Len Hatfull (Grandpa)

1896-1972

Eve Stride (Gran)

1892-1988

My grandfather used to rant about the world "going to pot", as did pretty much everybody's grandfather back then. His particular obsession, as I recall from one-on-one time I used to have with him after he had had his leg amputated, was the railways - Beeching (who was the minister responsible for closing them down en masse) was the devil's representative on earth. Grandpa used to sit rolling his Old Holborn fags in the living room of their retirement bungalow in Rotherfield, Sussex apparently quite content with the view onto the lane and the company of an eleven or twelve year old, and I seem to remember feeling a little honoured that he would talk to me man-to-man. As old photographs prove, he looked a lot like 'The Godfather', having genuine Neapolitan blood through his unknown Italian grandmother, and my memory often has Marlon Brando skinning up (and the living room wood-panneled and dark instead of the large 1960s windows and a room filled with nostalgic possessions from the grander and darker 1930s semi in Hayes, near Bromley).

It was a given, in those days, that authority went hand-in-glove with age, and children were imbued with deference towards their 'elders and betters' based, if nothing else, upon the maxim "when you've been around as long as I have, you'll understand". The older you were the more responsible you were - the two years I had on my younger brother conferred automatic guilt - "you're older - you should know better". Despite this, I can readily recall that the elders were quite obviously not necessarily betters; even a small child can tell that older people are not always right, clever or good, but the game was that you had to force them to live up to your respect. Maybe it was because of the many powers they, in fact, had over you - or maybe it was quite simply because they were bigger than you? That was the time-honoured natural order of things.

Schooling appeared to reinforce these notions and, even as recently as the early 1990s, graduating university students had the right to sequester one of the new students as a 'slave' to help with their degree shows (they would have said 'fag' but Oxbridge has the copyright, and anyway since the university gave up smoking ...). Perhaps I've just been unlucky, but that practice was suddenly abolished just as I was about to claim my own 'slave', coinciding with the up-grading of the polytechnics to nominal universities, and the start of the redefinition of students as 'clients'. I felt short-changed, as if my status had been stripped in favour of the new 'customers', and I feel short-changed now that I've reached an age where I expected to be bestowed with a 'natural' authority, even superiority, due to an assumption of experience and accrued knowledge, and that is not happening. Well, to be precise, I don't seem to be receiving the kind of unquestioning deference from young people that I though was the rule when I was young.

So, as I write this I am aware that any discussion of this subject will soon start to read like a letter to the Telegraph which, I guess, makes it an inevitable truth that age draws one to the right, but which pushes senility right to the long list of health worries fashionable to my time of life. Another product of our age, however, is the obsession with forensics on our TVs - where did all the detectives go? (Nice to have another, unexpected, career option for attractive women though). Wisdom, which I grew up to expect as a positive bi-product of ageing is increasingly consigned to the 'trashcan' of the Mythos in favour of a more readily medically identifiable malaise. The Hippies didn't bother to properly read up on Aquarians before they welcomed in the New Age, which comes bristling with gadgets and technological 'solutions' rather than organic Kaftans and transcendental incense. We do go back to nature, but not without our Goretex, Nike hikers and satellite phones.

At this point, I definitely must stop before I become my grandfather. Fighting the urge to stray into SatNav and countless other examples of 'the world going to pot', I am still young enough to be aware of approaching dementia, and agile enough to dodge it's grasp, so I'll stick to the point. The point is: why has getting old become bad?

I suppose the first obvious observation is that there are too many old folk around, and in ever increasing numbers. When life expectancy kept wrinklies to a more modest level, and getting to an old age itself deserved accolade, it was only natural that the view of the elderly was more reverential. Growing up with "I hope I die before I get old", "Only the good die young",
"Your parents fuck you up", "Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone" - existentialism turned into the Beat generation and Rock n' Roll and Twiggy ... parents haunted by two world wars determined their kids would not have to suffer - growing up through this empowerment of youth was unprecedented fun, and notably without any consideration of our own old age.
(Personally, I prefer "Now the sun can sun-burn you, but not as bad as those old people do" - Captain Beefheart - but that's another story).

Teenagers didn't really exist until Elvis Presley, when they started to become an important market, growing in power and influence until, fifty years later they have become the arbiters of beauty - it's all downhill from 'barely legal'. And as the standard for desirability creeps younger, creating markets for plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists and expanding countless other industries previously curtailed by dignified ageing - we used to grow old gracefully - should we be surprised that paedophilia has reared its ugly head?

Maturation has become mere distortion. Frankly, it irritates the hell out of us that we can't cure death, and the further away from its inevitability we can maintain ourselves, the happier we are. Nothing really new about that, but as life expectancy increases, it is becoming obsessive. Commensurate with the growing awareness of the dangers of our meddling with nature, and I suppose as a logical conclusion of our (humanitarian supremacist) power to meddle, we still feel we should be above it all. As long as we are kind to dolphins, it's okay to interfere with our own nature, but without really considering why.

My maternal grandmother lived to 96. Sharp as a fiddle (mentally), she was nevertheless physically limited for the last twenty or so years of her life by arthritis - she could not walk much and, in the final years was unable even to darn socks. All her friends and contemporaries had passed away, so she was stuck with younger folk in a world far changed from the one in which she flourished (mostly in front of a TV which was for the most part inappropriate for someone born at the end of the Victorian era). We greeted her each morning, and in answer to polite enquiries about her well-being would always hear " ... 'bout time I was dead."

Rather strangely, the generation that survived two world wars seemed to commonly live to 'a ripe old age' - perhaps so much real drama in their lives toughened them up? The survival instinct sharpened by regular reminders of mortality? My grandmother's complaint was more about loss of function - not wanting to be a 'burden' - than daily aches and pains, and had she been (for example) an intellectual, a writer or something else which depended less on physical attributes than mental, she would no doubt have been less keen to die. Everyday life was more routinely physical in the past, which gave her generation the exercise we now have to make time for (and pay money for) at the gym, out jogging, or going to exotic locations just to walk. Technological innovation may have given us what we want, but maybe not what we need. What should surely be a benefit of a longer life is more time for the uphill task of getting to know ourselves - understanding only what we want is pointedly immature. The power to be able to attract (and manipulate) the (physical) desire of others is becoming something we are no longer expected to transcend or 'grow out of'. As a catalyst for procreation it becomes redundant by a 'certain age', and surely, as individuals, we are more than 'just a pretty face'? And why does a pretty face trump all other human attributes?

The present climate cultivates an accumulation of regrets worthy of the films Magnolia and Groundhog Day, where the crimes of our youth, and those visited upon us in our youth, submerge the inexorable passage of time in a fixation with our formative years - reforming and re-inventing ourselves as blooming youth, stifling maturation and the natural cycle of life - the fear of winter eclipsing the beauty of autumn.

Jon Hatfull

Summer 2009