Age is a funny thing. Since I am coming up to what is often judged to be one of the key turning-points in life (i.e. downhill all the way from here) I have been pondering this question on and off for months, writes Heather Ingman.
If we didn't count up our years - and if people would stop enquiring how I am going to celebrate this monumental birthday (in bed with the duvet pulled over my head) - I would hardly feel any different from 20 years ago. How inspiring it was, then, to hear Robert Ballagh recently dismiss his 60th birthday as "just another day in my life".. He had, he said, long ago come to terms with his own mortality and, despite the slight creakiness of joints that comes to all of us, was concentrating on living life to the full.
The truth is, as anyone knows who has ever watched children of the same class troop out of school, we all age at different rates. Some children reach puberty at 10, at 14. Some people are elderly at 30 (Philip Larkin springs to mind), some retain youthful enthusiasm into their eighties. We need to come to terms with the idea that chronological age is of very little relevance these days. As the Calendar Girls have shown, women, no less than men, can continue to be gorgeous into their fifties and sixties and beyond.
Age is a moveable feast. Watching the fabulous, forty-something Nigel Kennedy perform at the Helix recently, and seeing him project an image of a barely articulate but friendly adolescent, I realised again the truth of this. My 11-year-old son instantly responded to his hair style and his clothes and patiently deciphered his various gestures for me ("respect", high fives, and so on). Why shouldn't he behave like an adolescent if he wants to? His playing, which is all that counts, was moving in its depth and maturity. At the other end of the age spectrum, plenty of artists have had a late flowering - the novelists Mary Wesley and Molly Keane, for instance. W.B. Yeats carried on with sexual and creative experimentation into his seventies. In her seventies, Edna O'Brien continues to court controversy and look wonderful. Good for her.
All this makes a nonsense of fixed retirement ages. The US has done away with them and I hope this country will too before long. What makes someone fit to do a job one day and not the next? It doesn't make sense. I have been to retirement parties where the person was anything but eager to stop work and one sensed a lifetime's experience going to waste. Others, of course, are only too glad to retire and have more time for the family, for hobbies, for learning new skills. The point is: we should have a choice.
Of course the ability to age excitingly depends on more than luck and good genes. Your lifespan is considerably enhanced if you live in the first world rather the third. In Ecuador we saw beautiful young girls on the streets, aged women, and nothing in between - except the aged women were breastfeeding their children. You age quickly on the streets of the third world. In respect of this country the entry in the new Encyclopaedia of Ireland under "elderly" should give us pause for thought.
At the start of the 20th century Ireland's elderly had the highest life expectancy in Europe. Now, they have the lowest life expectancy among 23 OECD countries. What has gone wrong? The recent statistics on the number of elderly in Ireland committing suicide are also alarming. As a group the elderly all too easily get swept aside in our fascination with the exploits of the under thirties.
As Celebrity Farm demonstrated, age is definitely uncool. We have pages and pages of our national newspapers devoted to the antics of the young - and of course middle-aged people feature everywhere since they are, mostly, the ones running the country. What about a column or a magazine devoted to the elderly in Ireland, or the Third Age, as they might prefer to be called?
Anyone who heard Joe Higgins's 85-year-old mother on the radio would agree that we can learn a thing or two from them. Speaking about the bin-charge dispute for which her son has been imprisoned, Mrs Higgins attacked manufacturers for producing so much packaging. She reminded us that in her youth it was possible to go into a shop and buy a bar of soap, unwrapped, whereas nowadays in supermarkets soap tends to be sold in packages of four all separately wrapped and then wrapped again. It was a good point. And she reminded us that even at 85 life can bring new challenges: she was entering a prison for the first time in her life, to visit her son.
There is a lot of talk these days about marginalisation. Aren't the elderly some of our truly marginalised in today's glamorous, hedonistic, youth-driven Ireland? Many of them grew up in an Ireland where the values were entirely different from those of today. The result is that some elderly people feel they can no longer identify with the country where they have lived all their lives.
I have always been impressed with the way people in the United States go on being active for so long after their retirement, doing voluntary work, getting involved in their local community. The small local museums we visit on our holidays are often staffed on a voluntary basis by retired people. Let's hear from our elderly. They may be up to more than we think.