On Ageing and the Lack of Cool.

There was an elderly couple blocking the door as I made my way out of a shop today. The man saw me immediately and ushered his wife slowly out of the way, while she turned and looked at me with what appeared to be a mixture of alarm and apology. She said: ‘Sorry. I’m old.’

I said in a recent post that we Brits are noted for our compulsion to be polite, and we’re always apologising for one thing or another. Mostly that’s OK, but should a person feel the need to apologise for being old?

Shortly afterwards I was standing in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s and realised that I was slouching a little. I thought back to when I was a very young man and slouching was a practiced habit because a minor slouch was considered cool. It seemed rebellious back then because it flew in the face of all those grown up authority figures who were always telling us to stand up straight. (Many of them remembered the days of Empire, you see, when military discipline was considered the bedrock of all things proper, and that included standing up straight.)

And it had its Romantic side. It possessed faint echoes of leaning against a wall surrounded by monochrome and melancholy chiaroscuro, smoking a cigarette held between the thumb and second finger while the dull glow from a mist-enshrouded street lamp cast your shadow weakly onto a wet and otherwise empty pavement. It went along with pulling the collar of your outer garment – whether you owned a trench coat or not – tighter against you neck, before flicking the cigarette idly into the gutter and walking away anonymously into the urban oblivion of a dark and dreary night.

But then I realised that no such condition now applies. The reason for the minor slouch now is the fact that my back muscles are growing a little tired of holding me up. These days it’s the habit of standing up straight which has to have practice applied to it.