Penelope Lively....

.... who is aged 76 is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. Quoted in today’s ‘Observer, she says that chronologies irritate her. ‘There is no chronology inside my head… The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once’.

The thoughts she has given to one of her characters have become her own. ‘The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at a flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provided these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours…The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life.’

This is very near to my own experience. I find this movement from one thought to another – the links sometimes apparent but often inexplicable – can be refreshing; occasionally disturbing, especially when I am reminded of things I would prefer to forget. Why have I remembered that particular incident, I wonder? Why of all the important things that have happened to me, why has this or that tiny fragment of memory remained to refresh or sometimes to plague me? I watched on TV last night a wonderful Promenade concert from the Royal Albert Hall in London. As a young man I was often in the audience, night after night. Last night I didn’t only watch. I was there!

I find Penelope Lively’s insights very helpful. ‘In old age’ she says, you realise that while you you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will.’ I wonder if others have this experience as I do. Putting the years of our life in order is often an impossible ambition, but in Lively’s terms, shuffling the pack of cards to evoke the good years of our lives is one of the rich gifts of age.

Bryan

The Bigger Picture

The U.S. Census Bureau has published a comprehensive report, ‘’Ageing World : 2008’ *which suggests that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65’s is expected to almost double from 506M in 2001 to 1.3B.

They have come up with some astonishing statistics, such as the number of people over 65 throughout the world is increasing on an average of by 870,000 a month. The oldest old people aged 80 and older, are the fastest growing portion of the total population in many countries. Europe is the 'greyest' continent, with 23 of the world's oldest countries. By 2040 more than one in four Europeans are expected to be at least 65 and one in seven at least 75.

While developed nations have relatively high proportions of people aged 65 and older, the most rapid increases in the older population are in the developing world where the older population is more than double than that in developed countries, and is also double that of the total world population. In 2008, 62 percent (313 million) of the world’s people aged 65 and older lived in developing countries. The 65-and-older population in China and India alone numbered 166 million in 2008, nearly one-third of the world’s total. By 2040, today’s developing countries are likely to be home to more than 1 billion people aged 65 and over, 76 percent of the projected world total. And this in countries that often have much earlier deaths because of malnutrition and poverty. In Zimbabwe for example life expectation has fallen to 40.

All this raises enormous issues of governance, social care, family life, national wellbeing, justice for rich and especially for the poor, the use of the earth's resources. But I tend to be sceptical about such figures as these, although they are the result of research from what is an apparently highly regarded source. They are in the end only projections and whilst deserving recognition by governments and world bodies, they are more important as guidance than they are as fuel for apocalyptic prophesies of doom.

Writing in the inestimable Guardian yesterday, Zoe Williams says that the spectra of decades of disability at the end of life is not borne out by the figures. For her our ageing world is ‘brilliant news. This is what we have been working towards…maybe there is just no pleasing a statistician’.

Having acknowledged the global picture, euroresidentes’ blogs on Ageing will no doubt soon return to the more personal ones!

Bryan

*The full report is available from www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p95-09-1.pdf

Longetivity is in the News

Younger people must be fed up with us older ones – certainly if they listen to the U.K. radio and buy newspapers. There was an excellent article in The Guardian a few days ago about Care homes. The author made the mistake of stating that old people go to such homes ‘to die’. There is a chorus of protests about that slick simplicity in the paper today. One writer says people go to care homes to be cared for and to continue living, not to die.

There has been remarkable coverage of the death of Henry Allingham last Saturday. A first world way veteran, at 113 years of age he was the world’s oldest man. He became a celebrity in his latter years. Responsible for having had six grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 14 great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild gives him fame even without the military connection. Walter Cronkite, the respected CBS News journalist for many years has died at 92. A typically British news story this week has been about the golfer Tom Watson who didn’t quite win the Open Championship, but became everyone’s hero because of his age at 59.

The anodyne TV programme (i.e. I don’t like it!) ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ has just lost one of its judges, Arlene Phillips who at 66 has been replaced by someone 36 years younger. Age is suspected to be the reason. And there is the continuing criticism from all quarters that compulsory retirement is a social injustice. I have read that when the pensionable age of 65 was decided upon, only 20% of people lived beyond that age, now its 80%. Apparently the US stopped having a compulsory retirement age some years ago; when shall we do the same?

