Emma Soames We may be aware that we were lucky to be born at the dawn of the Welfare State, with greatly improved chances of a decent education and now owners of valuable (or not) homes. Or we may think of ourselves as a generation burdened with children, ageing parents and still with a mortgage. Above all we may pride ourselves as being much more like our children than our parents.
But baby boomers? We have other things to think about. Like how, as children of the Sixties, we are truly glad we didn’t die before we got old, thank you very much.
Rebecca Leach’s research from Keele University strikes rather a disappointed note. “Those born between 1945-1954 are failing to break new ground in their approach to growing old.” Our lives are conventional: we haven’t gone to live in communes or deserted our families to live an utterly hedonistic old age.
Well I’m sorry to upset the sociologists but I think we are ageing quite well. Twenty per cent of us have second homes and most of us are doing our best to stay healthy. We think globally and regard the world as our playground – we all love to travel, the further from Blighty the better.
And what alternative lifestyles were the researchers hoping to find? Radicalism in old age can be frankly undignified. Just because we tore up the rulebook when we were young doesn’t mean to say we should live like hippies now. Hedonism is really not a good look after about 25, let alone 62. There are surprisingly many delights about ageing that are immeasurable – the joy of the moment, a capacity to be grateful for things that we so long took for granted, the chance to change our lives in small ways and to get pleasure from them. And if that means being labelled a conventional baby boomer, I can live with that.
I have in front of me some truly vile greeting cards that play on the idea of how utterly ghastly it is to grow old. Aimed at ladettes, they feature distorted pictures of old women and jokey captions that rely on incontinence, shopping trolleys and badly applied lipstick – all of which are implied to descend on the birthday girl any day now. The cards are truly ugly in both spirit and design.
Like many jokes, they rely on bullying – if you don’t buy into it, you don’t have that all-essential characteristic, a sense of humour. But we all know that this is no longer acceptable as an excuse for crude and cruel images, even those labelled “nostalgic”. If these cards were about ethnic minorities the manufacturers would be run out of town – quite rightly so too. But it is still apparently OK to depict old people in this frankly pornographic way. So, would the clever clogs at Emotional Rescue Ltd please go back to the drawing board?
Struggling to think of a present for an old relative or friend? May I suggest you have a look at a box of memory jogger cards called Many Happy Returns. They are the brainchild of Sarah Reed, a trustee of Contact the Elderly. Not content with working for the charity which gets old and vulnerable people out for a monthly tea party, Sarah has a website that deals with how the generations connect with each other – or rather dismally fail to.
She realised that the young – all of us under 65 – don’t know how best to talk to older people and in many cases, are scared of them. Many Happy Returns cards feature on one side an everyday image from the Forties – like an old Decca record or children playing in the streets – and on the other are questions related to the image. Cleverly, much of the information the answers will contain fits in with the National Curriculum.
“Many of the very old don’t understand too much about modern life,” says Sarah Reed, “but if you talk to them about their personal experiences they respond brilliantly – and the young get inspired by it too.”
She’s not kidding. Recently she took a group of primary school children into a care home where many of the residents suffer from dementia. Using the cards, the children engaged with the residents and the level of chat and laughter rose right across the room. Everyone joined in and the children asked to visit again.
A truly merry time was had by all. So get a set for an old relative or friend - and next time you take the kids round for tea you will be amazed at how brilliantly it works. A set of cards costs £17.99 and can be purchased online from the website.