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That said, it is possibly better to be old than young. The future is not looking bright. No one but an incurable optimist would anticipate any great progress this year towards peace in the Middle East, towards economic recovery in Europe, or even towards reform of America’s gun laws. The English countryside will doubtless continue to be desecrated by wind farms, while the world will get hotter nevertheless. Prospects for mankind are not good. But the old, with only limited time ahead of them, need not worry too much. For their own limited futures may be quite promising. Silvio Berlusconi, who is 76, may look forward not only to marrying a 27-year-old glamour girl but even, perhaps, to making an improbable political comeback as Italy’s next prime minister. And he is not alone among oldies with hope in their hearts.
The most remarkable example was offered a couple of weeks ago by a 100-year-old called Walter James, who wrote an article in the Sunday Times about what it was like to be a centenarian. It would be nice to know more about Mr James. He tells us he went to a grammar school and thence to Keble College, Oxford, but almost nothing of what he has done in the many decades since to make himself look today almost as good in his photograph as Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who is an extremely youthful 89. He writes that ‘people will be astonished or horrified at how much alcohol I put away’, but it turns out that he has kept to the same ‘strict, if large, ration’ for many years. ‘For lunch I have 90 ml of dry sherry followed by a 330ml bottle of Peroni beer. At dinner my 90ml of whisky or gin is followed by 250ml of red wine,’ he says.
Not understanding about metric measurements, I don’t know whether or not that is a large amount to drink; but one of Mr James’s strengths would seem to be his ‘strict’ self-control; no binge drinker he. He still drives, shops, cooks, reads on his Kindle, and scans the internet on his computer, and his mind is still very sharp. He confesses to frailties such as impaired balance and ‘fear of toppling over’, but these are ones that I, though 27 years younger, already share; I get it especially on my stepladder when changing light bulbs in the ceiling.
Mr James also laments that, while he can remember most things that happened in the past, ‘the feelings, the sensations that accompanied a happening are irrecoverable’. It is, for example, only in his nocturnal dreams that he can recover the feelings of what it was like to be in love; ‘the wild excitements, the ecstasy of returned love, the kisses and embraces, all come back to me as they once were’. He also looks forward to future events, such as visits from friends or members of his family, with ‘less relish’ than he used to. But the wonderful thing is that he looks forward to anything at all. ‘I look to my future, if not with confidence, at least with hope,’ he writes. And that is really quite something at 100 years old.
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