Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck
Lots of us have lists of ‘things we want to do before we die’. The late Miles Kington wanted to learn how to yodel, whistle with two fingers and how to pronounce both the words ‘macho’ and ‘chorizo’. Others want to see the world and mop up all those places they’ve always meant to visit but haven’t had time for. So, top of the list of things to do for most oldies, if they’ve got enough silver pounds and have retired, is to travel.
It strikes me as an odd thing to do. Travelling is what we do best when we’re young – it’s natural for youth to look outwards – and surely, like a dying leaf curling inwards, it would seem to me to be more natural to travel less or at least nearer when you’re old rather than more, and further. But again, it seems there’s this desperate trend for oldies of my generation to refuse to acknowledge that they’re getting on. Far from relaxing into themselves and enjoying the fruits of their labours, they long to have a final fling, as it were, and fly till they die.
However, oldies aren’t dumb. You don’t find many of them hitching around Europe or taking jobs as washer-uppers in Paris bistros and cattle-ranchers in Australia, as many young people do in their gap years. No, oldies like to travel in comfort.
Cruises
Cruises are just bursting with ancient people, all gagging to squeeze through the Corinth Canal, float through the Straits of the Bosphorus, nip round the Mediterranean cities, marvel at the fjords of Norway or sail round Cape Horn before they die. Cruising also suits old couples. If he’s too old to master a boat trip of his very own, there’s nothing an old bloke likes to do more of a morning than stand on the poop deck, stuffed to the gills with a three-course breakfast, and watch other blokes weighing anchor and splicing the mainbrace or whatever they do. And their wives, of course, can sit in the ‘well-stocked library’ researching whatever pile of historic rubble is on the list to see that day.
Anyway, the rub about cruises and old people is that so many other oldies have the same idea. And I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be trapped on a floating prison with dozens of people with crutches all over the place. People of my own age. On one cruise I went on – I was giving a talk – they actually had a mortuary on board, which, when we finally disembarked, two weeks later, was packed to the portholes with fellow cruisers who couldn’t make the distance.
(I also don’t want, incidentally, to sleep in a room the size of a small coffin in a bed the size of a schoolgirl’s pencil case, nor do I specially want to learn Flower Arranging on the lower deck portside on Friday afternoons, nor indulge in Scarf-tying Classes on Monday mornings in the Royal Tea Lounge on the Promenade Deck –‘Discover how to wear scarves effectively to suit your own style and enjoy the hands-on experience as you learn lots of chic knots and tying tricks.’ Don’t get me started…)
Some cruise lines are so anxious not to become floating nursing homes that they oblige passengers to sign a piece of paper in advance saying that they are fully mobile and able to take part in the visits and won’t hold anyone else up. But you can hear the grinding of the cruise line people’s teeth as they witness the crippled masses who lurch aboard waving their passes, all claiming that they had to have a hip operation, or slipped on a banana skin, after signing the contract. Life on a cruise hardly helps general mobility either, because you get so little exercise. And you do nothing but eat on a cruise, four meals a day. They say travel broadens the mind. But it also broadens the behind.
I was told of one old lady whose feet, during the last years of her life, barely touched dry land. Between cruises she’d put up at a hotel in Portsmouth so she had time to cash in her vast collection of prescriptions, before sailing off to her next destination. (‘Another truss, Lady Bonkers?’ I can imagine the chemist saying. ‘And your usual bunion splint? That’ll be free for you, since you are over sixty. And by the way, I do like your new Chinese hat. Suits you very well.’) I think the cruise people were trying to get her banned, because you don’t want someone wandering off unable to remember her name when you’re trying to keep everyone together on a crowded visit, say, to the Taj Mahal. If she got lost you would simply never find her again.
Trekking
When I heard about oldies going on trekking holidays abroad, I wondered if they weren’t the type of a slightly more adventurous nature. Apparently Dame Freya Stark was eighty-eight when she set off pony-trekking in the Himalayas. But it’s not for me for many reasons. Firstly, I don’t really like walking (see below) and also, if I were to fall over and break a hip (see Balance in Ailments), I wouldn’t really like my skeleton to be discovered years later beside some Yeti bones. But finally, when I investigated further, it turned out that my old friends didn’t really go trekking at all. Well, they did, I suppose, but they might just as well have been walking up and down their own living rooms for all the effort it cost them. Apparently, they had teams of slaves crashing on ahead to build little tents and make steaming suppers for when they arrived, and dozens of donkeys carrying their bags – not what I call trekking in the Himalayas; it’s what I call a Big Cheat, frankly. Next thing they’ll be telling me all about the perils and excitement of deep-sea diving and it’ll turn out that they haven’t been doing anything much more adventurous than going upstairs and having a bath.
Walking
Proper walking is frightfully popular with oldies in England. Appropriately enough, it’s called ‘rambling’. Kitted up with special sticks, stout shoes and clipboards and compasses hung around their necks, their backpacks stashed with provisions and water bottles, they stump around in the Lake District wearing the land out with their hobnailed boots. Of course, I have to bow to their crazy doggedness, their delightful Englishness, their utter devotion to total pointlessness, but myself, I have never really understood walking as an occupation in itself. It’s rather as if someone told me that they went ‘breathing’ for a fortnight.
