Growing older by stealth

It has struck me recently that age creeps up on you without your knowledge and certainly without your permission. In fact, I have just increased the magnification of this page by 10% because it was all looking a bit impressionistic. Ten per cent here, ten per cent there and before you know it you’re looking for large print books in the library. “The library?” you ask, “Do you really go there? I thought it was just a refuge for children and thrifty pensioners.” Although you’re lucky if you have a library at all if you live in the UK – nearly one quarter of them have closed since 2010 and our village library shut its doors due to Covid and has yet to re-open them. No large print books for me.

I’m really not complaining; I know that modern health care, better living conditions, more exercise and improved nutrition make us the healthiest older generation ever – sweet treats and salty snacks aside. We may have convinced ourselves that we are still the picture of youthful vigour, but old attitudes often linger and many people stay firmly attached to the mind-set of their youth, even if they don’t realise it. I went into London yesterday and had to smile when I looked in my bag and realised that in addition to the key items of phone, money and mask [I know, these are the times we live in], I had also included my reading glasses, a pocket atlas of London, a book written in the Victorian era and a cardigan, even though it was the hottest day of the year so far. Not the bag of a young person, I thought.

You might wonder what I was doing with a pocket atlas of London when I have Google maps on my phone, but I have never outgrown my childhood love of maps. It’s evolved into a grown-up love of maps that has been indulged with a giant map of the world on our kitchen wall, a nest of tables with maps on the glass tops and an already-out-of-date globe perched on a table. Directions on your phone are all very well, but the screen just gives you a snippet of the area and I need the big picture: I’m not happy unless I know how all the snippets fit together. I still manage to get hopelessly lost, even when armed with a phone and a pocket atlas and if I had more sense I’d make a point of concentrating less on the big picture and more on where I was going.

The Victorian novel in my bag was Three Men on the Bummel, written in 1900 by Jerome K Jerome, who is better known for Three Men in a Boat, the classic comic novel about a trip down the River Thames. A younger woman would probably be reading something like Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid instead of a very silly novel about three particularly un-woke men cycling through the German Black Forest, getting into all sorts of scrapes and offending the locals. However, this book is part of our family folklore. My parents rented a VW camper van back in the 1960s, packed it full of family and assorted friends (no seat belts in those days) and drove us all the way through France to a Spanish villa they had rented. My brother helped us to pass the time by reading Three Men on the Bummel aloud and we thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. I still think it’s hilarious. This makes me suspect that the mind-set of my youth hasn’t budged and might well be more peculiar than most.

But the reading glasses and the cardigan – what can I say? Sometimes you just have to accept things as they are. I think it’s called ageing with grace.