Old people

It worries me that my generation is not going to make interesting old people like the old people of now. For example, in her mid-twenties my Granny was in charge of a ward full of Dunkirk evacuees with head wounds -- forty of them with just one other nurse to help her. One of the men wouldn't stop saying "bloody hell, bloody hell" over and over again. His parents and fiancee came down to see him and were really shocked -- they kept assuring her that he was usually such a polite young man. A few years after the war, when my grandparents were living with young children in St Albans, there was a knock at the front door. It was the same man, all healed, come to apologise for his bad language.

Try talking to someone in their seventies or eighties about their life. They have had to cope with bizarre and really testing things, like the polite lady who lives beneath me -- a few months back we were talking about a terrible storm in the night and she said for a moment she had thought she was back in the blitz. They always have interesting stories. My generation won't have that. We remember when there weren't mobile phones and there was a Berlin wall -- that's about it. Also, Bagpuss. Not really likely to invoke respect.

On the other hand, when I was a kid I remember asking my Mum when she'd like most to have lived, and she said between the wars -- except that there was too little of it. Sometimes I worry that we are living in the '20s, after something bad, and before something bad, in a bubble of false quietness. Being a disrespected and ignored old person might be a small price for a smooth life.