Gap Years
I have heard of a website for real oldie adventurers, called Gaps for Grumpies and the idea there is that fit people over fifty take gap years (gap between what, I wonder? Retirement and death?) and buzz off to African villages or Peruvian farmlands, and help with such things as painting schools, building wells and teaching people to read. Now this appeals. Because it’s not just a way you can travel, if you want to, but also a way you can actually use your age and your wisdom to do something useful. I haven’t tried this, but when I am less busy I plan to give it a go. No, really.
The panic of flying
Of course there might be a slight problem for me. How do you get there? That seems to me another disadvantage to foreign travel when you’re older. Forget the ethical problem – I’m a non-believer when it comes to greenhouse gases, carbon footprints and global warming – I don’t want to fly simply because these days I get too flustered. Being flustered and being old seem to be synonymous. It’s a funny thing, but alongside the huge and increasing confidence in many areas that comes with age, in other areas lots of oldies, me in particular, can become gibbering wrecks.
The last time I drove to Stansted to catch a plane, I missed the turning and had to carry on to Cambridge and back before I could find it again, adding thirty miles to my journey and, worse, a panic-stricken hour eating into the check-in time.
More recently, having arrived at Terminal Five (which had hidden itself in ill-signed networks of roundabouts and slip roads), when the woman at the check-in desk said, ‘And how are you today?’ I simply burst into tears. And I mean tears. I couldn’t speak and had to sit on a bench gasping and choking with misery, holding my head in my hands. And when, on another occasion, at Gatwick, I was told to ‘check yourself in’ I simply had a nervous breakdown.
‘I can’t!’ I said. ‘I’m too old and I don’t understand!’
Luckily a kindly man in a uniform did it for me, but he admonished me, as I thanked him. ‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ he said, severely. ‘This is the future.’
‘Well, if this is the future, tha
t’s the last time I go abroad,’ I thought.
Like all old people I get muddled at security, often putting my water, nail-scissors and little penknives into a plastic bag in full view of the guards who always confiscate it, and taking off my skirt instead of my boots at the X-ray machine… and the last time I went through I actually tried to put on someone else’s belt and shoes after they’d come off the rollers.
Hotels
Us oldies need to be in charge. Which of course makes staying in hotels so problematic. Whereas when I was young I could check into a hotel, throw my suitcase into my room, and then hurtle down to the beach, now every time I stay in a hotel, I have to spend about an hour tidying my room after breakfast, and doing a bit of light housekeeping. The day I check in, I put all the hotel gunk – plastic folders, little cards saying ‘No Smoking’ and unwanted electric clocks – into a drawer, rearrange the chairs, unpack (but don’t put anything in drawers in case I forget it when I repack), make sure the towels are arranged in the way I like them, check the heating system and the phones – and, usually, tear all the bedclothes off the other single bed, if there is one, and pile it on to mine so that I’ll be warmer at night. Each evening I do my washing and hang it to dry on the shower curtain. The last time a friend of mine visited me in my hotel room she said it was like entering a Turkish bazaar, everywhere draped with tights, swimming costumes, slips, sarongs and smalls.
Trains
Of course I could travel the smart way – by train. And a year or so ago I did manage to go from London to Moscow entirely by train (never again). Sadly, trains are a grisly form of transport these days – the last one I went on had a guard speaking sententiously on the intercom before we left. ‘I would like to point out that this train has special facilities for your feet,’ he said. ‘It is called the floor’– and while I’m normally tolerant about other people’s behaviour I find that just being in a carriage turns me instantly into an old grump. Why is he speaking on his mobile in a Quiet Carriage? Is the seat beside him really taken, as he claims or has he just put his baggage there to give himself more room? Carriages induce a kind of incandescent fury.
Biking
I would go on a biking holiday, but since I was told by a cycling instructor that now I was so old I couldn’t turn my neck as far as I used to be able to and therefore biking was, for me, rather dangerous, I’ve put my helmet and yellow jacket away. Though I suppose if I were brave enough I could buy a trike. I see fearless oldies triking away – although now their form of travel is more likely to be those reckless little buggies used only, it seems to me, not by the disabled but by the hugely fat. (Can anyone tell us, what is the law on those things? Are they really allowed to travel both on the pavement and the roads?)
Driving
So it’s the car for me. I don’t actually own, as my great-aunt did, an old Ford, with little yellow indicators that flicked out on either side when you were turning left or right, and a cranking handle to wind up the engine – hers was so old that she actually had to reverse it to go up steep hills – and nor do I posses such a thing as a driving hat, and there isn’t a driving rug in the back. But I don’t yet have central locking and my windows are wound up and down by hand.
