GETTING OLDER SUCKS BUT DOESNT BLOW Today is the second day of the Over 50’s Show at the RDS in Ballsbridge and the place is awash with senior citizens, many of them of my vintage, bumbling around amidst the energetic striplings, who are merely in their fifties and sixties, everyone hoping that the next “miracle” product that will counteract old age, has arrived. Men my age are running out of time and our health and longevity has become a narrow window? But there may be a fallback position. I found two lines, tucked away at the bottom of a page of this newspaper and I was very taken by contrapuntal evidence that emerged from an American study on ageing. The findings suggest there is great news for men, especially men who marry “trophy” wives. They may be, unwittingly extending their lives, because the study in America has shown that men who had a partner, who was at least ten years younger than them, were likely to age at a slower pace. Trophywives were always ten years younger. Replaced in modern times by the “Best Dressed at the …”, once upon a time, the “trophy” wife was a novelty. Coiffed to the max, make up well applied, blonde hair and the ability to wear a short skirt without embarrassment, were the“trophy” wife’s fundamentals, even though at times such couplings were less than fun and more often mental. Well its pay-back time for all the tycoons, builders, bankers and politicians, who were sniggered at for having to hand over huge alimony settlements, including luxury houses, fast cars and lots of dosh, to cuckolded wives and partners in return for freedom to marry a woman who is at least ten years younger than him. Scaled down from the rich to the average punter, the ten year gap statistic doesn’t change, but I am not suggesting that you all run off and get hooked on a woman who is ten years adrift of you in age, just so you can keep admiring yourself in the mirror for an extra decade. Anyway, we’re all looking for that extra ten years, so I get annoyed when I hear, or read, the witterings of young and mostly minor celebrities, telling us they are looking forward to getting old. I get really riled and desire to smack them. Hard. Apart from the Bus Pass, which is great for engendering the satisfied feeling that you’re getting something back from the system every time you board a bus. After that, old age is a crock. If life was a showjumping arena, the seven foot wall would be old age. The other jumps would represent the other obstacles of old age that creep into our lives and try to undermine us by robbing us of our vigour, so that sometimes ambition triumphs over ability. Wife: “Would you like to run upstairs and fool around?” Husband: We’re going to have to make a decision here.” The biggest problem for old people today is that there are too many of us. And the scary part of it is that you don’t really notice, until you get old yourself. Here we are, clogging the footpaths, getting in the way of shoppers and driving too slowly. Last week a seventy year old woman was stopped by a very polite Garda . “Ma’am,” he said, “do you know that you’re doing15 kilometres an hour in a 30 k zone.” ”You can put me in jail if you like” she replied, “but you’re not going to get me to drive at 30 kilometres an hour.” Those were two little ageist gags I used to tell when I was a performer. Now I’m living them out in fading technicolour and mono audio. I was very entertained recently by a young bi-lingual, fiddle-playing comedian, who comes from that treasure trove of characters, Tuam, Co. Galway. His name is Andreas De Staic and his best line was “old people want everything to go back to the way it was… but warmer.” In their lighter moments, I’m sure Pat Rabbitte and Ruari Quinn would have chuckled at the gag, but it must be very hard for them to look back on the way their political lives ended They were virtually invited to commit a double hari kari. Pat in particular felt he had a lot more to contribute and I agree. We’ll miss his erudition and his caustic wit. When I was young, I used to moan that politicians were too old and consequently out of touch. Back then I wasn’t allowing for the wisdom, judgement and experience that comes with age. Pat and Ruari were two able parliamentarians, who knew how government works. They knew where the pitfalls were, better than most. The Dail is becoming a creche for the ambitious and Joan Burton may yet regret putting two perfectly good stallions out to pasture too soon. In the meantime, to my aged friends I say have as much of a good time as you possibly can in your dotage and don’t let anyone put you out to pasture too soon. Remember, (if you can), you’re only old once.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 10:44:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015