David Hill is in his ninth decade. In a touching tribute to his late friend, he challenges some myths about ‘old farts’.

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I‘m past The Birthday. Not “the big three-oh” or “four-oh” that callow young things fret about, but the big eight-oh. I’m into my ninth decade. I’m undeniably, irretrievably old.

Others are kind enough to fudge the fact. Brian at our local still greets our quartet of dotards (combined ages 329) with “Morning, lads,” as we arrive for our Thursday flat whites. Lissome young bar staff, who can bend to pick up a teaspoon from the floor without breaking stride, still chirp, “How are you boys today?” But the truth is bald and bare. I’m old.

It astonishes me; amuses me. It provides more humour than any years since puberty; UK writer Joe Moran noted that “old age turns us into comedians by default”.

I’m not fearful about it. I don’t totally agree with Bernard Barusch, who insisted that old age was always 15 years ahead of where he happened to be, but I still feel mortality is something that applies only to other people.

There’s a million of us Gold Card-holders in NZ these days; over 16 per cent of the population. Our number has probably increased since you started reading this essay. It’s a statistic usually mentioned in terms of how we strain the nation’s economy and health services. OK, we did get priority in Covid booster queues, but would you prefer a wheezing avalanche of us filling ICU beds?

Truth is, our tax give exceeds our benefit take, and we provide almost a quarter of New Zealand’s volunteers across multiple sectors. But we remain misunderstood by those age groups whose hair still sprouts from their heads rather than their ears. 

So in this year when a young guy on a bus stood up and offered me his seat – I didn’t know whether to strike the pup or hug him – may I challenge a few myths about our lot?

Safety isn’t our first priority.  Younger people often fret about keeping their olds out of harm’s way, and we do indeed want appropriate security and safety. But mostly we want freedom: to take risks, choose dubious options, startle our kids and grandkids. “Give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry to the 1775 Virginia Convention, and no, I wasn’t there – has special relevance when applied to our age group.

We aren’t necessarily unhappy. ”From a philosophical point of view, there is no difference between ageing and living,” notes A C Grayling. Reassuring, if opaque. Less buoyantly, 19th century novelist Edith Wharton muttered, “There is no such thing as old age. There is only sorrow.” Sorry, Edie baby, but hardly any of my peers resent being old. 

We can feel glum about illness and isolation. We feel diminished and apprehensive when a friend dies – and they do; even the apparently immortal ones. We’re not thrilled when a doctor tells us, “You’ll have to learn to live with it”. 

(Small digression here: Rall, my excellent GP, says his favourite patients are children. They’re honest; they don’t dissemble or deny. So as I approach my second childhood, does that mean…)

Anyway, old age itself doesn’t have to mean gloom. Research suggests the unhappiest years of one’s life are the early 40s. “I’m glad I’m not young any more,” sang Maurice Chevalier (you’ll have noticed that growing older also means increased use of quotations), and the guy had a point.

Nor are we inevitably grumpy. We just value honesty. I applaud a friend who, when the checkout operator droned, “So how are you today?” while staring past her, replied in a stage whisper, “The CIA are watching me.”

We’re not slow and forgetful. It’s more that messages from brain to extremities have so many friends to visit on the way, plus a more substantial database to scroll through. We’re not all hearing-challenged, either; we merely ask that you pronounce consonants as well as vowels. 

We’re not automatically antagonistic towards fashions, trends, changes. We’d be into tattoos, except we’re aware that the eagle on a smooth young forearm morphs into a buzzard as said forearm sags. 

We’re not set in our habits. But some days are a challenge for us, and one way you deal with challenges is to plan a way through them. If we’re having a bad time and our plan is suddenly ambushed by something new or disconcerting, then we need time to reconfigure.

I repeat, and not because I forgot having already said it: being old doesn’t automatically mean being a complainer. The excellent kids’ author Betty Gilderdale (think The Little Yellow Digger) warned me once, ”Old age isn’t for sissies.” Betty would have been in her 80s then. I was three decades younger, and wondered what on earth she meant. Now I know.

I think of my friend Rod who endured a necrotic appendix, Covid, a heart-valve issue, a prostate cancer flareup, all in one month, then pretended outrage at a suggestion he might wish to forego his Thursday long black, and I marvel that so few of my contemporaries ever mention the physical discomforts that attend them.

We aren’t always irrelevant. Somehow in the last half century, the word “elder”, as in village elder, has yielded to “old”, as in old fart. We may not have the information that those young things have at their digitised fingertips, but we can occasionally offer… let’s call it perspective. Nah, let’s call it wisdom. (“The main defences of age are silence and wisdom,” noted Jenny Diski.)

The Roman philosopher and Gold Card-holder Seneca reckoned that oldies have power. They can abash politicians and inspire the young. Few people dare reproach or demean them.

A degree of political fantasising there, I suspect, but he’s right about that last bit. I can approach a massed slouch of teenagers and they part like the Red Sea in front of me. Last week, one of them said, ”Hey, bro,” which lifted me for days. The week before, another told his peers, ”Watch out for the old guy,” which could have depressed me for the same period of time. Pleasingly, I heard my mouth go, ”Yeah, he’s really dangerous”. They laughed, with me rather than at me, and a third voice exclaimed, ”Cool!” Had I inspired them, Seneca-style? Take the verb literally, and I’d maybe breathed a faint friendship into them.

I’ll add one more research finding: from Leeds University, suggesting that in areas requiring accumulated skill and knowledge, such as dispute settlement and language skills, people become more able over time. So there we are. 

And there, since the arrow of time goes only one way, you will arrive.

Before then, if you happen to drop a teaspoon on the floor of our local, be assured that any of our Thursday group can still pick it up for you. In five separate movements. 

And that’s where I’d planned to end this, with that coy throwaway. But over the weeks and months that I slowly assembled this essay (all my stuff straggles together that way), everything changed for my friend Rod, the coffee lover from several paragraphs earlier.

His prostate cancer returned suddenly; savage and relentless. The last-chance medication made him vomit and faint, and it wasn’t working. He qualified for assisted dying, under the strange, almost arbitrary criteria of the present legislation, and he chose that option.

He told us one Thursday at coffee. ”I’ve had enough, guys.” He kept coming for a while. Then we went to see him, talked about his travels, his reading, his Physics lecturing. He stayed splendidly profane about our current government; kept erupting in his glorious shout of laughter.

The afternoon before his life ended, we and others gathered at his excellent daughter Gill’s house, where he spent his last weeks. People joked, fell silent, stared at the floor. We three other coffee-takers gave him a tulip cup, the sort from which he’d always drunk his long blacks, full of jaffas the pub had donated. I heard my voice shaking as we hugged goodbye.

I felt dubious about Seneca’s words at first reading, but, hell, Rod, you did keep chastising politicians, you lived in a manner to inspire the young, and you ended with a decision beyond reproach. I hope I can do it quarter as well as you did, mate.

For Rod Lambert, 1941 – 2024.