DEAD LETTERS
Recently, I was asked a small favour by the younger of my partner’s delicious nieces, Gaby (not her real name). She had written a letter of application for a sub-editing post and wanted me to run my eyes over it. I readily agreed. As Gaby is a terrifically smart cookie, widely read and highly articulate, I anticipated that this would be the work of a moment.
Not so. Indeed, I found it a ticklish assignment. I didn’t want to recast the letter in the words I would have used – no help in that – but I did feel some of her phraseology struck the wrong tone, both for a job application and for someone needing to be seen as rigorous in the matter of language. In my computing incompetence, I managed to delete the annotated version of her letter that I had prepared from her email attachment, so I rang her and talked it through instead.
It was a few days later that I finally realised what was wrong with the application. It was simply that no one knows how to write a proper letter any longer. No shame on Gaby, for whom epistolary style is as archaic as ploughing with horses. How often has she been required to put pen (or even keyboard) to paper in a formal manner?
When I was a boy, early in the reign of Queen Victoria, we were called upon to write letters rather frequently. Letter-writing modes were taught at school and, unless one were unlucky with one’s parents, at home too. We all understood the important distinction between “Yours faithfully” and “Yours sincerely” and we knew what the strange terms “inst” and “ultimo” meant. I still favour those terms in business letters and use them scrupulously (especially when I am writing a letter of complaint), even while expecting that the recipient will be puzzled. (For the record, “Yours of 3rd inst” means “your letter to me of the 3rd of this month” and “Mine of 25th ultimo” means “My letter to you of the 25th of last month”).
All givers of birthday and Christmas presents had to be thanked by post, carefully set out by hand in fountain pen on headed notepaper. We had to write everything at school in ink too; hence the proverbial pre-computer schoolboy with stained fingers. Now we have Mrs Janes, the bereaved mother to whom Gordon Brown wrote, complaining that the PM should have typed it. In days past, the idea of typing a personal letter would be unthinkable.
The telephone was used much more sparingly in those days. People would write to each other with news. Anything sent through the mail in a business or retail transaction would have a personal covering letter. Compliment slips were thought too sloppy and informal. Letters of acknowledgment were a matter of course – now they are an unexpected occasion for pathetic gratitude. And of course there was no email or texting.
These last two developments have played a great part in the destruction of writing style. I have no doubt that their spread has meant that many more people do actually write to each other than hitherto. But the conventions of these two modes have grown up spontaneously and therefore in an unstructured way. I still am uncertain whether to address somebody whom I do not know or to whom I am emailing for a business reason as “Dear” and to sign off with the usual “Yours sincerely” (if I know their name) or “Yours faithfully” (if the address is to “Dear Sir or Madam”). “Hi”, “Hello”, “Best wishes” and “Kind regards” seem to be the usual style in emails but I cling to older ways.
Texting, by its comparatively laborious method, is more informal and abrupt still. I have yet to learn the common abbreviations that young people bandy about. Only recently did I discover that “lol” is “laughing out loud”: I had assumed it to mean “lots of love”, a rather different sentiment.
What is everywhere apparent in the explosion of writing onto screens is that most people have no idea how to spell (and cannot be arsed to check their spelling with a dictionary) and/or that few of us look over what we have written before we send it. For a positive festival of bad spelling and worse expression, you need look no further than eBay. But I have several friends whose emails are frequently more or less incomprehensible, largely because they hit “send” as soon as they have written what they want to say and do not, as we were enjoined to do at school, “check your work”. We all make mistakes, of course, and those of mine that come to my attention are suppurating wounds for days (sometimes even years) afterwards – did I ever tell you about the phrase “a cheque shirt” that fetched up uncorrected in the published version of my first novel? (Cheque your work, indeed).
