Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Free

Actually, I haven’t much come up against ageism, myself. There was an occasion, I remember, a few years ago, when a teenage granddaughter was advising on the acquisition of a cell phone and the salesman’s enthusiastic attention turned to disdain when he realized that the purchase was not for her but for the old granny, who had no business with any mobile device, let alone the latest Nokia. But more usually I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. We are not especially interesting, by and large – waiting for a bus, walking along the street; younger people are busy sizing up one another, in the way that children in a park will only register other children. We are not exactly invisible, but we are not noticed, which I rather like; it leaves me free to do what a novelist does anyway, listen and watch, but with the added spice of feeling a little as though I am some observant time-traveler, on the edge of things, bearing witness to the customs of another age. I am dramatizing, of course – I am still a part of it all and most of what I see and hear is entirely familiar because as society mutates – language, behavior – so have I mutated, in assumptions and expectations. This is something I want to talk about in a later section – the way in which you change your skin, over a lifetime, change and change again. The point here is that age may sideline, but it also confers a sort of neutrality; you are no longer out there in the thick of things, but able to stand back, observe, consider.
    The other view, the counterview to the administrators and the ageists, is that this is the human race adapting again, and how interesting. How significant, how challenging that there is now this new demographic, this hefty group of people who have notched up seven or eight decades and counting, many of whom are still in good health, with all their marbles, able to savor life.
    Up to a point, that is. I am a diarist. It is a working diary, mainly, in which I jot down stuff that might possibly come in useful at some point. This means that I can never find anything I think I may once have noted, but during a trawl recently I came upon my visit to a specialist in 1994, around the time the spinal arthritis first struck that has plagued me ever since. “‘Anno Domini, I’m afraid,’ says the man kindly. ‘Whoever designed us didn’t make sufficient allowance for wear and tear.’ Which chimed nicely with my view of the Great Designer in the Sky – a piece of malevolent sabotage to ensure that when the human race gets to the point of discovering penicillin and sanitation and generally prolonging life those prolonged won’t find it worth living anyway.”
    I beg to differ, eighteen years on. One does; today, and for a while, perhaps. Most of my friends of my age group would agree, I think, and most of them have been slammed with something: hips, knees, teeth, eyes . . . We do indeed wear out before our time. The science of aging is complex and intriguing. The gerontologist Tom Kirkwood gives a technical but lively account in his book
Time of Our Lives
. He quotes John Maynard Smith’s dry definition: “Ageing is a progressive, generalized impairment of function resulting in an increasing probability of death.” Quite. But what is going on? Why do we age?
    The short answer seems to be: because we are disposable. And we are disposable because our own genes have decided this; their interests in keeping us going do not coincide with our own. The maintenance of certain cells most affected by the aging process takes many resources. If this is reduced, then energy is released for growth and reproduction, so natural selection favors such a mutation. This is called the “disposable soma” theory; my digest of it is inadequate – please go to Professor Kirkwood for a proper account. There is a cool rationality to the process (of course, natural selection is always rational) and while this is not exactly a palliative (it