You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It! Read online

  But unless you have serious memory problems there is a lot to be said for changing memory patterns. They don’t change, necessarily, for the worse. Indeed if you’re anything like me, they change for the better.

  As I get older, it’s true, I often can’t remember in the morning whether I’ve taken one of my seven pills (Free! All free!) or not. And I’m frequently forgetting where on earth I parked my car (sometimes I think I should leave a trail of crumbs, like Hansel and Gretel did, to retrace their steps in the woods), but there are all kinds of perks to our new memory patterns. Honestly.

  Joy of Forgetting Plots

  For a start, there’s the joy of forgetting quite a lot of useless things. These days, rather than wade through new novels that nine times out of ten I’ll throw across the room with rage and boredom long before I get to the end, I simply stick with the old favorites. The other day I reread Anna Karenina with enormous pleasure, and recently I seized on a republication of a favorite author, Patrick Hamilton, thinking it was one I’d never read, thoroughly enjoyed it and, when I put it into the Hamilton section of my bookcase (yes, I have one), found that I already had a copy that I had certainly read before. Then I know I watched the Bette Davis film All About Eve about thirty years ago when black-and-white movies were a staple on TV. And I remembered the odd scene. But I couldn’t remember the plot and the whole thing, upon seeing it again (though it felt as if it were for the first time), gave me a real thrill. Battleship Potemkin was another huge surprise and joy, even though my father took me to see it at the National Film Theatre when I was about fourteen. I have become a glutton for old black-and-white movies that I enjoyed at the time, like Victim and The Servant, not to mention On the Waterfront, which not only knock the socks off modern films but also, since I can’t remember anything about them, strike me as extraordinarily new and fresh.

  Joy of Forgetting Pain

  Though we tend to remember emotional rather than physical pain, I’ve forgotten quite how depressed I used to be, which is a relief. I’ve forgotten the ’60s, thank God (they say “If you remember the ’60s you weren’t there,” but I know my kind of forgetting is the equivalent of the forgetting of a dreadful trauma), and I’ve forgotten an enormous number of the ghastly men I ended up in bed with. Indeed, a puffy old alcoholic with a beer belly and a gray ponytail oiled up to me the other day in a club and breathed, “I remember your beautiful body, Virginia. ...” and I was able to reply, with shattering conviction to anyone within earshot, “Well, I can tell you, I don’t remember yours!” “Darling!” I added for good measure. Because it was true. I couldn’t. Thank God.

  Joy of Forgetting Useless Facts

  It must be awful for some men to forget facts, such as whether Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814 or 1815 (men, because of their brain makeup, have a tendency to collect and retain more facts than women; hence the large number of male, and small number of female, memory artists and savants). But there is some consolation.

  Who really wants to be like those rare people who can remember everything and whose minds are like those disgusting rooms that American ladies on TV, with the aid of several bonfires, are employed to declutter? In extreme cases these information hoarders can’t even operate normal lives, because their brains are just so stuffed with junk and they’re so busy remembering everything.

  There’s a wonderful passage in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet that tells of Sherlock Holmes’s amazement when told by Dr. Watson that the earth revolves around the sun. Holmes had never known this fact and was determined, once he did know, to forget it. “ ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across . . . You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.’ ”

  Pleasure of Long-term Memory

  Another plus of our new memory systems is that, although we may lose capacity in our short-term memory, our long-term memory often seems, oddly, to improve. These days, cracks seem to appear in the walls of my consciousness, revealing glimpses of the past as clear as if they were happening in front of my eyes. Sometimes I feel intense emotions about these moments that I never experienced at the time.

  I recently had a very odd moment in a carpet shop. I was flicking through samples and suddenly came across a brown square that was exactly the same color as an old coat my father used to wear. For a few seconds I was transported back to being a little girl, holding him by the hand. I could smell him, hear his voice, almost feel his cuff on my wrist. I was filled with an odd, poignant mixture of comfort and nostalgia. And then last week I saw a piece of graph paper in a French supermarket, and I was instantly back at my schoolroom desk, drawing graphs for the math teacher. The tears that sprang to my eyes were inexplicably pleasurable. I only have to smell the whiff of a bonfire and I’m immediately flung back into my grandparents’ garden in Herefordshire, standing shyly by, in the setting sun, as my grandfather potters around me, occasionally poking the fire with a stick.

  Brand-new Memories

  Memories can be like old photocopies, fading with time, and distorting and degrading every time they’re remembered anew. Sometimes these memories, created by constant remembering, are almost better than the original ones.

  The Plus of a Huge Past

  And we mustn’t forget that we oldies have a past. That’s something that no young person has. We have acres and acres, field upon field of experience, contact with different people from all walks of life. Our pasts are like caves of treasure, in which we can wander at our leisure, with the special bonus of not actually having to experience any of it ever again.

  The Problem with Names

  Now, the thing that most of my friends hate particularly about their memories’ changing patterns is that they forget names. But apparently we forget names only because they don’t actually mean anything. And anyway, there’s a simple solution. If we’re stymied at a party when a friend, whose name we’ve forgotten, comes up to us when we’re talking to someone else, we can easily just say (having primed the first friend to stick out her hand and say her name on meeting the other person), “Do you two know each other?” The person whose name you’ve forgotten will automatically say her own name in reply to your friend telling her hers.

