THE EXCRUCIATING JOYS OF GROWING OLD.

 

Me, aged 30, model portfolio shoot.

Growing old sneaks up on you, really, really fast.  One minute you're hanging in there in middle age, with men (in my case, as I'm a woman) still casting furtive glances at you, even though you're on the plus side of sixty and whoosh, overnight it seems, something has dropped and you discover a sudden clutch of grey hair on your temples; you know, the ones that make men look so distinguished.

Admittedly I'm a bit of a freak for greying so late. My mother had only a few grey hairs when she died at the age of eighty-one.  I was, in fact, pleased with mine because, after decades of dyeing my hair blond, when Covid and isolation hit, I let it return to the mouse brown that had been inflicted on me by my genes.  "Ah," I thought, "when I go blond again, no more dark roots."  No such luck.  I retain way too much mouse brown and my income has also dropped due to finishing work so I can no longer afford it, thanks to that uninvited little plague.

My age clock is about to tick over the seventy milestone on Christmas Eve.  I am pleased as punch to have made it thus far and hope for a lot more, but I must resign myself to losing my, almost glamorous and not unattractive former self.  I had worked hard at it.  I had always worn make up, remained slim and worn heels.  My feet now just laugh when I contemplate high heels in a moment of whimsy.  I am so out of practice at wearing them, after giving up work, that I feel I am teetering if the heels are over two centimeters.

When I was a young girl, my mother would tell me that I was plain, but that I would be beautiful one day.  It didn't help that she demanded that I keep my hair short and would nag me incessantly about it once I was old enough to ignore her demands and grow it.  In any case, she told me I would be beautiful and so I made bloody sure I was.  Whether by sheer force of will or good bone structure, I managed to achieve it.  I suppose you would call it striking, rather than beautiful but, with long, blonded hair and artfully applied makeup, I did a good impression of it.

Makeup, now, has become a problem.  Why?  Essential tremor is why.  Seven years ago my hands developed a tremor.  That's all it is but, it's a nuisance.  It makes putting on eye makeup and eating in restaurants a problem.  With the eye makeup, I am liable to paint anything but my lids.  With the restaurants, I am liable to feed someone beside me or fling food in their face rather than get it in my mouth.  Some foods are okay, cutting and knife and fork coordination is not.

I was recently trying to help my six-year-old grand-daughter with some artwork she was creating by mixing some paint with a brush for her.  The next thing I flipped the paint onto her nose.  My darling grandchildren find me amusing, rather happily.  I persist with typing on my laptop but the fourth and little finger of my left hand have other ideas.  My new laptop has just upgraded itself and offers me speech to text writing, but I will persist with typing, or it will be like the high heels; if I stop, my fingers will forget how.

Back to my feet.  My bunions are quite magnificent.  The odd thing is, they don't hurt.  They do if I wear shoes that are too tight but, by and large, they do not.  A general practitioner saw them recently and his jaw dropped open.  "Don't they hurt?", he exclaimed loudly.  I replied that they did not.  I've been offered an operation by public health but refuse.  I think I'll leave well enough alone for now.  I call the bunion on my right foot, Everest, and the one on my left, K2.  My mother warned me I would get bunions with glee, as she had perfect feet.  Apparently, I inherited them from her aunt.

I also, apparently, have arthritis in my bunions and, obviously, in my hands, which do not hurt unless someone squeezes them with vigor.  My hands are gradually becoming deformed because of it but they're not too bad, I just can no longer open my palms out flat.  About three years ago the fat under the skin of my hands also suddenly disappeared leaving them, with the help of sun damage, not the smooth things they had been.

What offends me most, however, are my arms.  My upper arms were always taut and shiny things of beauty.  Suddenly they have developed vertical wrinkles.  Now, I'm not, and never have been, plump, or even close.  I don't recall my mother having vertical arm wrinkles, but she was slightly on the heavy side so perhaps that's why.  When my grandchildren sit either side of me at lunch, one will start to play with the floppy fat bit on the underside of my upper arm, then the other, finding it amusing, will join in on the other side.  My arms are far from fat, I am slim, but when the skin stretches, any fat follows gravity.  At least I can consider myself a toy.