But if, as is claimed, there will soon be more people over 65 in the U.K. than children under 5, what about young people as they grow up into a society of the seriously mature? I’ve read a blog on another website where the correspondent agrees with anti-age discrimination, but says that ‘younger people were promised they could enter the workforce with a lot of opportunities waiting for them as the baby-boomers would slowly leave the market en masse to retire. Instead, they now have to face a market saturated with people over 65 who want to remain at work - because they're too poor not to’. What can we do about correcting an injustice by creating another one, the writer asks? Indeed.

Amongst all the huge and multiple problems that surround us and make politics an increasingly difficult and perhaps even impossible art, the consequences of ageing populations for people of whatever age, takes it’s necessary place.

Bryan

Being Kind to Yourself

Getting older brings a variety of frustrations. In the mornings it takes longer to get yourself ready for the day. Clothes once slipped on in a moment have to be engineered onto your body, laces on your shoes take longer to get tied, its not so easy to find the gap in your jacket to put your arm through. It can involve a lot of hopping about before the process is completed. And then you go from one room to another in search of something you need, and then forget what it is, retrace your steps and then hopefully remember. You walk more slowly than you used to, foot carefully following foot, doing with care what once you never gave a thought to. Looking ahead these days it becomes more difficult to focus your eyes, and as a bus approaches you can be the last to recognise that it’s the one you want as you join the queue to board it.

You meet people who may know you more readily than you recognise them, and a long conversation can take place as you decode it and recognition slowly dawns and you perhaps even remember names as well as connections. I had such an experience recently as two very friendly people who clearly knew quite a lot about me started a three way dialogue in which I was a very stumbling third party. Only when it was over and with help from my wife, did I fully know who I had been socialising with. Names are so important and whilst often one is aware of the person, unless you can trace their label they are likely to doubt that you know them. It can involve a whole lot of recollection – places, moments, events, before you get there. All part of the memory game.

And then there are aches, pains and general physical deterioration! This can be a problem – is my hearing getting worse or is it that I am finding it difficult to concentrate on what people are saying? Is my persistent tiredness at the end of the day the inevitability of age or should such things as these mean yet another visit to the doctor?

We should have an open forum on ‘age management’, although at the moment the term seems restricted to issues raised when people work beyond retirement age . I am amazed at how many very elderly people do manage. I see some of them slowly and with great carefulness, moving around our city, still getting to the shops but with great difficulty and – as I now realise – often in great pain. Others maintain a lively life style, determined to resist the limitations of age. But go to bed earlier than they used to!

So it may be frustrating, even alarming, this ageing business ....but all the time we need to be kind to ourselves.

Bryan

Care Homes for the Elderly*

It’s something few of us want and many of us dread : to leave your own home and in the company of other older people to be cared for by people paid to do the job But sometimes it has to happen. It is estimated that in the next twenty years there will be twice the number of people living who are over eighty five years old, many of whom may not be able to look after themselves. It was announced yesterday that Parliament’s House of Commons is to receive ‘shortly‘ a set of proposals for improving residential provision. In my working days I often visited care homes run by local councils. Too many of them were badly administered with little thought given to how to create interest and variety for people mostly confined to where they lived. Some were appallingly under-resourced. It has got much better.

But the provision is changing rapidly from homes administered and supervised by local authorities to ones that are run sometimes by charities but more often by companies in the business of making profit out of need. According to analysts Laing and Buisoon, of the 271,100 residential homes in the U.K. in 2008, only 35,400 were provided in council-owned homes. Private sector homes on average offer lower rates of pay and less job security than the public sector. When a Council care home in the county of Essex was transferred to a private firm, one supervisor’s salary was dropped from £25,000 to £18,000. Many of her colleagues she says had to find second jobs. The firm in question said that changes had to be made ‘for compelling business reasons.’ Such companies complain that cash-strapped Councils are not paying adequate fees for residents, but the average pay for care workers is only £6.56 an hour with some employers paying less than the minimum wage, currently at £5.77.

Partly as a consequence of this, more than 25% of home workers recruited in 2007 were foreign-born and whilst often they come with a good work ethic and are respectful toward older people, language difficulties can make communication with residents difficult. The proportion has doubled over the last ten years.

I shall look with interest at the government’s report when it comes out, ‘shortly’.

Bryan
* I am indebted to an article in the ‘The Guardian’ 08.07.09.by Ann Bawden for the information in this blog.