  Another, less insulting, way of admitting you’ve forgotten someone’s name when you’re introducing them is to feign complete blankness. “Wow, I suddenly feel I’ve had a blackout! I can’t remember either of your names! Senior Moment!” (This is where the use of the phrase “Senior Moment” does come in useful.) If I’m feeling too shy to say, as I should, “I’m so sorry, but I’ve just forgotten your name,” I always use a sly trick and say, warmly, “Oh dear, I’ve forgotten your name . . . all I remember is that I know I like you!”

  The other infallible way of getting the conversation going with someone whose name you can’t remember is the simple, “How lovely to see you. And how is the old problem?”

  Memory Tricks

  When you forget words, there’s always the “sounds like” trick or the Alphabet Trick, in which you simply trawl down the alphabet until you reach the right letter and miraculously the word you want springs into your mind. The other day I was having lunch with someone and we were talking about making our own picture frames. I mentioned that at home I’d gotten a “thing that you use to make a frame . . . it’s made out of metal. ...” She was baffled. “I’ll remember by the end of the meal,” I said, wisely putting the whole thing aside so that my slow retrieval system could get going. I did a quick trawl down the alphabet to give the system a boost. Sure enough, in the middle of coffee, I suddenly found myself yelling, “Miter!” much to her—and my—surprise. And, indeed, to the surprise of the whole restaurant.

  Too Old to Care?

  Perhaps because I’m less anxious, now that I’m older, my own memory se
ems to be slightly improving. But, fundamentally, I’m pretty relaxed about memory—losing it or keeping it. So what if I walk into a room and can’t remember what I’ve come in for? It’ll come to me. So what if I can’t remember the name of the actress who played in that film, you know, the one about boiled rabbits? Who cares?

  And isn’t one of the reasons we don’t remember so much that our brains are already absolutely bursting with information? As Homer Simpson, a wise old bird, says, “Every time I learn something new, it pushes something old out of my brain.”

  If you look into my mind, you’ll find a lovely, dusty Victorian drawing room, crammed with stuffed birds, spider plants, bits of shells, old crockery, piles of dusty books, pictures. . . . Look into a young person’s mind and you’ll discover it looks like one of those grim, bleak, white minimalist rooms you see in interior decorating magazines. Stylish, but almost empty. No wonder a young person can remember everything. They’ve got nothing to remember. (And yes, I do know I’ve said something like this before. I’ve just chosen to repeat it, so there.)

  Of course I get annoyed when someone leaves a message on my answering machine, giving their cell-phone number so quickly I can never write it down fast enough to get it in one shot. Often I will have to listen to a lengthy message again and again just to get the full number.

  And it does irritate me that although when speaking I rarely use the wrong word, I find that my fingers can sometimes fail me when writing. For instance, when typing the word irritate above, I inadvertently typed the word imitate instead.

  Quite honestly I prefer my memory as it is now, compared with how it used to be. Most of the things I forget are things I would really hate to remember. Anyway, who needs memory? Again and again I can’t help feeling we are the luckiest generation alive. Just as we are starting to lose our memories, what happens?

  Along comes Wikipedia.

  3. Confidence

  I’m a big girl now, mummy,

  I can walk, holding on to a chair,

  and I can feed myself with a spoon

  and I can say “Moo.”

  I’m a big girl now, mummy,

  I can go to school

  and I can cross the road all by myself.

  I’m a big girl now, mummy,

  And I can come back home at whatever time I like,

  You’re bloody lucky I come home at all!

  I’m a big girl now, mummy,

  I sit on committees

  and boss other people around

  and lay down the rules about what you give my

  children to eat if I let them

  stay with you.

  I’m a big girl now, mummy,

  And now I can face death calmly.

  And then we will meet again.

  Mummy.

  I WAS ONE of those children who screamed with panic whenever my mother threatened to take me to a party. I’d suck my thumb in a corner, cling to her skirts in terror. Usually she left and I’d be the child hanging about with other people’s grandparents, refusing to play statues or musical chairs, and, when it came to teatime, shaking my head silently when offered a pink cupcake and refusing to sit at the table with others. The only thing I could whisper was, “Is it time to go home?” Or “When is my mummy coming?”

  My reports at school had me down as a child who needed to “come out of her shell” and the prospect of spending the night even with a close relative reduced me to tears of panic. When I was about seven years old, I once went to stay with a school friend who lived across the street. From her window I could see my parents’ bedroom. When, at about nine thirty, I looked out of the window and saw my parents moving around, I felt so homesick and became so hysterical that I had to be chaperoned back across the street, tears pouring down my face, holding the little suitcase I’d so carefully packed that morning.

  Shy has been my middle name . . . until now, in my sixties, I have the sort of confidence I can only describe as sickening. Okay, probably most of it’s an act but, if so, it’s one that could only be developed after a certain age.