My skin is now crepey and dry in various places but, all in all, my body and physique are doing well.  My breasts have done an admirable job of staying firm and are only now sagging slightly.  I forgive them as I loathe wearing a bra and do so as little as possible.  Thank heavens for moderate sized bosoms.

My only other age-related problem are my eyes.  I cannot consider the floaters I've had since I was twelve age-related since I have had them since then.  They just get worse with time.  What annoys me most is that once I was only short-sighted but now, I am also long-sighted.  This really is galling.  I mean, really, how can a person be both?  I didn't mind being short-sighted so much, as everything up close was clear.  Suddenly, I need glasses to see something small and fiddly up close.  I've had graduated lenses for some time now because, ten years ago, my lenses for short-sightedness began to blur things when I looked at something near.  This had never happened before but has something to do with the muscles ageing.  Hence, I needed graduated lenses to correct this.  Nonetheless, without glasses, I could still see fine up close.  In the last year, however, I've had to pull away from print to see it, then when I get too far away, I have to move closer again.  My eyes are not coordinated in this respect as each one has a different distance at which it likes to read.

Well, that's all I have to report, so far.  My knees and hips are fine, which I'm beginning to think is unusual.  I have met many people, some much younger than me, who have had operations to fix their knees, some even twice.  My blood pressure was once on the low side and my cholesterol was perfect.  Both are creeping upwards, but neither are cause for concern.  I don't wish to have to start my breakfast with five or six different medications daily.  If I can keep things under control as naturally as possible, I will.

There's no use fighting it, the trick is to stay alive as long as possible, feeling as well as possible.

Me, at 70.

See you next year.

END

8 BILLION AND COUNTING.

 

A few years ago, I made a comment beneath a post on Facebook.  I thought it was a fairly moderate, innocuous comment that suggested people should start to think about how many children they should produce if they considered the maths, the size of our planet and how many people it could sustain in the future.  I was certainly not prepared for the online vitriol I would receive.

I had, unbeknownst to me, commented on a post that originated in the USA.  A number of women, who had produced over six offspring, told me to mind my own business and that no one could tell them how many children they could have.  What I came away from this was that, if these were the type of people reproducing with great gusto, would their offspring have the brains to consider the effect of the numbers they would themselves produce when their time came?  The attitude was very much a 'Me first, bugger the planet and the future'.

Let me be clear.  I do not advocate the culling of humans or the horrible one child, or even two, policy.  I just want people to really consider the future for their descendants.  In fact, I believe schools should teach children from a fairly young age about how much arable land is available on the planet and how many people it can feed.   We don't need a terror campaign, we just need children to be taught this, the way they are now about climate change, so that they will think of their options in future.

When I was born in 1952, the world population stood at around 2.5 billion.  In seventy years, it has almost tripled.  That is scary.  The population is growing exponentially and yet every time I hear the media and politicians ranting about greenhouse gas emissions, I boil.  We have greenhouse gas emissions because of all the fuel and production necessities required for a massive population.  Dealing with solely greenhouse gases as being the potential source of the world's demise is like hosing the top floor of a building when the ground floor is on fire.

We are at the point in history where we have to stabilize the population before there needs to be the radical, unwanted and immoral ways to enforce population control, but people will not address it.  It will be almost impossible in third world countries to educate people about population growth, but wealthy and educated countries can use education to gradually make those who won't think, do so; to inform and encourage young people to have families of sustainable size.

Even as I write this, I feel I am treading on eggshells because I am expecting another serve of the vitriol I previously received.  I have never understood why people do not use their brains.  At the age of seven, I began to think about pollution and things that affected the beautiful, green environment in which I grew up.  I have come to understand, however, that a large percentage of people simply do not give any thought to the future or anything that doesn't immediately impact them.  When I hear people say, "Oh, I never thought that could happen to me", I am appalled.  Why not?

I am not a genius, so why can't other people put their brains into gear and use them.  I can't believe mankind has progressed as far as it has technologically and scientifically while common sense has remained the least common thing on the planet.

We have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al, racing each other into space to create new frontiers.  That's because they know Earth will, very soon, be stuffed.  This beautiful, amazing planet (and, no, I have no desire to live on a colony on Mars), is being destroyed by simple lack of thought.  No one will address the elephant in the room; overpopulation.  The politicians don't dare and so they keep rabbiting on about climate change.  Climate change is Santa Claus propped up in front of the unpalatable truth of untethered population growth.