Gordon Brown’s letter to Mrs Janes has caused him enormous grief, both in the sense of his own unmistakeable anguish that his unavoidable shortcomings – crap handwriting, compromised eyesight – should have let him down in a way that has been made so public and in the sense that he has been mercilessly harried by a woman with an agenda and a newspaper with an axe to grind. I feel for him. My own penmanship is terrible, ruined by the years of taking scribbled notes as a student and then as a journalist, so now I type a letter unless it is really unavoidable: condolences for a bereavement provide just such an occasion. My eyesight is compromised too, though not nearly as profoundly as Brown’s. And like him I favour felt-tips over nasty biros.
Brown’s effort – which evidently now ranks with the Zinoviev Letter in the annals of political mischief making – was clearly thoughtful and well-meant. Mrs Janes was outraged that he misspelled her name, though it seems to me that, in his hand, it could quite as well have been read as Janes rather than James. Nick Robinson, speaking on BBC News, referred to her at one point as Mrs Jane. Surely that gives The Sun new ammunition in its campaign against the BBC too.
Mrs Janes went to The Sun in the first instance – whether by way of Max Clifford or on her own has not been revealed – and says that she has not been paid by the paper. Not everybody believes her. When Brown telephoned her to apologise in person, she recorded the conversation. The Sun says it had nothing to do with this recording. Not everybody believes it. The Sun of course has very publicly turned its back on the Labour government and is now doing everything in its power to ensure a Tory victory at the general election. There is little doubt that the Tories will go out of their way to please Rupert Murdoch by hobbling the BBC, allowing Sky to take a larger stake in ITV and doing nothing to force non-residents (example: R Murdoch) to pay tax on their income earned here.
Of course, The Sun has never made an error, be it of spelling, of fact, of judgment or of taste. Indeed, the mounting evidence that, on the matter of the Brown letter, it has wholly misjudged the public mood may very well be the first miscalculation that it has ever made.
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The other day, the son of my oldest friend turned 21. I sent him a message – “welcome to big school” – that he probably didn’t appreciate. But to the generation of his pop and me, born within ten days of each other in 1947, 21 will always be the age at which one attains one’s majority. Back in the 1960s, that’s when everything came to you, all the rights and responsibilities (save for sex, which was permitted five years earlier, as long as you were a heterosexual or a lesbian). So Tony and I could not vote in the 1966 general election, when we were 19. As it happens our respective partners --– Tony’s wife Tricia and my civil partner David who, spookily, were born on the very same day – both could vote in the 1970 election when they were 19, because the Wilson government had betweentimes changed the law and allowed 18 year-olds the vote. I always felt a tad deprived by this change, voting myself for the first time at the same 1970 election, although the Labour Party that I would have voted for in 1966 did get back into power.
Showing posts with label eyesight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eyesight. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Tati, summer 2007
photo: Barbra Flinder
The ONE-EYED DOG is KING
An update on Tati (further to the previous entry, Dog Days, immediately below): our PBGV is half-way through an enforced period of wearing one of those inverted lampshade affairs that prevent him scratching the delicate areas (in his case, the eyes) and, in practice, pretty much anywhere else. This of course is frustrating and uncomfortable for him. He is not supposed to get excited or to bark much or to go tearing off round our field so he is often walked on the lead (which is attached to a harness so as not to interfere with the lampshade) and, because he is naturally ebullient even in his reduced circumstances, he finds this stressful.
The worst part – perhaps even more for us than for him – is that he has suffered significant sight loss. His right eye, which underwent the operation, is now permanently longsighted so that he can see what he is aiming at but not necessarily what is along the route. And that is his good eye. His left eye has a partially detached front lens that is being held in place by the iris, which is functioning normally. The right iris was unable to do this job, which was why he had to lose the lens. But it means that effectively he has no useful sight in his left eye. So he finds himself much like Gordon Brown: blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other. Perhaps he too can raise 17 standing ovations in Congress.
On Monday he will again see the specialist and we shall learn where we go from here. It may be necessary at some juncture to operate similarly on the left eye or we may have to continue to medicate and monitor it, perhaps for the rest of his life. Currently, he is taking an extensive regime of medication, most but not all in the form of eye drops. He accepts all this with what, in a human, you would call good grace. In canine terms, he has certainly not lost his wag and, when distracted from his condition, he is still capable of getting excited about the prospect of a game or a walk, though of course we have to damp down any such excitement.