  It’s such a relief. I can actually stand up to people. I can tell Jehovah’s Witnesses who ring my bell to bugger off. I can say, when my dentist tells me I need a filling, “Hang on! Before you go ahead could you have the courtesy to explain the procedure to me? It is my mouth we’re talking about here!” (And when he’s finished, and it’s all worked out nicely, I now have the confidence to kiss him on both cheeks and, using his first name, without even asking if he minds, tell him what a total genius he is.)

  If I find myself at a committee meeting, I often hear a familiar voice—mine—asking a question, which is usually something along the lines of, “I didn’t understand a word of that. Could you say exactly what you mean in two sentences? And in plain English please?” And suddenly I find that no one else in the room could understand it either and everyone’s very pleased someone was confident enough—and old enough—to ask. Indeed, sometimes I’m almost too confident. You know that moment when you hear yourself saying something really frightful that you were thinking privately, and it just leaps out like a toad from a princess’s mouth in a fairy tale? You suddenly hear yourself saying to someone who’s just been to the hairdresser’s and had all her locks cut off for a short bob: “Oh. But it was so pretty the old way you had it!” Scientists say it’s something to do with your synapses atrophying in your frontal lobes as you age, but I think it’s just extraordinary confidence.

  I have started, in my sixties, calling people “darling” and “sweetie”—like Dickie Attenborough. (Of course it’s often because I can’t remember their names, but we’ll gloss over that.) When I open a door and let someone go first, it’s no longer because I feel as if I’m a lowly servantlike person. No, I open the door and let them go first—sometimes actually insisting they go first—as a mark of superiority in a power struggle. I’m saying, “I have such ludicrous confidence in myself that it doesn’t matter to me who goes first!”

  Some poet once complained that “the years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.” But I don’t find it a problem. I can refuse things. Someone invites me, say, to hear her youngest goddaughter playing the oboe for charity in Ely Cathedral (hundreds of miles away) on a cold January afternoon, and I’m shamelessly able to say, “No, I’m so sorry. It’s a bit far. I do wish her the very best. I’d love to give something to the charity, but these days I just can’t do oboe concerts in Ely Cathedral. I’m just too bloody old!” Well, maybe I put it a bit more politely than that, but that’s the basic drift.

  It’s quite nice, too, now one’s older, being able to say quite loopy things like “I’m sorry I can’t come to supper—I’ve got the electrician coming in the following day.” It’s an excuse that is entirely baffling to the person who’s asking you, and is entirely irrefutable.

  I’ve even heard myself say, when someone asks me to go and see a film that doesn’t sound very good, “No, I couldn’t possibly come to that. I know I’ll hate it.” (Oddly, if ever I do have to see it, I find that, increasingly, I’m right in my judgment of films and plays I’ve never seen.) Age has given me a second sense about movies, rather like that of a blind man who can feel what an object is without seeing it. I only have to read that certain people have given it a good review, certain other people have given it a bad review, watch a trailer on YouTube, and ask certain key friends what they thought of it, and I know at once whether I’m going to like it or not. Actually, my confidence is such that I know not only whether I’ll like it or not but, more crucially, whether it is actually any good or not. Yes, I’m now so old that I no longer say things like “Well, that’s your opinion, and this is my opinion.” I now know quite categorically not only whether the issue is one that can bear a conclusion like that, or whether it’s one about which I have to say, “I will grant you your opinion. But when it comes to judgment, you are wrong. And I am right. There
are no two ways about it.” (Recently I discovered that Ezra Pound once said, “One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right and that was much righter than one knew at, say, seventeen or twenty-three.”)

  And, of course, lest anyone think me an old gloombird, I am quite happy these days to go to movies on my own. I don’t imagine that if I see someone I know in the foyer they’ll see me as a sad old biddy without any friends. I think they’ll say to themselves, “She’s incredibly bold to go to the cinema on her own. Wish I dared do the same.”

  Not only that, I’m now confident enough to walk out of films or plays—and not just in the middle or in the intermission. I walk out of them if they don’t have the decency to captivate me in the first ten minutes. When you’ve spent some time watching a lousy movie, little feels more pleasurable, after struggling past dozens of people’s knees and making your way blindly up a darkened aisle, than reaching the fresh air and light outside a movie theater and breathing a sigh of relief. Free at last.

  It’s nice, too, no longer to feel we have to be politically correct. I’m not saying I want to go around talking of golliwogs, because I never did, but the occasional slip, when you’re over sixty, is forgivable. And, sometimes, quite useful.

  I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’ve become a member of the “Me” generation. As a baby boomer I was born just at the end of the war, and it’s impossible to shake off a feeling that women are put here to serve. And, to be honest, I rather like it. I love taking other people’s clothes to the cleaners, doing their shopping and cooking, and making appointments for other people to see the doctor and so on. I actually enjoy trying to make others’ lives less stressful and get very miffed if that role is wrenched away from me. I loved being a mum and, during the brief period when it worked, being a wife. It’s not because I’m good, but simply because that’s how it feels comfortable for me. I’d be hopeless with a whole bunch of servants pandering to my every whim.