Time Like Everything Else is Relative

It’s nearly Christmas and people in town are still rushing around shopping as if their lives (and their relationships) depended on buying the right presents and supplying vast quantities of food and drink that would normally last more than a week, but seasonal gluttony demands shall be consumed in a couple of days. Just now my wife and I are living less by routine than by the discipline of ‘’lists ‘compiled to monitor our progress, or lack of it. Our days are no longer measured by the hours but by what we can get done before the part of our family in the U.K. departs for the less tense culture of our Spanish Christmas, where the birth of Jesus is given less prominence than the Three Kings who searched him out.

Raymond Briggs is the author of the cartoon books, ‘The Snowman’ , ‘Father Christmas’ and ‘Father Christmas Goes on Holiday’. He calls his books ‘graphic novels’ and they have become famous not only as books but as plays and films. They are unique in this country and are enjoyed as much by adults as by children. With the same skill but for a different audience, nearly 20 years ago he published a picture biography of his mother and father. Called ‘Ethel and Ernest’, it movingly captures the feel of a respectable working class couple in post-War Britain.

Briggs is now 73 and was recently interviewed by Emma Tucker of The Times. She got the impression that he is enjoying his seventies. But she quotes him as saying ‘When you get old, everyday life takes over. You seem to spend all day doing everyday life things – shopping, going to the Building Society, going to the chemist and all that. Then when you get back, its time to walk the dog again. Before you know where you are its 4 o’clock and you haven’t started. It happens time and time again, its maddening’’.

Time is always relative to our capacity to fill it or keep up with it. As you get older its true that time often seems in short supply. It would be much, much worse if time dragged and every day was a day unfilled. Better to be ‘maddened’ as Briggs says than to be bored. I’m reminded of the dreadful words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth : To-morrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time…

No creeping for us!

B.R.

Afraid?

The results of a recent poll reported in The Guardian are disturbing. Apparently 40% of Britons fear being lonely in old age. Two thirds of the adult population are ‘frightened’ by the prospect of having to move into care homes. More than 90% said they knew they could not survive on the state pension and would need to rely on savings. 55% of people didn’t believe that older people in Britain are generally treated with respect.

Accepting that no poll is ever totally reliable, these figures suggest that ageing is the ogre that haunts many people. My blogs are an attempt to face the realities of old age, but to do so in a positive way. In my last posting we faced the fact that there are no easy answers to the process of ageing and the provision of care for older people. But answers must be found. For example, Charities in the U.K. estimate that spending by the state and individuals will have to increase fivefold to keep pace with the number of people living longer than ever before. There is a great deal of research on these matters in this country, some of it government sponsored. The minister for social care, Ian Lewis, has said that priority should be given at all times to maintain the dignity of older people.

But what about this fear of ageing that some people have? And the darker fear of death itself. In the Spanish translation of these blogs there has been some correspondence between two people who are coincidently both Argentinian. One, nearly fifty years of age, says she is ‘terrified ‘of getting old and of death. ‘ Old age is very sad whatever people say…I am a woman who doesn’t want to age, who cries daily.’ But her respondent who is in her sixties, writes about a friend who has helped her to cope with ‘the inevitable moments of existential anxiety’ and who has convinced her that death is simply a liberation, a change.’

Older people, when they are together, share stories of their aches and pains, and how they manage to live as full a life as possible despite them. They talk nostalgically of the years through which they have lived, a common experience which helps to unite us but hopefully doesn’t exclude us from wider contacts with people of different generations. (The ‘old days’ were never as good as we can too easily suggest!). But we don’t often talk about endings, about death.

Perhaps we should.

B.R.