My only indulgence is a brilliant gizmo – installed following the frightful disaster driving to Stansted and Terminal Five – and that is a sat-nav. Not only can I now get from place to place without risking a heart attack (see Ailments) but also, if by any chance I am driving with a loved one – and I do have loved ones, despite my insistence on spending most of my time alone – without risking the most almighty row which usually, as far as I remember, resulted in night after night of non-speaks when we actually arrived at our holiday destination. Women have always wondered why men don’t ask for directions when they lose their way. Now neither of them has any need to. They are told as they go along by a disembodied voice sitting on their dashboard.
England
I’ve made an extraordinary discovery since I’ve got older – that there are dozens and dozens of absolutely sensational places in England that I haven’t been to before. Someone said that ‘at sixty, a man learns how to value home’ and I’m starting to realize exactly what he meant. Why go to Italy when you can go to the Lake District? Why trek in the Himalayas when you can walk in the most beautiful scenery in the world, in Invernessshire? Is there really anywhere more staggering than the Cornish coast? Anywhere with more amazing birds than Norfolk?
Travel of another kind
Finally, for us of a certain age, there is a kind of existential Proustian travel which appeals to me most of all. You do this from the comfort of your own bed. You wake up, having endured the long journey of sleep the night before and then, hour after hour, you trace, with your index finger, a slow and meditative path along your sheets and duvet, acutely aware, wherever you are, of the changing colours, whether you’re going up or down the folds in the coverlet, occasionally glancing up at the ceiling to check out the cracks and sometimes, on a hill of pillow feathers, glancing round to take in the view of a glass of water, false teeth, unreadable book that you couldn’t get beyond two pages of (leave that bookclub!), stack of pills, dressing table, hairbrush, mirror, wallpaper and so on. Some people have managed to travel like this for weeks on end.
Try it.
13
Funerals
Lately there’s nothing but trouble, grief and strife
There’s not much attraction about this bloomin’ life
Last night I dreamt I was bloomin’ well dead
As I went to the funeral, I bloomin’ well said,
Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
And look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ’andles
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
Some people there were praying for me soul
I said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve been off the dole’
Look at the mourners, bloomin’ well sozzled
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
Look at the children, bloomin’ excited
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
Look at the neighbours, bloomin’ delighted
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
‘Spend the insurance,’ I murmured, ‘For alack,
You know I shan’t be with you going back’
Look at the Missus, bloomin’ well laughing
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
Look at me Sister, bloomin new ’at on
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
And look at me Brother, bloomin’ cigar on
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
We come from clay and we all go back they say
Don’t ’eave a brick it may be your Aunty May
Look at me Grandma, bloomin’ great haybag
Ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!
‘Ain’t It Grand to Be Bloomin’ Well Dead!’
–written and sung by Leslie Sarony in 1933
Aren’t funerals fun? Apparently there is some crowd of people who enjoy funerals and memorial services so much that they pretend to have known the late lamented just in order to get along to the bash afterwards. Victoria Coren wrote about this gang who tried – and succeeded – to gatecrash her father Alan Coren’s memorial service. I’m tempted to hire this lot in advance for when I die, plus, perhaps, a few actors who will be paid to droop around the place, sniffing their misery into hankies and occasionally emitting the odd wolf-like howl.
It’s interesting that I haven’t noticed anyone clamouring to get into anyone’s wedding.
And I know why. I’ve worked out scientifically – yes, scientifically – why funerals are so much more fun than weddings. If you take a handful of marbles and lay them out on a table, and then add another handful – which is what happens at a wedding when two families meet at t
he reception – all the original marbles are spread further apart. But take the same group of marbles and remove one from the middle – as happens at funerals – and everyone gets closer together. Funerals are warm, affectionate affairs with everyone thinking good things about the person who’s gone, feeling closer to those who are left behind and, often, quite smug that, for the moment at least, it’s not them in that box over there.
It’s also a time to count who is left, who is still there on your side of the River Styx. Dreary old relations whom you might have taken somewhat for granted in the past, suddenly look warm and sparkling. They may not be soulmates, but at least they are still here. They are alive, they’re not dead and they probably love you, as you love them, in that peculiarly loyal and dog-like way that relations love each other.
I like the music, the hymns (except for when the organist strikes up some tune other than Crimond for ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’), I like the speed – cremation services, particularly, usually last no longer than half an hour – and I love the cadences. Funerals usually start off sadly, and then build up to a rousing finale, when we all look around at each other congratulating ourselves on having survived and secretly wondering at whose funeral we will all be meeting again in the near future.
And we all leave saying effusively to each other, because we rather wonder if we’ll ever see them again, ‘I love you.’
The downside
Let’s put aside the grief, which is not the correct subject for a book that’s supposed to be celebrating the great things about being old. Apart, then, from the non-Crimond music there are only two things I dislike about modern funerals. One is the habit of organizing one’s funeral in advance, thus taking all the fun out of it for your bereaved relatives. I got a letter, the other day, from Sun Life.
‘Dear Ms Tronsde,’ it began.
The Virginia Monologues Page 12
