New Perspective

The pianist Alfred Brendel , who is also a poet and an essayist and reputed to have a wonderful sense of humour, has for a long time been one of my heroes. I have heard him play in Concert several times, and have one of his recordings of Mozart concertos together with an album of the Schubert sonatas. He was the first person to record all of Beethoven’s piano works and is currently making a world tour. It will be his last. He is 77, as I am, and he will give his final performance in Vienna next December. On Saturday he was responding to the Questions and Answers column in The Guardian magazine.

Asked what his greatest fear was he said that it was the collapse of the planet. His guiltiest pleasure he admitted was keeping smokers out of his house, and three things that he owed his parents were their loving care, a set of excellent teeth and a need to branch out. To the question ‘how do you relax?’ he answered ‘Looking. Reading. (Not listening: it’s too intense)’. ‘Tell us a secret’ said his questioner, and Brendel’s answer was ‘The piano sings’, which is exactly how it feels when one listens to him performing . Asked what he found deplorable in others, he said ‘Fanaticism, unreliability, pretence, and defined ‘the antics of an ageing brain’ as the trait he deplores in himself.

The phrase has stayed with me. It's just how it can feel as you get older, at least for me. Antics. The frustration of wayward thoughts, the difficulty of finding a word that’s got hidden in the fog of memory, forgetfulness (I left a building today and had to go back twice to collect things I had left behind and each time nearly fell over the same unexpected step as I left); misspelling every other word I type on this computer: they are all very well described by this ironic word, ‘antics’. I shall use it – if only to myself - in future. It transforms the inconvenience of ageing into a new sort of game. I shall try to be less angry with my ageing brain and deplore it as Brendel does, but laugh at it as well.

Thank you Alfred Brendel for being one of the most perfect and humane of musicians; and for this new insight, that may turn the occasional agonies of age into a series of amusing antics.

B.R.

A Signifcant Day

It was my seventy seventh birthday on Tuesday. Children are often asked if they feel ‘different’ on their birthday and the answer tends to be in the negative, but rapidly advancing years are a sobering experience, and on Tuesday I did feel a bit different; there were kind family and friends around helping it to be so. It was a mixture of three emotions : nostalgic reflection, limited expectation and quiet celebration.

I have been reading about the veteran journalist Katherine Whitehorn . I knew her late sister once but that is as near as I ever got to a remarkable woman who at 80 still loves and practices her profession. At the time of her ‘Guardian’ interview on Friday, she was off to Oregon on an assignment. After many years of very happy marriage she is now a widow. She says that she came to terms with her loss by continuing to be engaged with the world.

NOSTALGIA is not something I am very good at, and I suppose I distrust it a bit – what has been can never be again. I don’t want to live in the past. In her interview Whitehorn quotes someone called Jim Fiebig who ironically says ‘If you can look back on your life with contentment, you have one of man’s most precious gifts – a selective memory’. Well, I find the selective process isn’t that easy to control, and although there are wonderful memories, the unwanted ones often get in the way. A friend described herself the other day as contented. Perversely perhaps I am not sure that I want to be like that.

EXPECTATION has to be limited in time and ambition when you are in your 78th. year, but reaching for something more that you have, is part of being human and I am open to that. New experiences (but not too many responsibilities please ) are welcome at this address! ‘I’m looking forward to my 80’s’ Whitehorn says, I have friends and relatives in their 90’s who say it is a fine decade. I’ll report back once I know if they are right’, she concludes.

CELEBRATION is certainly one of the pleasures of being older. So many things that one values and enjoys. Music, art, books (there is a never ending stream of good novels these days), Cinema. Theatre, the countryside, good food, the Church - fallible but still important for the faith it represents. Most of all as the years progress, my friends become increasingly important, and my wife and family precious beyond words. All the others are signs of life, but my family is life itself.

B.R.

Ageing and Change

One of the hardest things about getting older is having to come to terms with the inescapable physical changes that the years inflict on you. There will be all sorts of medical explanations to do with physical deterioration, brain cells coming to the end of their time, bones getting weaker; but the visible effects of ageing can be depressing (if they are your own) and surprising when you see how they effect other people.

I was at a regional meeting of people of my own profession this week and amongst the hundred or so of us, there were quite a few retired people, some of whom were at college at the same time as me. We gravitated towards each other at the lunch break, catching up on news, reflecting on how things had changed since we started out on our work, and all the time doubtless noticing what the ravages of time had done to us!

The thing that interested me was how some people were immediately recognisable, especially their voices, the cadencies of their speech and the things they talked about, reminiscent of fifty years ago when we were sorting out the world in general and the Church in particular. Suddenly we were students again. ‘The years rolled back’, as they say. Of course we were older, our faces lined, some of us with hearing problems, all of us happy to trade stories of what we are doing with our lives as people with few responsibilities now but still with a sense of vocation.

But then there were others who were quite unrecognisable. One of them– cheerfully boasting that he had ‘two new hips and several other additions’ – was like a complete stranger. He knew me (which was encouraging) but even when he told me his name I failed to find any physical connection with the 25 year old I once knew. Perhaps if we had talked for longer the situation would have changed.

I was looking at a video the other day of a holiday we spent last summer and I watched this old man walking around somewhat unsteadily and seeming to be a little outside his group, and realised of course that it was me. Age becomes a sort of costume drama in which you are still you, but are wearing the clothes that belong to someone else. Nothing we can do about it. ‘Mustn’t grumble’ a neighbour said to me today. O.K. But it is a curiosity, this process of ageing .

B.R.