Both Sides Now

From the personal ads in our freebie newspaper: “Dublin Woman, 79, seeks older male companion”…
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I’m fed up with younger men, guys in their 60s who think they’re great just because their hips are the same age as they are. They all saw The Graduate as teenagers and have been obsessed with older women ever since. It wouldn’t be so bad if any of them looked like Dustin Hoffman, but most of them look more like Dustin the Turkey, with their scrawny faces and scraggy necks.

I’ve decided to look for an older man. Not that I’ve given up all thoughts of, er, that, I mean Joan Collins is 79 too and still goes like a train, but I’d like a gentler man, a gentle man, a gentleman. We could get a dog and take it for walks along the beach. In fact we could get a tortoise and take it for walks along the beach.

And we could sit companionably reading, and use our free-travel passes to go on day trips to Killarney or Belfast. We could talk about the old times, when you had to saw loaves into lumpy slices with a bread-knife the size of a hack-saw. We could talk about when you could buy broken biscuits, or just one cigarette, or Mackeson stout. It’d be nice just to have someone to talk to. I’ve been alone too long.

We wouldn’t grow old together, it’s too late for that, but we could be old together, and that might just be enough.

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I’m going to ring her. I’ve hemmed and hawed about it for a week, but I’ve decided to chance it.

After all, you’re only young once, and in my case that was an awfully long time ago. You don’t get a lot of invitations when you’re 83, and while she wasn’t writing to me personally she was aiming at a pretty small target group, it’s unlikely that she’s going to get a thousand of us wheezing our way up to her door.

I’m not over the hill yet, though I can certainly see over the brow. I still have my own hair, though not that much of it, and I can still waltz, so long as there’s a chair nearby to sit down in afterwards.

And it will drive the kids mad. I’ll tell them I’ve met a young wan, which will not be a lie, and let their imaginations do the rest. They’ll ask me if I’m off my rocker, or my medication, and I’ll say “oh, that reminds me, I must see if I can get Viagra on my medical card” just to see the look on their faces.

Not that I’m expecting any of, er, that, though Joan Collins is 79 and still goes like a train, I’d just like someone you’d call a lady, though someone proud and strong, the kind of girl to whom the expression “I gave him a piece of my mind” doesn’t mean she’s had a lobotomy. We could sit in the garden together on sunny evenings, and I could fetch her a blanket when it started to get cool. We could talk about the old times, when we only had three channels and had to walk over to the TV to change them. We could talk about where we were the night of the moon landing, or when Elvis pelvissed on the telly, or when JFK was shot (I’d tell her I was standing on a grassy knoll, just to see the look of surprise and then the eyes-up-to-heaven smile on her face). We wouldn’t have shared memories, but we’d have memories to share.

I’m going to ring her. We won’t grow old together, it’s too late for that, but we could be old together, and that might just be enough.

Last in The Line

Millvina Dean, the last Titanic survivor, has died.

She was just nine weeks old when the ship sank in 1912, and lived to be 97.

One of the reasons I’m mentioning this is that she was a guest on the Late Late Show the time I was a member of the audience (how I ended up in the audience is a whole other story). She was vivacious and funny, and seemed determined to enjoy the second chance at life she had been given to the full. As she said herself, “if it hadn’t been for Titanic I would have just lived an ordinary life. Once they found the wreck, and then they found me, I was able to travel all over the place, having the best of everything.”

The other reason I’m mentioning it is because of how the Irish Times refers to her in the last paragraph below:

It is, as always with the Times, painfully accurate.

I think Millvena would have found it hilarious.

Like a Dragon

So, not too bad. I do have to get one tooth replaced by a crown though. The dentist asked would he take the impression there and then, saying that there was a small chance doing this might actually pull the tooth out. Fuck that – it’s hard enough being the old guy in a company full of beautiful young women, without being the old gummy guy as well. So I’m going on Monday 15th and the crown will be ready on the 18th, & if the tooth comes out on the Monday, well, then I’m taking 3 days holidays.

I do wonder, though. This will be my third crown, as well as all the Tinman pacemaker stuff. What percentage of my body weight has to comprise man-made materials before I’m officially classed as an Artificial Life Form?

Anyway, the dentist cleaned up my teeth, dug out all the gunk, etc, then told me this story. He had an old guy in yesterday and did the same for him (and now the reason for the strange title of this post will become clear). The man stood up, poked his tongue against his teeth, and said “that’s great, now I can do my Christmas trick for my grandkids”.

“And what’s that?” asked the dentist.

“Spitting gin though the gap in my front teeth into the fire.”

Old people rock.

I Nearly Fell Out of my (Bath)chair

The Irish Times carried an advert yesterday for the Over 50s Show, which is taking place in the RDS next weekend. The Show, organised by ‘Senior Times’ magazine (nah, me neither), is described as “Ireland’s Lifestyle Event for Older People”. The ad has 3 photos of celebrities who will be performing there: Gerry Daly (“Gardening Clinics”), Sonny Knowles (“The Legend Returns”), and Sil Fox (“Mr Comedy Himself”).

Get. Bloody. Stuffed.

Not me, yet

The organisers seem to think that when we turn 50 someone takes our aesthetic taste and puts it into a blender to turn it to mush, as they do with the food that we now have to eat. I do not regard either Sonny Knowles or Sil Fox as entertaining, and cannot imagine what age I’ll have to reach before I ever will. Nor am I interested in a “gardening clinic”, whatever the hell that might be.

My dad is 75 and would scoff at this crap. He still has Pink Floyd on his iPod (hear that, Senior Times, older people have iPods!).

If the rest of the show is as stereotypical as the celebrities they’ve hired, I can guess what the exhibits will be like. Ads for Denturefix and Sennakot. Brochures for Nursing Homes. Discreet leaflets about erectile dysfunction.

Perhaps they’ll go all out and have a Undertakers’ stand.