Last week, in addition to my existing pancreatic and heart problems, I was diagnosed with something called an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Anyway, I had to attend a ‘routine’ screening appointment, and after the nurse spent ages poking her ultrasound machine around my big belly, the decision was made (smiling) to refer me to a vascular consultant.
Modern medicine is always finding new things to scare me, and I’ve learned that I fall nicely into this group of baby boomers (those of us born between 1946 and 1964) who are significantly less healthy than our parents or grandparents (born during or after before the war), even though they had to fend off Adolf Hitler.
After looking into all this, Laura Gimeno from University College London has published a new report: ‘Even with advances in medicine and greater public awareness about healthy living, people born since 1945 are at greater risk of chronic disease and disability than their predecessors. ‘ she says.
Hitler may be the key. From January 1940, when Nazi submarines destroyed the merchant marine and threatened to starve us into defeat, the Ministry of Food introduced rationing – which lasted for fourteen years.
Last week, in addition to my existing pancreatic and heart problems, I was diagnosed with something called an abdominal aortic aneurysm, writes ROGER LEWIS
Paradoxically, the war diet made everyone healthier. You never see fat people in today’s news.
Everyone had their ration book, with weekly coupons that gave each adult two ounces of cheese, two ounces of butter, two pints of milk, two ounces of tea, two small chops and four ounces of bacon. People were only allowed one egg. Offal and pieces of whale were available, but not in excess.
Since the country was digging for victory, vegetables were in abundance on the allotments. There was no gas, so everyone walked.
The rations were enriched with vitamins. Vegetarians had not yet been invented, so meat provided sufficient protein and iron. Cooking had to be inventive, although I’m glad I never saw roast cow udders or squirrel tail soup.
A lot was done with carrots and egg powder. Spuds were a staple. I was told that the main side effect of wartime diet was increased flatulence. “Take that, Hitler!” my grandfather would say, even in the 1960s.
But when imports returned in the 1950s, the baby boomers started drinking like pigs. That weekly wartime diet was something I could personally eat on an average morning.
When Harold Macmillan said, “You’ve never had it so good!” He may have been referring specifically to me.
It was good – very nice actually – but now we’re paying for it. My peer group, our off-scale body mass index, has problems with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiology problems and lung disease.
Everyone I know is older than their hips or knees, and conversations among us men are almost exclusively about prostate. We fall into two categories, us Boomers. There are those of us who shy away from doctors, who fear the letter from the NHS demanding we make an appointment.
I always get them. They bring me out in beehives because the doctors always find something else that has gone wrong.
It’s my own fault. I didn’t like to move, and when I did, for example waddling to the chip shop around the corner, with the funny name Oh My Cod, I was only shouted at by joggers, mowed down by cyclists and tripped over retractable dog leashes.
I found it easier to stay home and hang out, watch TV and say it’s work.
The result is that I huff and puff when I go upstairs, and an air ambulance had to come to my rescue after having a heart attack in a Morrisons car park in Hastings.
But I’m glad that when I had the chance, I wasted my youth and wandered off into the night, even if it means it all catches up with me and I’ve become a fan of the elastic waistband.
I was in Normandy this summer. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now, but after a long lunch with an old school friend I fell down the granite steps outside the kitchen and landed in a butterfly bush.
The second category of Boomers are those in middle age who continue to harass doctors and hospitals in the expectation that some medical miracle will help them rejuvenate.
They’re the people who are always talking about their annual health MOT, and they think modern medicine will allow them to live forever and solve aches and pains.
If the older generations – that is, those just before mine – had mobility problems, they would manfully endure stumbling only short distances, or sit contentedly in their chairs, staring at the fire, listening to what Shakespeare called the chimes. at midnight.
The Boomers who harass doctors, on the other hand, seem to think they have the right, even if they are certainly over it, to skydive for charity or climb Kilimanjaro. The main beneficiaries are orthopedic surgeons. It is a strange development that older people try to act as if they are younger, especially when the reality is that they are on their way for a check-up or returning from the pharmacy with yet another bag of pills.
Because it’s the pills and medical developments and interventions that are throwing us Boomers into the purgatory of debilitating ill health. While previous generations seemed to know when to fall out of place, doctors can keep us going again and again.
This is the great paradox. We live longer, yet we are less healthy and are fast becoming a race of weaklings.
And the next generations are no better. At least we could play in the streets, climb trees, be physically active and independent.
Today, children are closely monitored by helicopter parents, teachers paralyze the initiative with their risk assessment procedures, and every hour they can manage is spent alone staring at smartphones.
When they go to university, having affairs and drinking heavily, which we planned, doesn’t seem to be on the menu – freshers’ week might as well involve monks and nuns now. It’s abstinence on all fronts, with many mental health issues.
As for me, I’m not ready to board the water wagon and crunch into a Boomer spin class just yet. The sun is over the yardarm as I write this and I reach for a big one – for now the aneurysm can wait.
Roger Lewis’s erotic vagrancy: everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is now available in paperback from Quercus Books.