It’s not how old you are that matters – it’s how you are old
‘Old age is flexible depending on how you feel.’ Photograph: Alamy
Polly Toynbee’s article about old age neatly exposes the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary old age (How old is too old? I’m 77 and I don’t know yet. But I will when I get there, 4 May). I am now in my 90th year, nimble of mind but disintegrating in body as cancer and heart conditions take their bows in the theatre of my aged body. Old age is no longer God’s time of threescore years and ten – modern medicine and better social conditions have subverted God.
I was born in the mid-1930s. My working-class forebears were all members of the labouring classes when it was a matter of luck to reach 60 years of age. I had one grandmother left when I was born, who died in 1947 at 66 years of age. Very old for those times. In my late teens and during national service, I began to resist the idea of being a general labourer and took an opportunity, provided by the much-mourned London county council, to make my own social mobility journey into the professional classes.
That enabled me, in late middle age, to retire early and return to university and postgraduate education and the award of my PhD at the age of 77.
Education, I believe, has contributed much to my reaching into deep old age, still resisting the siren calls of death. Such calls have always been there somewhere, but they now grow louder and more insistent. However, my mind still attempts to keep them at bay.
Tony Austin
Cardiff
• I am in agreement with nearly all of Polly Toynbee’s fascinating article. I am the same age as she is, but rarely think about ageing. I fortunately look about 10 years younger than 77, and behave the same as I have always done.
I have been leftwing (or a bloody hippy as my brother-in-law once called me) since I was 20. I was a member of the Socialist Workers party in the late 1960s and 70s, and once did a pro-choice talk in a street in Brixton. I have had three careers – radiography, biology teaching and five-elements acupuncture. The first two I gave up after 10 years because they were not challenging enough.
A while ago someone told me that they were looking to buy a book on what to do when you get old. Just get on with your life, I said.
Liz Hall
Condicote, Gloucestershire
• Polly Toynbee is quite right – old age is flexible depending on how you feel (and she really is quite young). I passed 90 recently through a combination of the NHS, supportive family, no meat or smoking from choice and much gardening and walking.
The downside is that so many family and friends have died, often much too young. The upside is that many of us pensioners are comfortably off, which means we can travel (often at no cost), enjoy special prices for much entertainment, and fill every moment with activities that we choose. Charities couldn’t survive without us volunteers, so let’s live as long as we can do so independently.
Alison Watson
London
• Maybe you are old when people start asking: “Do you mind me asking how old you are?” It happened last year three times up Red Pike in the Lake District. Now it is moving closer to home, and a woman asked me recently in the swimming pool.
Margaret Squires (nearly 85)
St Andrews, Fife
• Thank you, Polly Toynbee, for putting into words, far better than I ever could, my feelings precisely about age. I’m a couple of years ahead of her and subscribe to the view that one should never complain about growing old: it’s a privilege denied to many.
David Shannon
Ashton-under-Hill, Worcestershire
• In answer to the question how old is too old, just beware the word “sprightly”.
Mike Woodcock
Olveston, Gloucestershire
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