GRIFF RHYS JONES: Now I’m 70, I’ve a **** it listing

I’ve simply reached the nationwide velocity restrict. The biblical allocation. You could gibber that three rating and ten is the brand new two rating and ten.

You can attempt to reassure me that these are ‘the wonder years’. That a minimum of I’m not 80, that I can put on purple and shout on the visitors, that I can change into an everyday contributor to the Oldie journal, that it’s only some extra years till the ‘National Treasure Status’ for little greater than the power to survive Rik Mayall, Mel Smith and Robbie Coltrane.

But I can’t be sanguine about being 70. I hadn’t deliberate for this. My dad advised me that, regardless of a portly kind, skinny white hair and age spots, the bloke inside him was nonetheless basically a pupil. The one he’d been on the age of 20.

I’m about 14. Yes, I grew up, put apart quick trousers and labored out find out how to keep away from bores, however someday across the early-interest-in-girls years I turned my mounted, immutable self. I don’t suppose the important interior me has modified since then.

For God’s sake, I nonetheless like toys. I purchased a mannequin steam beam engine solely three weeks in the past. I crave cream desserts and peas (in the identical meal if not on the identical plate). I don’t faux to any further knowledge or diminished urge for food. I’m not and by no means shall be ‘mature’. Only half my face grows a beard.

When I meet an outdated individual, by which I imply a 50-year-old, I naturally suppose they’re a bit doddery, gradual on the uptake, presumably ‘elderly’ in comparison with me. I went for my flu jab the opposite day, in the identical place that I received the Covid one — some half-abandoned hut on a Suffolk showground — and the improvised clinic was thronged with stooped outdated white-haired folks, strolling in small steps.

Without pondering, I assumed I had come to the fallacious place. This is not any lie. I assumed ‘care home’ and ‘mistake’. I turned to get out, however a passing nurse took me by the elbow and gently turned me round.

‘Here we go, dearie, this way.’ That’s what she mentioned. To me.

‘But you don’t perceive, nursey. I’ve a mirror in my lavatory. I can stand below the sunshine at a sure angle and I look about 40. Don’t get me confused with these outdated crocks.’

But 70! There’s no fudging that, is there?

When I turned 60, my daughter received all her mates collectively and threw a celebration. They dressed up as nurses, served canapes in medicine trays and pushed my mates and me round in wheelchairs. Oh, how we laughed.

It’s not that we couldn’t repeat that and chuckle once more — besides, absolutely, that was simply yesterday, wasn’t it? Three years previous, at most. Not ten years in the past. Why is all of it dashing up?

There was that incident, some time again. I received my Freedom Pass at 60. This was one of many biggest advantages of outdated age — a mad concept from former London Mayor Ken Livingstone to provide millionaires like me a free ticket to the Underground. I began to go all over the place by bus and prepare. So a lot faster than ready for that antiquated car-share scheme known as the London taxi. But then I went all the way down to Great Portland Street station and it simply didn’t work.

Obviously being a middle-aged man (a late-middle-aged man), it was unimaginable for me to ask for assist. A kindly guard observed me standing in entrance of the barrier and distractedly waving my go, strolling again and making an attempt to shock it, you realize, the correct technical manner, and requested if I wanted help. I mentioned: ‘My thing doesn’t work.’

He mentioned: ‘How old are you?’

‘Sixty five, yesterday,’ I mentioned.

‘Well, there we go. It’s run out.’ he mentioned.

‘How can it have run out? This was given to me by Ken Livingstone until I die.’

‘You have to get another one at the age of 65 . . . for really old people.’

But why, oh why is all of it going so shortly? The author John Mortimer identified that every little thing accelerates as you begin to decelerate.

‘Your 60s run away, the 70s flash by, and when you get to the 80s you can’t sustain with it.’

When the good film director Billy Wilder received to 90, he advised somebody that he felt he had wasted his 80s. So he determined he needed to get again to work.

It’s like being inside a kind of sand-timers. You’ve been sprawled on the grit, having a picnic, peering out on the distorted world after which the bottom beneath begins to shift.

It’s slipping by way of the outlet. It’s all starting to run away and you’ll go together with it. Hold on. Wait. Wait. I’m not prepared for this. I haven’t even began a profession but.

There is a gallon of heart-warming silvery-haired spew in regards to the ‘wonder years’, ‘the best is yet to come’, ‘salt and pepper, grey pound, silver surfer’ twaddle. It all appears somewhat bit determined to me. Do not go light into that down-sizing.

Advertisers appear to suppose that you just need to sit on a dock a stretch of glittery water with some mountains within the background. As for those who now should be bored foolish.

The huge dilemma, as I see it, is do you scrabble to lastly write that youngsters’s e book, seem on Radio 4’s Just A Minute, decide to taking part in a surly detective in some apparently paradisiacal setting the place all people is murdering one another for no cause for seven seasons (as if), do Glastonbury, play a revisionist Romeo on the age of 92?

Or do you begin leaping out of planes, exploring seven cities in autumn, studying to prepare dinner in Bologna, studying a brand new language and taking part in trombone in a jazz band: all of the issues that you just thought you actually needed to do whenever you had been working so arduous. Or do you do each?

I’m solely too conscious that a few of the folks — folks I at all times thought had been my seniors and now transform roughly the identical age as me, just like the King for instance — appear to have launched themselves into geriatric hyperactivity.