I hope there is still time.  It is absolutely extraordinary that civilization has gone on with blinkers on in this regard for decades.  Politicians only care about votes and won't deal with it.  The great man, David Attenborough, has done amazing work using the media to awaken today's youth to the problem of this Earth's survival.  He has done, however, only one show on population.  I believe that is because he knows that addressing the youth and making them think about the planet is the best way to start without creating controversy.  All power to this man, I love him and thank him from the bottom of my heart.  I only wish he'd been around sooner.

THE END.

EMOJI POWER : symbols worth a thousand words.

Emojis have entered electronic communications throughout the world like a fresh gust of wind.  I'm sure I won't do justice to their symbolism in this, my first attempt, at addressing their impact.  I undertook a degree in Communications Studies, which focused greatly on semiotics in all forms of media.  Before my degree I couldn't have told you the meaning of 'semiotics' or 'semiology'.  In fact, I thought it must have had something to do with pathology, honestly, I did.

Let me bore you with a definition of Semiotics from www.brittanica.com:

"Semiotics, also called semiology, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. … Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians applied to sign-systems other than language."

But I wasn't as stupid as I thought for there is also medical semiology.  A definition I found on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov goes:

"Medical semiology comprises the study of symptoms, somatic signs and laboratory signs, history taking and physical examination."

Signs actually play a very important role in our lives.  Language itself is a sign system and non-language signs, from expressions, to gestures, to the underlying meanings given to colours, all expand our way of communicating with others.

During my degree I studied the role of signs of all kinds used in advertising, from that in print to broadcast on television.  Colours, and the meanings we associate with them, play a big role in how advertisers construct their copy.  Blue has a lot of connotations ranging from sadness to porn.  Red is for excitement, heat and the forbidden.  "He's yellow" - a coward; "she's green with envy"; "he looks really black" - angry, upset.

As students we were given print advertisements and asked to assess how the visual background and elements of a photo or picture supported the text.

I have come to feel that emojis are a really valid form of expression.  They are something to be used in addition to language but can also take its place.  Emojis are just what they are named for: a means of expressing emotion.  They are somehow friendlier than mere words and I think that the reason for this is that we associate pictures, and communication using them, as relating to childhood.  There's something sweet and innocent about them.  To use the words 'I love you' in a missive can bear too much weight.  You can send a platonic friend a 💓 for instance and not have them fearing you have developed a passion for them.

With emoji faces you can express so much with the expression you choose.  Not only that, but they also tend to make us laugh.  For those of us who are older, they also bring out the kid in us.  For someone like me, in her late sixties 😱, it gives my communications a whole new sense of fun. (And, yes, the horror emoji more than adequately expresses what it's like to be a young person who finds themselves in an old body.  When the heck did that happen?)

The internet was born in the 'nineties but really came into its own after the millennium.  The children of today will never know what it was like to be without it.  In a way it really is magic and has given rise to many new careers and possibilities that didn't exist before.  I watch my five- and eight-year-old grandchildren on their iPads and know that they must become adept in the use of computer technology.  The eight-year-old needs his for school, as do his fellow students.  Their homework also includes Mathletics on the iPad.  At their age they take to it like a duck to water, just as they learn language so quickly when they are young.

The five-year-old girl uses an app on hers to put make up on a panda or some fantasy creature, but she can flick through apps like a pro and find what she's after.  At her age having an iPad may seem a bit much, but older brother had one and there would have been a battle if she didn't.  Besides, it is amazing to watch how quickly she became adept at using it.  What really amazed me most was the two-year-old grandchild trying to operate the television remote the other day and refusing all help.  It wasn't just for the television; it was a box that connected to Netflix or something, but he persisted and studied the screen trying to choose a program.  He didn't succeed but he tried.

The older two grandchildren try to do awful, and sometimes beautiful things, to my face using Snapchat.  These days I need improvement but, at worst, I end up looking funny.  I even wonder if I get more of a thrill acting like a kid and using emojis than they do.  When new things come into the world as you're becoming a bit jaded, having been born in an age of television, phones, cars and all the mod cons, and then something new, refreshing and only dreamed of, like mobile phones and the not even imagined internet, comes along, it does make you feel young again.    

🤸🏼‍♀️

END