This was almost called ‘I’ve looked at age from both sides now’ but ‘all the old dudes’ was shorter and punchier. Yes, what follows is about age. More specifically, perceptions of it. Even more specifically, an attitude to age that drives me crazy (another song reference for anyone keeping count). Of course, it’s not unusual for me to bitch about things that annoy me (did you catch that last one? I’m going to stop now, I promise).
First, the Young Dudes
I recently read The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey. I bought it because staff at Waterstones in Taunton recommended it and their suggestions are usually sound.
Apparently, Jennie Godfrey does some stints working in the Taunton branch (she wasn’t one of the people who pushed the book). From the cover, I had it tagged as cosy crime, which isn’t usually my scene. I was pleasantly surprised it was a far grittier read, and enjoyed it all the more for that. What also interested me in the story of twelve-year-old Miv trying to track down the Yorkshire Ripper was there were parallels with a book I’m working on. The ages were in the same ball park, there is a serial killer referenced, a fear of ghosts, silly adventures, troubled domestic lives, and so on.
Amazon Reviews are deservedly positive, but a rare negative one caught my eye: “Miv is the most juvenile 12-year-old on the planet. As someone with a 12-year-old, Miv is more like 8/9. I suspect Jennie Godfrey does not have children.”
People who don’t have any offspring know nothing about children, so can’t have an opinion. That’s a given. As someone who doesn’t have children, I’ve heard it many times. If this attitude was applied across the board, that people who didn’t have first-hand experience of something shouldn’t voice an opinion about it, there would be tumbleweed blowing across the pages of social media. Hmm, maybe that’s no bad thing.
Breaking the comment down shows why it’s nonsense.
Miv is the most juvenile 12-year-old on the planet: Are we talking past or present? It sounds like the person who left the comment doesn’t realise children in the 1970s were very different from today’s.
As someone with a 12-year-old, Miv is more like 8/9: See above. Even people without children know that young people today have access to the sort of information that previous generations didn’t. There was a report on the radio this morning about the problem of children accessing online porn. I remember the first time I was exposed to what I can only describe as hardcore porn. A boy in my class got hold of a Swedish mag when we were about fourteen. I was horrified by some of the images in it; they could have put me off women for life. Yes. We were naïve.
I suspect Jennie Godfrey does not have children: I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t. But here’s something I do know. She was a child herself at one point. Not only that, she was a child at the time the book is set. From rough calculations, it’s unlikely the author of the comment was even born then. My question to them would be, ‘How would you know what it was like to be a child in the 1970s?’ The answer is, they wouldn’t.
Age is a mask which can hide the real person.
And the Old Dudes
The Channel 4 series Worlds Apart paired twelve young and old strangers into intergenerational teams for a treasure hunt across Japan. A nice idea in these times of societal division . . . apart from one thing. Where does the media dig up its ‘old’ people?
As one quite frail lady with a quivery voice explained to her twentysomething partner that young women never went to the pub in her day unless with their man, Andy remarked, ‘I guess that’s true.’ To which I replied, ‘Bollocks. She’s younger than you.’
Because of the way she behaved and spoke, both of us had incorrectly placed her as being a young woman in the 1950s rather than the 70s or 80s. Maybe there are women who didn’t go to the pub then, but we certainly didn’t know any. Nobody I know now looks, sounds, dresses, or acts as elderly as most of the older generation in the programme. I don’t think of myself as being any age; I am what I am. Neither do I notice ‘age’ when I’m with friends, which is why it stands out so much in the media.
Whenever a ‘pensioner’ was rolled out on R4 to moan about the removal of their winter fuel allowance earlier in the year, they invariably had voices as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. My ninety-four-year-old mother doesn’t sound anything like as brittle as some of these people. Of course, it was deliberate, designed to provoke sympathy.
Media manipulation aside, there are people who are old way beyond their years. Andy’s brother John looked and dressed decades younger than the way people his age are generally portrayed. When he went into a home because of illness, he had Planet Rock blasting out on his radio. In other rooms, some with patients of similar age, the music came from the likes of Jim Reeves and Roger Whittaker. The sounds the occupants heard when they were young men must have mirrored John’s – Cream, Hendrix etc – so why listen to music from long before their formative years and not of the period when they were young, footloose, and fancy free? This sort of behaviour has often been a mystery to me.
Sixty is the new forty, not the other way around. I guess some folk are just old before their time. Maybe there’s a model they believe they should conform to, even though the times they are a-changing. Why some still embrace an outdated stereotype baffles me. Anyway, apart from exasperating me, what difference does it make? Not that the people I’m referring to would ever sing along to that.
