U.K.: The New Rules of Ageing

LONDON (The Sunday Times), July 9, 2006: I used to love the idea of being old — healthy-old, not decrepit-old, or, God forbid, care-home old — and looked forward to it tremendously. I had it all planned out: I was going to run a pub-cum-bookshop somewhere near the sea, with rooms, so that friends could come and stay, and lock-ins every night. I was going to spend my days pottering about, drinking gin, cooking pub food, learning to paint seascapes and reading fat novels. It was going to be bliss. But I’ve noticed recently that one isn’t really allowed to look forward to being old any more, or even to be old. Instead, people beyond the age of, say, 65, are supposed to have millions of affairs, lots of work on their face, and drive around in sports cars looking hot (as in sexy, not as in flushed). India Knight was born in 1965. She lives in London with her two children, writes a weekly column for The Sunday Times, and is the author of two novels, My Life on a Plate and Don’t You Want Me? I find this quite a tiring prospect. What is wrong with wanting to take things easy, and with quite liking the idea of letting go of all the things that are monumentally pressuring about being “young”? Thank goodness I’m not (that) old already. The news last week that Sophia Loren, who is 71, is to grace the pages of the Pirelli calendar clad in a “see-through” black dress and a pair of diamond earrings would have made me quite anxious. The boundaries of age have become completely eroded: nobody’s terribly surprised when a 13- year-old girl with the knowing looks of someone twice that age models for Vogue, and nobody’s terribly surprised when a septuagenarian writhes around on a bed for Pirelli. This ought to be a good thing — liberal and inclusive and not governed by strange, antiquated rules about what is and isn’t allowed or “appropriate” at any given stage of life. By the same token, Loren’s decision to pose en deshabillé would at first glance seem evidence of a marvellous and celebration-worthy revolution in the way in which women’s body-image and physical self-esteem don’t dwindle away to nothing just because they’re no longer spring chickens. But, of course, nothing’s that simple. She isn’t posing for Pirelli because she’s 71, she’s posing for Pirelli despite it. Loren has always had a particularly enviable figure and, well, she’s Sophia Loren. Age cannot wither her. Her appearance in the calendar doesn’t mean modelling agency talent scouts are going to be cruising nursing homes any time soon and nor, despite appearances, does it mean that 70 is the new 35. You wouldn’t blame anyone for being confused, though, what with grannies becoming pregnant, menopausal middle-aged women demanding babies and deluding themselves that natural pregnancy is going to be a cinch, and old ladies continuing to be sex symbols well into their dotage. And this is where the problem lies. It used to be so simple: you were young, then you were middle-aged, then you were old and listened to the radio and sort of mooched about. The demarcations were clear. Then it all went a bit blurry, thanks to the baby boomer generation — hello, middle-youth — who refused to put on pinnies, take up baking and generally be apple-cheeked and cosy. Fair enough, but they slightly ruined it for the rest of us, with the weird consequence that it is middle-aged women like me who now relax by making a cake, while women 20 years older than me run around London falling down drunk at parties, not quite wearing hot pants, but almost. The craze for domesticity — patron saint, Nigella — is not only to do with guilty working women trying to make things 1950sy and homely: it is also to do with the fact that we know we’d better get the domestic bliss in now, while we still can, because by the time we’re old we’ll all be expected to look like supermodels and have exhausting social lives. This isn’t supposed to sound ungrateful: some aspects of the age-erosions suit me very well, not least that it is possible for me, at 40, to buy my clothes from Topshop and find I’m by no means the oldest person there. I like having friends who are much younger than me, as well as much older, and I love that the older ones dress so fabulously. But I do see, almost every day, how confused people have become about the question of age. I have girlfriends who lie outrageously about how old they are, shaving off a good decade or more, because of the pressure to appear “young” at all times. I’ve never understood the point of this: wouldn’t it be better to add a few years and be complimented on how well preserved you are, rather than have people thinking, “Blimey, she looks utterly ancient for her age”? I know women whose maintenance regime runs to hundreds of pounds a month, not because they’re rich but because they’re absolutely hysterical about “lines”. I even know someone who has re-learnt all the minutiae of an adolescence she never had, to incorporate the Human League and Space Dust rather than loon pants and T Rex, so as to appear credible when she claims to be an age she saw the back of long ago. (This is a variant on another news story last week that showed everybody lies about what they were up to when young — total Sixties squares make up stories about having been a hippie, having love-ins, dropping acid and meeting the Beatles; their Seventies equivalents swear blind they were disco habitués, wore platforms and hung out with famous people; and, from the Eighties batch, so many people claim to have been at Live Aid that Wembley stadium would have had to accommodate more than a million people.) It all seems a bit messed up. I do wish we would get over our collective phobia of old age, or even middle-age. It is, to use an appropriately old-fashioned term, unseemly. Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.