It is all most distressing but, as I say, more distressing for us who discuss and fear and speculate and question than for the dog who finds himself perplexed and quelled but, to pick up my refrain from Dog Days, living in the moment and adjusting and coping.
PS: What an outstanding episode of Shameless on Channel 4 this week, written by Jack Lothian and directed by Paul Norton Waller. Even though it was part of an on-going serial dreamt up by someone else (the mighty Paul Abbott), it still managed to shift some telling material and fashion some powerful individual scenes. British teledrama is still – just – alive and kicking.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
DOG DAYS
The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.
I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.
You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.
Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.
The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.
Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.
We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.
The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.
Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.
It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.
The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.
We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.
Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.
For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.
Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.
Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.
The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.
And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.
I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.
The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.
To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.
We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.
Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.
The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.
I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.
You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.
Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.
The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.
Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.
We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.
The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.
Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.
It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.
The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.
We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.
Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.
For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.
Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.
Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.
The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.
And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.
I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.
The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.
To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.
We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.
Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.
Friday, February 20, 2009
CRASH and BURN
I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.
So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.
In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.
By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.
So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.
Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.
Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.
It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...
I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.
So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.
In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.
By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.
So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.
Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.
Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.
It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...
Sunday, May 20, 2007
The LEAN and SLIPPERED PANTALOON
Today, May 20th, is Eliza Doolittle Day and, around midday, I shall complete 60 years of independent existence. I told the butcher so yesterday morning when he called me, as he often does, “young man”. “Some of us have already passed beyond that,” he said, without much show of sympathy as he selected the shoulder of lamb. He’s 63. When he returned from out the back with the bones for the dogs, he said “oh, it’s only a number, sir”. Then he gave me a quizzical look. “Mind,” he added, “it’s a big number”.
For years I’ve taken the view that it’s only a number. I remember the sensation, when I turned 33, that I had never thought of being that old. After that, I took it in my stride and was short with friends who groaned about getting older. Hell, the alternative is worse.
But this one seems like a rite of passage. There’s the bus pass, for starters. Not that I’ve actually got my bus pass yet. I thought I’d applied in good time. I asked my favourite woman at the post office for the form and, when she said nothing, I cried “you’re supposed to reel back in shock and amazement”. She came back quick as a flash: “Well, I assumed you were getting it for your mother”. But I forgot to feed into the calculation that I was dealing with the local council. So the paperwork is no doubt mired on some jobsworth’s desk. I expect I will have to pay unnecessarily for a few bus rides before I finally have the priceless pass in my hand.
If were a woman I’d be a pensioner from today. Not long to wait. Five years will zip by if the last 27 or so be any guide. In society’s view, I am formally old. If I am the victim of some crime or public incident, the press will describe me as “an elderly man”. At least I don’t have grandchildren which is just about the most defining fact the press grabs hold of if you’re over a certain age: “Local grandmother wins Lottery jackpot” – you know the kind of thing.
And there’s a sort of expectation about lifestyle that, if you’re not careful, you begin to take on board. I don’t think we’re about to start taking Saga holidays and going to Darby & Joan Clubs (are there still Darby & Joan Clubs?) But take last weekend, for instance. We caught a lunchtime train to London for two 60th birthday parties. One was an informal afternoon-drifting-into-evening drop-in do in a north London garden and living room. The other was a catered affair in the Conservatory at the Barbican Centre, for which the witty invitations were fold-out versions of a bus pass. This was firmly designated as 6.00-8.30pm so that anyone who wanted to would still have evening left in which to go on to something else. We got the train back west and were home soon after 10.00. Now, what sort of people under the age-range of 55-upwards go to two Saturday parties and can still have an early night? Only the religious, probably.
