There is precious little that’s good about growing old. Obviously, the main one is that it beats the alternative. But the older I get, and the more I look around and see my fellow citizens of the world growing old with me, the less attractive the prospect of living to a fine old age becomes.
For weeks, I have been feeling the after effects of a football injury I suffered over 40 years ago, a debilitating back complaint that surfaces occasionally, this time on a recent holiday when bending down to fill my water bottle. I’m ‘wearing-in’ a new pair of shoes at the moment, but today my arthritic foot is so painful I can’t even put an old shoe on yet. And most annoyingly, I have a painful ear infection which has caused more than partial deafness in my less deaf ear, meaning that anything that involves listening is next to impossible. President Joe Biden, if he reads this blog, will know the feeling only too well.
Biden, who has been a great president, he really has, is even older than me, at 81. He’s more doddery than I am – and that’s really saying something – and increasingly he is making the kind of verbal blunders that make you wonder if what’s going on in his brain is more than just the signs of old age. At an age where people should be enjoying long SAGA holidays, if they’re not already largely infirm, Biden is seeking to remain president, the most powerful politician in the world. His opponent Donald Trump, himself living in a parallel universe and making long, rambling speeches packed with gobbledegook and lies, suddenly appears to be the smartest man in the room. Unlike many, I do not write off people because of their age – why, for example, is England fast bowler Jimmy Anderson, 42 next week, being axed from the national cricket team when he is still arguably the best at what he does, possibly in the world? – but in the case of Biden, and Trump for that matter, it does matter.
In my own case, I am not at all surprised by the inevitable physical decline. In many ways, I am lucky to still be here, unable to hear anything or walk without a pronounced limp. The signs of decline, which weren’t there in my fifties are unquestionably there in my late sixties. I am on enough medication to empty an average-sized pharmacy and that is not going to change in a good way. The exact opposite, actually.
I dreamed last night – and this is a recurring and highly stressful and anxious dream, the only dreams I have these days, apart from the embarrassing naked in public dreams, that is – that I had still not retired from work. I was making calculations as to whether I afford to retire on a reduced income. What a dream that is, given that I actually retired from full time work over 10 years ago. In the cold light of day – well, it is the British summer, so it’s usually cold – I know that I had ten largely great years of doing what I really wanted to do in life, albeit on a reduced income, and if I had only just retired now, many of my dreams for later life might be in tatters.
And this is the point really. Joe Biden, with a distinguished political career on quite clearly one of the great presidents of my lifetime, if not the best, should really be living out his dotage doing the kind of things that 81 year old people do. Spending time with family, loafing about in the autumn or even winter sunshine of one’s life, reading, listening to music and just hoping that what’s left of his physical and cognitive well-being allows him to do that. When you are referring to Volodymyr Zelenskiy as ‘President Putin’ and your own vice president Kamala Harris as ‘vice president Trump’, it is impossible to conclude that there is nothing wrong.
For Joe Biden, read Donald Trump, read you and me, because unfortunately this is only going to end one way. As I hobble around the house, the radio on full blast so that I can actually hear it, as I fear they can several streets away, I am very aware of how this goes and how this ends.
I am optimistic that in a few days, I will have regained what’s left of my hearing and that my foot, and other arthritic bits, will feel less painful and I’ll be fully mobile again. It may only be a temporary reprieve and God knows what other ailments of varying severity are just waiting round the corner for me. ‘No one here gets out alive‘ by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins was probably the definitive biography of Doors singer and lyricist Jim Morrison and the title applies to all of us.
These days, I am getting a taste of what could await me when and if I reach serious old age. I am trying to rage against the dying of the light, with, I admit, limited success. Getting old kind of catches up with you. I must have heard a million people saying things like, ‘I don’t feel old. I feel just the same as I did when I was young’ and, like them, in my head I do, too.
Time and tide wait for no man, said Chaucer in his Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale in about 1395. They wait for no woman, either, but I suppose women didn’t count in those days.
I think Talk Talk’s genius, the late, Mark Hollis said it all:
