Polly Toynbee’s article on old age nicely exposes the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary old age (How old is too old? I’m 77 and I don’t know yet. But I will when I get there, May 4). I am now in my 90th year, agile in mind but disintegrating in body as cancer and heart disease take their bow in the theater of my aged body. Old age is no longer God’s age of seventy years – modern medicine and better social conditions have undermined God.
I was born in the mid-1930s. My working class ancestors were all working class when reaching the age of 60 was a matter of luck. When I was born, I had one grandmother, who died in 1947 at the age of 66. Very old for that time. In my late teens and during national service I began to resist the idea of becoming a general laborer and took the opportunity, offered by the much-mourned London County Council, to embark on my own social mobility journey into the professional classes.
That allowed me to take early retirement in late middle age and return to college and graduate school and pursue a PhD at age 77.
I believe that education did much to enable me to reach old age while still resisting the call of death. Such calls have always been there somewhere, but are now becoming louder and more insistent. However, my mind still tries to keep them at bay.
Tony Austin
Cardiff
I agree with almost all of Polly Toynbee’s fascinating article. I’m the same age as her, but I rarely think about growing older. Luckily I look about 10 years younger than 77, and act the same as always.
I’ve been left-wing (or a damn hippie, as my brother-in-law once called me) since I was twenty. I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the late 1960s and 1970s and once gave a pro-choice speech on a street in Brixton. I have had three careers: radiography, biology teaching, and five-element acupuncture. I gave up the first two after 10 years because they weren’t challenging enough.
A while ago someone told me they wanted to buy a book about what to do when you get old. Just go on with your life, I said.
Liz Hall
Condicote, Gloucestershire
Polly Toynbee is absolutely right: old age is flexible depending on how you feel (and she really is very young). I recently turned 90 through a combination of the NHS, supportive family, no meat or smoking by choice and lots of gardening and walking.
The downside is that so many family and friends have died, often far too young. The advantage is that many of us retirees are comfortably free, which means we can travel (often for free), enjoy special prices on lots of entertainment and fill every moment with activities of our own choosing. Charities cannot exist without us volunteers, so let’s live as long as we can do so independently.
Alison Watson
London
Maybe you’re already old when people start asking, “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” It happened three times last year on Red Pike in the Lake District. Now it’s hitting closer to home, and a woman recently asked me in the pool.
Margaret Squires (almost 85)
St Andrews, Fife
Thank you, Polly Toynbee, for expressing my feelings about age far better than I ever could. I am a few years ahead of her and subscribe to the view that you should never complain about growing older: it is a privilege that is denied to many.
David Shannon
Ashton-under-Hill, Worcestershire
In answer to the question of how old is too old, be careful with the word “lively.”
Mike Houtcock
Olveston, Gloucestershire