Of course, we are by and large a good advert for our years. When Jack Nicholson turned 60 ten years and a month ago, he said that he was a lot younger than his father had been at 60. I feel the same. In our parents’ generation, there was a vivid fear of being thought “mutton dressed as lamb” but nobody pays that any heed any more. There are “young” clothes, of course, but you really can’t wear those unless you’re 17 and thin as a wand. For the rest of us, we fight against age discrimination while wearing the kinds of clothes we wore in our twenties, dyeing our hair and having “work” done to make our ages more mysterious. There is much less evidence of youth culture now than when we invented it and many of the heroes of our youth are still working and are the heroes of the present young. There was a “generation gap” between us and our parents. Now we’re all Jack and Jill, whatever age we are.
The downside is that it’s downhill. In your 50s, I discovered – because certainly nobody warned me – that the aging process really takes hold. Run for a bus and you’re winded for the whole journey. Work in the garden and you can’t get out of the chair you just sat in for five minutes. Stay up late and you’re nodding off all the next day. Aches and pains become part of the warp and woof of daily life. Recovery from any extra effort takes far longer than when you took most things in your stride.
And if you didn’t have health problems before, they begin at least to threaten to hang about you now. My eyesight has become gradually compromised and it isn’t clear yet whether any surgical procedures will be recommended or even practicable. For someone whose home is bursting with still-to-be-read books and still-to-be-watched videotapes, this is gloomy stuff. And my lifelong disinclination to exercise is coming home to roost in various subterranean and not so subtle ways. I don’t suggest that turning 60 brings unfamiliar intimations of mortality. I never lacked for those. The playwright David Mercer, a largely forgotten figure now, was born 19 years before me and said, when he turned 45, that being that age made him aware of his mortality. At the time, I found that unaccountable for, at 26, I felt well aware that we pass this way only once and then not for long. Mercer died only seven years later, the same year as John Lennon. I hope to savour the full and rich old age that those two giants were cruelly denied.
But there are no guarantees in these matters, whatever age you are. In the late 1970s, a Sunday Times Magazine survey of acting talent picked out one man and one woman tipped to go a long way. They were Richard Beckinsale, who was to die of a heart attack in 1979 at the age of 31, and Susan Littler, who died of cancer in 1982 at 32. So you just have to hope for the best and try to present a moving target. There are no rules about these things. John Gielgud gave his last television interview to a rather probing Jeremy Paxman who wanted to know Sir John’s attitude to death, which Paxman evidently thought a man in his mid-90s should be daily expecting. I wish Sir John had snapped that, unless the interview were saved until after his death, he would certainly see out some of those watching and perhaps, who could guess, even Paxman himself. And of course, as I write in the small hours of May 20th, there is actually no knowing if I will indeed reach the full 60. I could pass in my sleep, still a quinquagenarian.
Today, May 20th, is Eliza Doolittle Day and, around midday, I shall complete 60 years of independent existence. I told the butcher so yesterday morning when he called me, as he often does, “young man”. “Some of us have already passed beyond that,” he said, without much show of sympathy as he selected the shoulder of lamb. He’s 63. When he returned from out the back with the bones for the dogs, he said “oh, it’s only a number, sir”. Then he gave me a quizzical look. “Mind,” he added, “it’s a big number”.
For years I’ve taken the view that it’s only a number. I remember the sensation, when I turned 33, that I had never thought of being that old. After that, I took it in my stride and was short with friends who groaned about getting older. Hell, the alternative is worse.
But this one seems like a rite of passage. There’s the bus pass, for starters. Not that I’ve actually got my bus pass yet. I thought I’d applied in good time. I asked my favourite woman at the post office for the form and, when she said nothing, I cried “you’re supposed to reel back in shock and amazement”. She came back quick as a flash: “Well, I assumed you were getting it for your mother”. But I forgot to feed into the calculation that I was dealing with the local council. So the paperwork is no doubt mired on some jobsworth’s desk. I expect I will have to pay unnecessarily for a few bus rides before I finally have the priceless pass in my hand.