I’m frightened by how a lot I might need to do to maintain up. Over-achieving wrinklies have change into the function fashions of the period.

You can assure that any actor who all of us thought had formally retired will abruptly reappear in a movie as a digitally de-aged model of their youthful self. Or have a child with some deluded buddy of their great-granddaughter’s.

I genuflect to Mick Jagger, although if I received down there would I ever rise up once more?

He’s not in a house. He’s on the market, strutting about, posturing and flicking his barnet, goading the remainder of the band to get at it, with a number of operating repairs to the center and a alternative drummer on the way in which. Jagger is now planning his centenary tour, little question.

David Hockney fills a sketch e book a day and is at all times daubing one thing vibrant by new digital processes. David Attenborough confronts hyenas in Botswana, for these collection that take years to arrange, whereas on the similar time signing long-term contracts with Sky.

And the factor that unites all of them is that they’re most emphatically nonetheless alive. The retired do are inclined to croak early, don’t they?

Listen to me, Elton. Don’t grasp up Vegas. If you imply to see in your hundred and tenth 12 months, it’s important to get that comeback tour below manner.

I’m clearly a mere stripling at 70. Ahead lies a neurotic 70s and lively 80s and restful 90s, perhaps. It’s all positively exhausting. I believe what all these white-haired function fashions (or ginger-haired, if Mick) search to point out us is that work is the elixir of youth. This is all new.

My Welsh granny gave up the store when she was 60. She owned a Fruiterers. She hobbled straight off to Old Person’s Supplies and acquired the clumpy sneakers, the bouclé coat and the thick specs and, lo, she was an outdated lady.

Me, even when I believe Taylor Swift is a building firm, I’m at all times getting down with the children in natty darkish denim and bucket hats. I’m now on Instagram so I even have nagging social media anxieties to share with the younger. But in so many different methods I’ve left the stresses of formative years behind. I can take my garments off in a swimming pool dressing room.

I don’t fret about issues that I can’t presumably management similar to world poverty or transphobia, when with a little bit of reasoned pondering, I can remedy actual issues like ‘where did I leave my shoes?’

It is, nevertheless, a race to the end. I went to my physician ten years in the past and identified that my eyelids had received a bit flaky. ‘What people don’t know,’ he intoned, ‘is that there are tiny glands in your eyelids. They lubricate the skin. Yours aren’t working.’

‘What will get them going?’

‘No you don’t perceive. They’ve run out. They’re empty. That’s your lot. They’ve completed. You’re outdated. Here, have some ointment.’

Medical science goes to begin providing me replacements, helps, infusions and extractions, after all, however it’s inevitable that different bits are going to expire too. They say that males specifically discover utter bliss after 60 with all these foolish obligations gone — after which one thing main inside begins clanking and the engine begins to fall to bits.

Obviously, I’ve to get going and do stuff. But I don’t have a bucket listing. I’ve a f*** it listing.

At the age of 70, life is genuinely too quick for a hell of plenty of issues. Or is likely to be.

I’ve vows. I have to eschew pressured exercise I’m merely by no means going to do once more. No extra formal dinners.

Even a Roman orgy would have been dreary for those who needed to put on a dinner jacket and sit speaking to the chairman’s spouse. I’ve utterly satiated any need for stadium rock. (Bye Mick.)

Or whale watching. It’s almost value doing this stuff as soon as, I’m certain.

But be careful for these loved-ones’ earnest entreaties, ‘Oh you’re going to like this,’ or. ‘It’s solely a night, you grumpy bastard’.

Firework shows, after-dinner talking, poetry recitals, prolonged guided excursions, three-day weddings, AGMs, faculty speech days. Night golf equipment. They’re the apparent ones. Dodge these bullets. (‘I’m simply having my eyelids seen to that day, alas.’)

Put apart the obsessive ordinary pursuits you suppose you take pleasure in.

No extra lengthy, self-righteous letters of grievance.

Watch out for the younger at coronary heart impulses. Don’t purchase a racy supercar. Don’t climb one more volcano — in the event that they had been doing something value seeing, besides exhaling steam, they’d kill you.

Three-star meals that take 4 hours to dish up. Forego. Mind-expanding medicine. Clubs. Collections of magazines. Hoarding of any sort. Jeans. (The light denim ones appear like an alcoholic on day launch and the Japanese rail employee darkish ones with the turn-ups are reserved for younger males with huge ginger beards.)

Even some mates. (‘You don’t must see them,’ Richard Briers mentioned winningly, ‘most of my old friends are very boring.’)

So I do know you’re pondering: ‘Yay. And eventually I can give up breathing and die.’ But we should overcome disdain.

I’m not boasting however I did my first bungee soar three years in the past. I used to be pressured to, for TV. But it cured my back-ache.

Karaoke! It’s asinine. I knew that. We all know that. I did it for the primary time at my birthday dinner. I cherished it.

I’ve by no means been on a cruise. I wouldn’t be seen useless on one. But I had higher do it as soon as, hadn’t I?

Line-dancing? Why not?

Do you realize, I’ve by no means even performed golf.

I’m not speaking about new habits. I’m not bungee leaping ever once more. God forbid. I’m simply echoing Alfred Tennyson:

‘Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done’

Fellow decrepits. If you haven’t learn Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, that masterwork of pensioner lively involvement, do.

You’ll instantly need to smite the ocean’s sounding furrows and set sail. My God. I haven’t even but performed golf.

Or did I let you know that already?