Читать книгу Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age - Julia Neuberger - Страница 7

Then there are those issues about getting out into the world and playing an active role, which appears to be a basic human need at any age – and starting with the vexed question of appearances. Older people, and especially women, are always complaining about shops having no proper clothes for them, about how they hate communal changing areas – and swimming with younger, fitter people – and how they are always scared of being regarded as mutton dressed as lamb.

Any manifesto must insist on decent and accurate mirrors in shops, sales staff who are old enough to understand, single changing rooms, an alteration hand, and a decent range of clothes for the over-sixties. In exchange, older women would buy better clothes, check carefully that they were always well groomed – and therefore not ‘invisible’ as so many often complain – and keep up to date with emerging trends, as interpreted for older people.

The role models would be Joan Bakewell and Judi Dench and many, many more. But the fact that women are older – and men for that matter – does not mean they are not interested in their appearance, or that attractiveness and sexual attraction have disappeared. And headlines that suggest there was a plot to oust Menzies Campbell as Liberal Democrat leader for ‘looking too old’ are precisely those that depress, and anger, older people (he was a youthful 65 when that headline was published). It was particularly galling that the source who said this to the Evening Standard was quoted as adding: ‘It’s not that he is too old, it’s just he looks too old …’

That relates to getting out to work, but how many older people are going to continue to work into very old age? Should they have to? Is it only because pension provision and savings are so poor in the UK, or is there a better, or different, reason for older people working, to do with work giving meaning to life? And will that be full or part time? And will it be at the same status as previous jobs and careers, or at a lower status, however grand the title, as they often manage in the United States?

People want to be visible. Some older people want to work, some will need to because of the money, and many will need to be volunteers. What is essential is that older people are visible and welcome and being active. But that means adapting the rigid rules that now govern when they are allowed to do so, and bear little or no relationship to their actual abilities.