out a wonderful list of rules for how to dress after middle age, most of which were given to her by her mother.4 They include:
1 Never wear white. It makes yellow teeth look yellower.
2 Always keep your upper arms covered. Those bits of flesh that hang down at the sides (known, apparently, as bingo wings) are hideous, and so are those strange rolls of flesh that appear between your underarms and your body.
3 Get a new bra every six months.
4 Don’t disguise a lizardy neck with a scarf or polo-neck. They always look as if you have something to hide.
5 Never wear trousers after 50, unless they are ludicrously well cut and slinky, and never wear short skirts.
6 Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing gown in the world.
When a 56-year-old woman called Mary asked the Age Concern discussion website whether people should ‘dress and live like the age I’m supposed to be?’, she was overwhelmed by the response.5 This came from much older women refusing to grow old ‘gracefully’, quoting Jenny Joseph’s famous poem ‘Warning’ – ‘When I am old I shall wear purple’ – and wearing whatever they felt like.
With the emergence on magazine covers of powerful actresses in their sixties and seventies – Dames Helen Mirren and Judi Dench – celebrated for their style, it is clear that older women are now more fashionable. That should be some comfort for those who are more inclined to worry about whether they could fit into fashionable shoes.
But there is still a very long way to go. If the advertisers and the fashion magazines are beginning to shift, and the newspaper columnists are beginning to talk about it, that is important. But older people worry about it enormously, and those professionals whose job is to care for them later – and who make policy about their care – often have not the slightest idea that appearance is important to them at all.
The issue of what to wear and how to wear it remains hotly debated. What seems to unite older people I talked to was that it was important to do it with style and effort, because of the message that action gives to yourself and others that you remain an active human being. The business of appearance underpins the active role that older people play, and therefore helps them stay healthy and happy.
Work
I wrote at the beginning of the book about how much my mother wanted to go back to work when she was in her eighties. There is no doubt that older people wish to feel that they are active providers in the community, that they are a useful part of society, and that they are not a burden on others. It is the other side of keeping up appearances: older people have to protect their self-respect, not just by looking as if they are playing a useful role, but by actually playing one.
Of course, people manage being active providers better if they live in their own homes, and are mobile enough to get to family, friends and shops. They also have to be in reasonably good health, but that is not an absolute. Even if older people’s health is getting worse, there are ways of making sure their quality of life holds up, or at least that it doesn’t go down at the same speed. There are a range of technological advances that can keep people independent.
Productivity means different things to different people. So many of my discussions with older people make it clear how much they long to be back at work. This might be because they need to earn more money, but it is about more than just money. For many of them, it seems to be a sense of being of value. The more our society judges people by what they do, rather than by who they are, the more older people are going to want to go back to work. Of course they will.
The point is that even those who have run their own businesses, or been very senior in some major corporation, and who have all the money anyone could wish for, still need to be needed, and long to be asked to do something, however unlikely, that gives them a role. In the United States, where people retire later – if at all – this is sometimes provided by continuing to go to work, and often by getting a more and more senior-sounding title, even though the role is in fact less influential than the one the same person held in their forties. It is hugely important that this has happened: the people concerned feel valued, still have an office, a secretary and a role, and are often wheeled out at all sorts of occasions to do some glad handing or to look after more junior staff.
In fact, when the bank HSBC carried out a huge survey of 21,000 people on the subject in 2006, it showed that more than 70 per cent of people in countries such as Canada, the United States and Britain say they want to work into their old age.6 Many of those who took part in the survey were clear that they wanted to work on their own terms, part-time or seasonally, with switches between periods of work and periods of leisure. Surprisingly, HSBC’s advisor on retirement said he thought the British were the most positive in the world in their attitude towards working in retirement, perhaps because the pensions are so poor here that people simply have to think differently. Or perhaps because opportunities are finally emerging for older workers to work differently from earlier in their career, more flexibly, and with increased satisfaction.
If so, there is still a very long way to go. An ICM poll for the BBC’s Newsnight programme in 2004 suggests that people are more than irritated at the discrimination against older workers. But there is a peculiar contradiction here. Only a few months earlier, when Lord Turner had published his pensions report, much of the media coverage had been about being ‘forced’ to work longer, to 67, 68 or 69. On the one hand, the polls suggest people want to work longer, albeit more flexibly; on the other hand, the commentators are telling us that people are resisting the idea.
The answer is that it depends what we mean by ‘work’. It depends on what the work is, whether we feel we are being cheated out of a pension we have earned, and a retirement date, whether pensions will be clawed back if we are earning, whether we are allowed to be flexible about how we work, whether the jobs can be rewarding in older age and, perhaps most significantly, how much we can feel independent. If people are self-employed, then they might reasonably expect to carry on working because they have customers, the most natural thing in the world. Maybe others can reinvent themselves to become self-employed later in life in order to do something totally different and, of course, find the customers who want to buy.
The Independent columnist Hamish McRae suggested that, a generation from now, a quarter of the workforce will be self-employed, which will change the nature of the pensions debate completely.7 The Turner proposals, and all the others, assumed that people are mainly employed by somebody else. But if McRae is right, then a large proportion of older people will be self-employed, carrying on working, perhaps less energetically than before, but possibly just as devotedly, and arguably with greater experience.
Some will be new self-starters, like Jacquie Lawson, of JacquieLawson.com, who became the market leader in online greeting card, at the age of 62.8 After
