The Relativity of Ageing

The American composer, Elliott Carter will be a hundred years old next December and his 2006 short work for piano was performed by its dedicatee Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the opening night of the Promenade season in London’s Albert Hall last Friday. ‘When Pierre-Laurent Aimard who performs so eloquently, asked me to write a piece for him’, writes Carter, ‘I became obsessed with the idea of a fast one line piece with no chords. It became a continuous chain using different spacings, accents, and colorings, to produce a wide variety of expression.’

It’s an astonishing work. A tour de force. Watching the performance on TV it demanded the technical and physical ability of a pianist as distinguished as Aimard, who performs it again in New York in November and later in Chicago. Only a few minutes long, it employs just about all the notes on the keyboard, sometimes it felt as if all of them at once. The audience applauded wildly, as much as for the athletic skill of the pianist as for the quality of the music, although both were impressive.

Any further reflection on the composer belongs to our music blogs rather than here, but it is the continuing achievement of someone who is so old that I find amazing. What is it about the relativity of ageing? Some people are old at 60 and then others like Carter just go on – physically more frail of course – but mentally and in this case creatively, as vibrant as ever.

On this same weekend I visited one of the local Homes for the Elderly in Bath. None of the residents were as old as Carter, and all of them were women, and finding it difficult to relate to a visitor and to each other. One reason for the sense of inertia in such places may be how they are looked after. No longer managing to look after themselves, those who care for them – not an easy task - may too easily have too low an expectation of their ability.

The next day I travelled to the Midlands to visit an old college friend who has an incurable illness and can’t move around much. But unlike me, he has an astonishing memory. He was always good at anecdotes and it’s as if his brain has stored them all and without any difficulty he can say ‘oh yes, that reminds me…’ and begin another fascinating story from his eventful life.

Ageing can be monitored, but it can’t be reduced to fixed categories. We are all different.

B.R.

Are ageing people becoming fashionable?

Suddenly all the talk is about older people. For as long as I can remember the media spotlight has been on the young, their life-style fascinating to many of us (‘it wasn’t like that in my young days’) and their economic value a constant invitation to people who want to make money out of them. The middle-aged are left to plod on with their considerable responsibilities as best they can; soon they may be the media’s most neglected age group, even though they run the world!

But now it’s older people – their interests, needs and place in society - that are hitting the headlines. There have been a series of reports in Britain about the care of older people and the way in which society often discriminates against them, and we have referred to this in recent blogs. People are increasingly being offered early retirement, and subsequently find it hard to live on their savings and pensions. There is a public discussion going on about the right to continue to work for as long as people are able to do so, irrespective of their age, and its seems that quite a few people are beating the age ban. Otherwise future generations may have to survive as pensioners for the same number of years as they have worked. Our generation is in a unique situation.

Whilst the physical and psychological needs of older people are being recognised and to some extent addressed, the remarkable rabbi and activist Julia Neurenberg thinks very much more than that is needed. She has just published a book with the arresting title ‘Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age’. Apparently she argues that in the U.K. the way we view and treat the old has barely adjusted over the years and we are rapidly heading towards a crisis – in health, housing, finance and long–term care. It is shocking, for example, she says, that despite less than 1 in 20 British people want to reside in a care home in their old age, 1 in 5 end up by dying in one.

She argues that it is time that we examined how we look after ourselves as we age – and address issues that when we are young we take for granted as a right, not a privilege. She asks why we are not building suitable housing for the less mobile amongst us, enabling older people to look after themselves for longer? The opportunity to make life better as we age is being missed, but not necessarily because the solutions are so difficult... Are we even asking ourselves the obvious questions?

I shall read the book and report back!

B.R.

Lonely Men?

We were unable to attend the funeral of an old friend, but visited his wife recently. She told us about an event that had clearly been full of joyful memories, the sadness mixed with celebration. The last ten years or so of Kenneth’s life were marked by poor health and five of those years he was confined to a wheelchair. Much of that time he stayed in the house, visited by the members of his large family. 'He wouldn't join anything' his widow said.Is it true for most men that we are not natural joiners?

He was fortunate to have had a remarkable family, but apparently most children find it harder to relate to their ageing fathers than they do to their mothers, and when there’s a phone call from one of them, instinctively their fathers say ‘ wait and I’ll get your mother’. (I’ve done it!). When a life comes to its end, research suggests that one in five adults feel guilty about not seeing their older fathers more regularly. But how do you relate to a lonely man, when your own life is so active and different? I read of one enterprising son who advertised for a drinking companion for his lonely father, and it worked. One way out of the problem.

What is it about older men? Is there some truth in the assumption that they are not as naturally sociable as women and that whereas work was once your way into talking with other men, when you are retired there seems nothing much to talk about? The policy officer at U.K.’s Help the Aged organisation says that for at least 400,000 men ‘loneliness is their constant companion’. Since 2004 there has been an increase of 21% of men living alone, whilst the equivalent number of women has increased by only 1%. In this country there are over a million men over 60 who live on their own.

77 year old retired agony aunt Claire Rayner says its easy to get out of the habit of being sociable, and advises older people to accept any invitation that comes their way. She sympathises with older men who have lost their wives. Often wives are men’s social secretaries, she says, making things happen for them both. Men alone must somehow motivate themselves to keep things on the move by themselves.

But if men find it difficult to make friends with other men, what about women friends? I read in ‘The Guardian’ recently that one man who lives alone is visited regularly by a woman who cleaned the house when his wife was alive. ‘We don’t have much in common’, he says, she likes the royals and I don’t. She always reads me poetry and I can’t stand bloody poetry. But she’s very important to me. I depend on her to take me everywhere, and I’m very grateful to her. She’s the other half of my life in a way’.

B.R.