Ageing and zeal as the alphabet ends

Richard Hoggart is an honoured name in British social history. His book ‘The Uses of Literacy’ published in 1960 was a pioneering work examining how the mass media changed the lives and values of the English working class. Mixing personal memoir with social history and contemporary critique, Hoggart's approach to cultural analysis didn’t hide behind a mask of objective social scientific jargon. For some years he was in adult education, teaching English around North Yorkshire and has always been near to the people. The same was true when for some years he was a professor at Birmingham University. When the book was first published in 1960, The Guardian critic called it ‘an exquisitely drawn picture of the urban working-class life in which the author grew up’. The book has been republished many times, most recently in 1997.

Hoggart is now in his eighties and has just published ‘Promises to Keep’ in which he reflects on the issues still important to him, but also ruminates on the perils and pleasures of old age, as we have been doing. He quotes Tolstoy who once noted in his diary that ‘old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man’. ‘It steals up’, writes Hoggart, ‘like a burglar in stockinged feet, but with a cosh. Some of us take the pension but ignore the indicated age and suddenly realise, perhaps at 80, that we have become old, as my wife and I did’. He goes on to say how grateful he is to have a wife and children and the ‘intangible bonds of mutual affection’ between them.

Writing about the signs of being old, he says how it becomes noticeable in restaurants when the waiter presents the bill ‘to one who is a generation back, no doubt thinking ‘that the old man is obviously being taken out for a treat. You restore your pride, if it really needs restoring’, he says, ‘by insisting on paying the bill. A strange little dance’.

Perhaps in these blogs we too have been sending out signs as well as simple information. I hope they have been helpful and not over-anxious. There is some comfort in knowing that age is something that cannot be stopped, needs to be endured, is our common inheritance, has to be understood, and lived out with zeal. It is rather like the coda of a great symphony, summing up and rephrasing all the tunes and traumas of our life. It is to be welcomed rather than feared.

A few more thoughts and information, less frequently, in the future. And your own?

Go well and keep well.

Bryan