A New Perfume for the Old

Older people tend to be noticed only when people want to hear a story about them or make some money out of them. We get on with our lives, have a moan every so often, regret our declining powers, try not to be envious of the young, keep in touch with the real world and make what contribution we can to its betterment, and mostly -except when there’s some issue that really gets us going – we keep a low profile.

Michele Hanson writes regularly for The Guardian and does so from the perspective of an older person. Today she is fulminating about a new perfume called ‘Ageless Fantasy’. Apparently it smells of various fruits, cherry blossom, musk and vanilla, ‘and if you douse yourself in it’, says Hanson, ‘men will come sniffing around and think you are at least eight years younger?’ Should you want to buy it, it costs £59.

I am rather upset by this, she writes, not only are we meant to look unsightly: grey- haired, swathed in veins and wrinkles, ankles flopping over our shoes, widows’ humps and no waistlines to speak of, but now apparently we stink as well. We don’t, she says. Thank you for this latest demolition job, she adds sarcastically. It is one more thing for women over 40 to feel wretched about, as if we didn’t have enough already. Body odour is indiscriminate. No age is immune. Even young people can smell repugnant, although they tend to drown themselves in violent perfumes that zoom up your nose like a dagger. Not the tiniest hint of body smell is allowed. Sometimes on my walks, a perfumed jogger whirls past, she says, blasting us with their smell.

Apparently the label on the bottle claims that this new fragrance ‘defies your skin’s natural age-revealing scent’. M-m-m. Here we are with the world in the middle of a financial crises, and yet people who make money out of the credulous continue to go on marketing strange commodities to meet non-existent needs. That amazes me. More alarming is the thought that some people will believe what they are told and spend their latter years in a haze of musk and vanilla. At £59 a time.

B.R.

'A Trip Into the Oldie World'

The Guardian journalist Jackie Ashley has been suffering from a broken bone in her foot, and for months she has been hobbling around on crutches or sat on a wheel chair at the mercy of others. ‘A chastening experience’, she says in her usual Monday column. It has been, she says, a small hint of what it must be like to be old or disabled. Small but repeated inconveniences compared to what some people have to put up with, but it has been a revelation of what it must be like to be dependent on others. She discovered that in a wheel chair for some people you don’t exist, whilst for others ‘you need to be talked to –very – slowly – because – let’s face it, if you can’t use your legs you’re probably a bit simple’. She has seen humankind at its best and worst.

Ashley moves on from her personal situation to make some sharp comments on the provision of care and support for older people, quoting the recent statistic that there are now more pensioners in Britain than young people under the age of sixteen. 11.6 M of us. It can’t go on like this, she says. If medicine has produced fit, alert 70 year olds, ‘the notion that they shouldn’t work, even if they want to, is barmy’. The present level of state support can’t continue for the next generation of older people. The clear social contract about a guaranteed retirement age pensioners benefit from today, will be a thing of the past for people now beginning their working years. Politicians don’t like these topics. It doesn’t get them votes. ‘If I’m going to be expected to work in my late 60’s I would like to know now. If I need to cut back my spending to save for the years after that, politicians need to start insisting. That’s leadership’.

Arising out of her temporary experience of .being an oldie', Ashley is direct in her politicising of these issues, ‘politicians are betraying the millions who need more consideration now, and the rest of us who will one day be in their position’. She says ‘the trouble about discussing ageing is that it is depressing. ‘But’ she says, ‘there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had in one’s 80’s and 90’s. There’s a whole world of gallows humour, sardonic reflection and wisdom’. Indeed!

This is all so important. We are back in Julia Neuberger territory again.

B.R.