by Jennifer HarveyBeen asked to go ballroom dancing recently? Or engage in wartime reminiscences? A tad insulting if you are in your fifties...
Growing older is not so bad when you consider the alternatives; but as a fairly fit, active, working fifty-something I feel a bit patronised by the types of activities aimed at the over-50s.
Why do we need nifty-fifties at the gym when we'd have no trouble keeping up with the McDonald's generation of young adults? And ballroom dancing for the over-fifties - by my calculation, someone who's 50 would have grown up with punk not quickstep, but then Strictly Come Dancing and its spin-offs have a lot to answer for.
How about wartime reminiscence for the over-50s? As Prince Philip
recently gaffed: "And what did you do in the war?", only to be told "I
wasn't born until 1954".
Concessions
So here's my point: people in their fifties and people in their eighties are of a different generation. Some people might want special concessions, some don't and some never will.
It's more than a little ironic that there's a plethora of groups encouraging me to remember rationing (I can't) before heading to a nice tea dance, at the same time as we're all being told we'll have to work until we're 90 to survive (like the man stacking supermarket shelves and apparently loving it).
Use it or lose it
Then there's the "use it or lose it" brigade: keep working, do sudoku, get married, go for walks, drink coffee, and you'll not get Alzheimer's.
There's a particularly annoying US e-mail going round at the moment about the merits of old age, which includes the words "The devil loves idle hands and the devil's name is Alzheimer's". What a crass insensitive insult. Tell that to Terry Pratchett. My mum died earlier this year after a devastating decline with the disease. She was happily married for 60 years, worked all her life, walked miles every day and loved her crosswords and her coffee. Idle hands indeed.
Debt free
Anyway, I should just be grateful that my local cinema now lets me in for £3.50, even though I'm almost debt free, having bought my house for 2/6d in the year dot, unlike the poor person behind me in the queue with massive negative equity and a ticket price of £7. I eagerly await my National Concession Travel Pass in a few years. I'm planning that trip from John O'Groats to Lands End on local buses already - if I can get the time off work.
Jennifer Harvey works with people with autism
Concessions
So here's my point: people in their fifties and people in their eighties are of a different generation. Some people might want special concessions, some don't and some never will.
It's more than a little ironic that there's a plethora of groups encouraging me to remember rationing (I can't) before heading to a nice tea dance, at the same time as we're all being told we'll have to work until we're 90 to survive (like the man stacking supermarket shelves and apparently loving it).
Use it or lose it
Then there's the "use it or lose it" brigade: keep working, do sudoku, get married, go for walks, drink coffee, and you'll not get Alzheimer's.
There's a particularly annoying US e-mail going round at the moment about the merits of old age, which includes the words "The devil loves idle hands and the devil's name is Alzheimer's". What a crass insensitive insult. Tell that to Terry Pratchett. My mum died earlier this year after a devastating decline with the disease. She was happily married for 60 years, worked all her life, walked miles every day and loved her crosswords and her coffee. Idle hands indeed.
Debt free
Anyway, I should just be grateful that my local cinema now lets me in for £3.50, even though I'm almost debt free, having bought my house for 2/6d in the year dot, unlike the poor person behind me in the queue with massive negative equity and a ticket price of £7. I eagerly await my National Concession Travel Pass in a few years. I'm planning that trip from John O'Groats to Lands End on local buses already - if I can get the time off work.
Jennifer Harvey works with people with autism
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