The Perfect World

I see the Education Guardian and Piccadilly Press have announced a competition for children between the ages of 8 and 13. Asked to submit their thoughts in no more than 3,000 words on what for them would constitute a perfect world, the ten winners will be published in a book of that title. It’s more than probable that anyone reading this blog won’t be eligible! -though a grandchild might be.

In today’s edition of The Guardian, the competition is introduced by the journalist Jon Snow, who is by far the best newscaster of the British TV networks. He writes that the place to start in any quest for a perfect world might be Granny and Grandpa at the centre of the family. “Any child visiting a grandparent or great-grandparent in one of the vast number of old people’s homes in Britain must wonder what offence their old relative committed to end up in one of those places . Early history teaches us that our forebears learned most from within the family. Yet today the family is under siege. So my perfect world would welcome my extended family to breakfast as a habit. We would live in housing systems that encouraged interdependent family units. These units would enable our older relatives to live downstairs or close by, so that they could share in our familial activities with ease….

My perfect world would empower local communities so they were the core of our democratic systems. Central government would merely look after foreign affairs, defence and economic strategy. Everything else, from health-care and education to housing, would be returned to the local community.

Every child would have easy access to swimming pools, hot tubs, sports pitches, gymnasiums and more. Fewer children would ever go into care because the encouragement of extended families would produce care from within the wider family grouping…Crime would be reduced because, the family and the community would come together to resist such behaviour….

Above all my perfect world would be built on love. Love of life, of family, of community and of the world we live in. “

(B.R.)

An Amazing Man

We have had a lengthy comment from a reader on the Spanish version of ‘Ageing’ and here are some of the things she says about her father who is 87 and lives in his own home but near enough for her to prepare his daily meals for him. She says he is an extraordinary man, gets on well with everyone, with friends whom he has known from childhood and who ‘give him a spiritual wellbeing and enjoyment’. Apparently he is writing his memoirs, making a small tractor to cut the grass, and a greenhouse so that when Spring arrives he can start growing organic produce. His daughter says that he is ‘generous and has always looked after people around him. Nothing has ever been easy for him, but he was able to get over adversity and to progress with serenity, optimism, strength and courage.’

These comments come at a time when the media here have been picking up recent research into the lives of older people which suggest that some are tyrannized and mistreated by younger people, and especially by their own relatives. There have been some horrific stories. It seems that for some people the elderly need to be told in words and actions that their lives are now worthless, unproductive and inconvenient.

It is certainly true that the older one gets the more selfish you can become, expecting a quite unrealistic amount of attention and care from others. And our families are likely to be the first port of call and demands made on them so great that their own lives may be intolerably pressurised. I find I have constantly to remember my own attitude to older people when I was younger. It was easy then to categorise them, rather than to study their needs and anxieties. It seems sometimes that in Bath we live in a city of the old. Slowly they move from bus to supermarket, often beautifully dressed but walking painfully yet bravely. ‘I may be old,’ they seem to say,‘ but I am still managing’. The dialogue between the generations we have often argued for in these blogs is never more urgent than in this respect.

Meanwhile thanks to our correspondent for sharing her love for her father with us. Her final comments about him are that his ambition is to’ progress with serenity, optimism, strength and courage.’ I find that both a challenge – and a rebuke!

B.R.

Memory in the Margins

A friend who sometimes reads these postings suggests that I write more personally than I do. He says, ‘the opinions and ideas of an older person are as interesting as their occasionally creaking limbs’. I have been hesitant to do too much of that, although I find I have been thinking a great deal recently about my earliest days, confirming the experience of older people that it’s easier to recall what happened years ago than to remember what you did yesterday. Someone of my age said ‘the past is over, the future is unpredictable, let’s live in the present’. But the past is never entirely ‘over’, and remains in the margins of one’s life. As one gets older those fragments of memory can be nurturing, but sometimes disturbing as well.

My sister and a cousin both died last year, and I am now the only remaining member of our small family who is still alive. I have therefore lost not only people who have been important to me but also a basic connection with my formative years. This must be a common experience: ‘it’s only me now’. I have a quite irrational wish that I could refresh and learn from those memories and in particular that I could better understand my father – not as the growing child I was, but as the man I now am. Impossible!

My father was a kind, courteous man. If he passed a woman on the street he raised his hat and would always walk near the curb as protector of my mother. He was traditional in his values, almost certainly voted conservative, had a great respect for royalty and read the Daily Mail. My parents led a conventional life, went to church on Sundays, their circle of friends similar people who inherited a way of life they were unlikely to question. My father was devoted to my mother and if she could sometimes act impetuously, he was the stable one and only a sudden shaft of humour suggested that somewhere deep down an anarchist was lurking. He was a sailor in the 14-18 war, his boat torpedoed and eventually he was rescued after five hours in the sea. A security officer for an airplane factory in the second world war, he later became a Personnel Manager, retiring with a derisory pension. Dying before my mother, he was always worried about whether she would be properly provided for after he had gone. (She was.)

He wasa good man but I don’t think I ever properly knew him, and I wish it was possible to do so after all these years. Perhaps it’s an illusion, but belonging now to a very different era and as a very different person, I wonder if the hidden man that I imagine his cultural loyalties prevented him from ever showing or even confessing to himself, could be unlocked. It can’t of course. This is fantasy and a bit morbid perhaps. But the truth is that I miss him, this man whom I never properly knew.

B.R.