Nervous sniggering

Whenever I see an article with a title and sub-line like, ‘Golden oldies-
having spent the Sixties inventing youth culture, why should we grow old gracefully?’
I cannot help but have a quick scan to see if it worth reading.

This article appeared in Sunday’s Observer, written by a Mr Phil Hogan. It is stuffed full of English ‘humour’ and references so if you are not from these shores, beware.

Well, I guess the only positive thing that can be said about the thing is that it didn’t make any attempt to delivery a serious commentary about older people. What struck me about the thing was its mocking and cynical tone. For example: ‘it seems that traditional senior pastimes such as bingo and forming queues at the post office are going the way of the surgical corset, as wives of a certain age busy themselves arranging surprise second honeymoons in Beirut or the Himalayas only to find that their husbands have already set off for the North Pole on their new motorbike, leaving a note saying not to wait up.’

You might say, ‘so what, I read this sort of stuff every day’. This is the point of this post – we do read this sort of stuff on a regular basis. It seems that when writing about the changing behaviour of older people, the media finds it difficult not to retreat into a sniggering writing style. It is not that the media adopts this approach that interests me, it is why do they do it?

Here is my explanation. There are certain groups of people, from religious and geographic backgrounds, where that it is OK to talk about in humorous terms. There are others where you employ humour at your peril. I am not going to give examples! When it comes to age groups, young people are very sensitive to being the brunt of humour, from anybody other than their peer group. This is not the case with older people – they are fair game.

My suspicion is that there is a deep vein of envy that determines the tone of much of the writing. Older people seem to be pretty relaxed with their existence and appear to be having a good time. That’s not how it is supposed to be. Being young (if you are young) is the zenith of existence; every day older is a bad thing. When you have this apparent mismatch between reality and expectation it result in the sort of article I started by describing. Dick Stroud: www.20plus30.com