Second Anniversary

These postings have been going on now for two years and there have been nearly 80 of them. We started off with a sort of ABC of medical problems connected to ageing and then moved off in several different directions. I wrote more personally sometimes than may have been helpful, but I am often writing about things from first hand experience and I wanted to deal with real issues, emotional, medical and social. In the process I have learned quite a lot and there have been useful comments from readers, some of which I have tried to follow up. It has all been very English-based and I apologise to Spanish readers for references that may not have made much sense, and yet there have been as many comments from them as from English readers.

All the time I have tried to hold a balance between the ‘I am as young as I feel’ attitude of many older people as they rightly insist on being positive about their age, and the scientific perspective which recognises the physical reality of ageing. But I have been sceptical of the frantic anti-ageing approach of some people (encouraged by the cosmetic industry) which pretends that nothing is happening to our bodies and therefore to our mental capacity. It is a fact that as soon as we are born, we begin to age – and that accelerates as we come to the later years of our lives. The challenge is, how can we adjust to the rather different person we have become as that process happens?

There hasn’t been much original in what I have written, and much of it has been borrowed from news items, articles and the internet. We who are older have become an industry! People are living longer, we have our own agencies like Age Concern, we have become a new market for people who want to sell us things, our votes are valuable to politicians who recognise that democracy means something to us, and medics study us under the subject of gerontology, that inelegant word. So to quite a lot of people we are important, and our importance is growing.

I am encouraged by the euroresidentes directorate to continue with these blogs. I shall do so, but perhaps less often. And I will always value your comments. Thanks for looking me up!

B.R.

Boredom and ageing

Staying with our Anglo-Spanish family, near to Alicante, I walk along the beach. At the weekends there would be a procession – the paseo – of people doing the same, a dedicated routine. Now on this Autumn morning there are only a few of us and whilst there are one or two families with small children, most of us are older people, some very old indeed.

I flash my professional smile once or twice but then as people avert their eyes, I surrender to the fact that this walking buisness is a serious and very personal affair. Courtesies are limited to the people you know and the perambulation is halted for a moment as two couples meet, the women talking to the women and the men animatedly excanging opinions.

It is a perfect morning after yesterday´s storm and there are ships on the pencil line of the horizon, one a tanker and another a tall masted sailing boat. The sun creates a crystalline V shape across the sea and, as I drink my ice cold beer, I fantasise about what it must be like to do this every day when the weather permits, for I seem to recognise some of the walkers. A daily routine perhaps.

There are others on the beach, the serious sun-worshippers.They arrive with small collapsible chairs, sun lotion, and sometimes a book or the newspaper, remove as much of their clothing as they wish and when all is ready, present themselves to the sun. Like many of the walkers they are impossibly bronzed.

I wonder what it must be like to do this every day.The setting is perfect. More beautiful than many fashionable sea resorts, this great bay – beginning where I am staying and extending several kilometres to the full stop that is Benidorm – is idyllic. But I sense – and I may be quite wrong – that the older people I see look a bit bored, and boredom is the merciless ghost at the feast of our latter years, the scavenger that wrecks the dream of an end life that has purpose. I would swap even the glorious Mediterranean coast, for the activity and fulfilment that old age can deliver. If both could be arranged - perfecto!