If were a woman I’d be a pensioner from today. Not long to wait. Five years will zip by if the last 27 or so be any guide. In society’s view, I am formally old. If I am the victim of some crime or public incident, the press will describe me as “an elderly man”. At least I don’t have grandchildren which is just about the most defining fact the press grabs hold of if you’re over a certain age: “Local grandmother wins Lottery jackpot” – you know the kind of thing.
And there’s a sort of expectation about lifestyle that, if you’re not careful, you begin to take on board. I don’t think we’re about to start taking Saga holidays and going to Darby & Joan Clubs (are there still Darby & Joan Clubs?) But take last weekend, for instance. We caught a lunchtime train to London for two 60th birthday parties. One was an informal afternoon-drifting-into-evening drop-in do in a north London garden and living room. The other was a catered affair in the Conservatory at the Barbican Centre, for which the witty invitations were fold-out versions of a bus pass. This was firmly designated as 6.00-8.30pm so that anyone who wanted to would still have evening left in which to go on to something else. We got the train back west and were home soon after 10.00. Now, what sort of people under the age-range of 55-upwards go to two Saturday parties and can still have an early night? Only the religious, probably.
Of course, we are by and large a good advert for our years. When Jack Nicholson turned 60 ten years and a month ago, he said that he was a lot younger than his father had been at 60. I feel the same. In our parents’ generation, there was a vivid fear of being thought “mutton dressed as lamb” but nobody pays that any heed any more. There are “young” clothes, of course, but you really can’t wear those unless you’re 17 and thin as a wand. For the rest of us, we fight against age discrimination while wearing the kinds of clothes we wore in our twenties, dyeing our hair and having “work” done to make our ages more mysterious. There is much less evidence of youth culture now than when we invented it and many of the heroes of our youth are still working and are the heroes of the present young. There was a “generation gap” between us and our parents. Now we’re all Jack and Jill, whatever age we are.
The downside is that it’s downhill. In your 50s, I discovered – because certainly nobody warned me – that the aging process really takes hold. Run for a bus and you’re winded for the whole journey. Work in the garden and you can’t get out of the chair you just sat in for five minutes. Stay up late and you’re nodding off all the next day. Aches and pains become part of the warp and woof of daily life. Recovery from any extra effort takes far longer than when you took most things in your stride.
And if you didn’t have health problems before, they begin at least to threaten to hang about you now. My eyesight has become gradually compromised and it isn’t clear yet whether any surgical procedures will be recommended or even practicable. For someone whose home is bursting with still-to-be-read books and still-to-be-watched videotapes, this is gloomy stuff. And my lifelong disinclination to exercise is coming home to roost in various subterranean and not so subtle ways. I don’t suggest that turning 60 brings unfamiliar intimations of mortality. I never lacked for those. The playwright David Mercer, a largely forgotten figure now, was born 19 years before me and said, when he turned 45, that being that age made him aware of his mortality. At the time, I found that unaccountable for, at 26, I felt well aware that we pass this way only once and then not for long. Mercer died only seven years later, the same year as John Lennon. I hope to savour the full and rich old age that those two giants were cruelly denied.
But there are no guarantees in these matters, whatever age you are. In the late 1970s, a Sunday Times Magazine survey of acting talent picked out one man and one woman tipped to go a long way. They were Richard Beckinsale, who was to die of a heart attack in 1979 at the age of 31, and Susan Littler, who died of cancer in 1982 at 32. So you just have to hope for the best and try to present a moving target. There are no rules about these things. John Gielgud gave his last television interview to a rather probing Jeremy Paxman who wanted to know Sir John’s attitude to death, which Paxman evidently thought a man in his mid-90s should be daily expecting. I wish Sir John had snapped that, unless the interview were saved until after his death, he would certainly see out some of those watching and perhaps, who could guess, even Paxman himself. And of course, as I write in the small hours of May 20th, there is actually no knowing if I will indeed reach the full 60. I could pass in my sleep, still a quinquagenarian.
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