PETER HITCHENS: To my critics who call me ‘Boomer’, I say this: One day you’ll be lucky enough to be old

My opponents often fail with words, because they usually do not contain many arguments. So, as I have spent the last few years fighting for facts and logic on anti-social media, my critics have taken to calling me “old” in the hopes of causing me harm.

A variation on this is to call me a ‘Boomer’, the American expression for those like me who were born in the great Baby Bulge after World War II (I was born in October 1951).

They do this like it’s a brilliant point. They seem to think that because I’m old, I’m stupid. They are not at all ashamed of this, because they would just as openly have prejudices based on race or gender.

My first reaction to this strange, rather stupid rudeness was to say to myself, ‘Old? Me?’ As recent research from Humboldt University in Berlin shows, the boundaries of age have shifted slightly further in recent years.

Those born in 1911 believed that old age began at age 71 when they were 65 years old. Those born in 1956 said at the same stage of their lives that old age began at age 74. But of course I am old, a fact first resisted, then accepted and now actively welcomed. These days I tend to respond to this intended abuse by saying that I hope my critics will one day be lucky enough to grow old themselves.

Peter Hitchens in 1969 after being evicted from a hippie squat in Piccadilly, London

Hitchens, here near Russia’s Red Square in 1984, witnessed the collapse of communism while living in the country

If so, they will discover one thing: that we who are old generally do not feel that we are old. We accept it as a fact, but I am essentially the same person who protested quite vigorously against the Vietnam War in 1968, in Grosvenor Square in London, where the American Embassy was then.

As it is, I am as sure as ever that I was right to do so. The historians have definitively sided with the anti-war movement. A photo of this version of me still exists, just in case I’m tempted to forget or suppress this fact.

In reality, as a minor celebrity, I can see my progress towards retirement age with just a few mouse clicks, illustrated with lots of photos and videos. From the late 1990s onwards, TV clips have surfaced documenting the strange behavior of my hair, on my head and face, and the strange unwillingness of any clothing to fit my stocky farmer’s body, no matter how thin I am ( occasionally) or (more often) thick.

Beards come and go, starting dark brown and turning gray. During the Great Panic over Covid, my hair is growing to prodigious lengths because an out-of-control government has decreed that it is too dangerous for anyone to get close enough to me to cut it. Oh, very good then.

If it had lasted much longer, I would have planned to adopt a full Karl Marx look in protest at the idiocy of our rulers. The thrilling success and predictable aftermath of a strict diet (kippers and cabbage, plus Listerine mouthwash) can also be traced. This also applies to a lot of other changes, of spirit and of direction.

At what stage in all of this did I think I was getting old? Never, until the jokes started – at which point I thought I might as well enjoy it. As the good novelist Kingsley Amis said about another inevitable part of life (death): you don’t have to apply for it, stand in line for it, or pick it up. “They’ll bring it to you – for free!”

Hitchens returns to Russia in 2002 after ten years to see if life has improved now that the country is no longer under Soviet rule

Meeting with Bhutan’s then Home Minister Jigme Thinley at his office in the Dzong in the capital Thimphu in 2004

Now, at 72, Hitchens tells his critics that one day they will be lucky to be old

So here I am, over the past three and ten years, more than two years of extra time, and I firmly maintain the position that I can’t really complain about what happens next. My generation generally hasn’t treated their bodies like temples, and every few weeks another Bourbon-and-cocaine-ridden rock star bites the dust, often a lot younger than me.

The great institutions of my time are growing weaker and weaker. I always wondered if The Times, that mighty organ, would give me an obituary when I died. Now I wonder which of us will go first.

And then there are the benefits. I am old enough to have been educated before the revolution. I knew England before the roads were so full of cars that children were not allowed to go outside alone.

I know what ‘Button A’ and ‘Button B’ were back in the day when we had payphones. I ate bars of Fry’s ‘Five Boys’ chocolate. I know things about history and poetry that most people don’t even know they don’t know.

What I used to (correctly) consider to be a pretty poor education now makes me sound like an intellectual (a description I absolutely reject, because I can remember what really well-educated people were like, and I can also remember real teachers). I failed an exam. I saw fast steam locomotives hissing and rattling into stations on winter evenings, glowing fiery red and orange – and that was normal.

I saw the Royal Navy’s last great battleship, HMS Vanguard, being towed into the surf on a sultry summer afternoon in 1960. I saw and smelled Paris almost sixty years ago, before it was modernized. I heckled Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe on the steps of 10 Downing Street (then open to all) in 1974 as he went in to discuss a coalition with Ted Heath. I saw the deep blue stratosphere and the curve of the Earth’s surface from the cockpit of the Concorde.

I watched one of America’s last great luxury trains, the Southern Crescent, leave Washington’s Union Station en route to New Orleans, with waiters in white coats serving mint juleps to the lucky passengers.

I queued at the Downing Street receptions to be welcomed by Margaret Thatcher, who first took my hand and then pulled me sharply forward and past her, to let me know that I was a person of no importance , I wasn’t expected to linger in her presence. . I was told to sit down and stop being bad by the future Sir Anthony Blair after I asked him a tough question at a press conference.

I have passed through the Berlin Wall many times and seen the gigantic Red Army roar through the streets and roads of East Germany, shaking the Soviet-controlled air with sonic booms. I stood in the freezing snow, warmed by a pair of communist long johns, when Marxism-Leninism collapsed in Prague in 1989.

I was asked for my vote (which I didn’t have) by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I saw how an admiral of the Soviet Navy at a reception in the Kremlin threw a plate of pies into his briefcase, because even he could not get decent food in the shops in Moscow at that time.

I was frightened almost excessively by Islamic gangsters in Mogadishu. I have attended church services in a nuclear missile submarine and walked through the radioactive dust of a nuclear test site. I was chased down a Berlin street by the East German People’s Police (I ran faster than them) and was denied entry to a rather interesting looking bar in North Korea.

I have seen chain gangs at work, two American executions, a Soviet massacre and several Nazi concentration camps. I crossed the International Date Line from Monday morning to the previous Sunday afternoon, on a journey between Siberia and Alaska that I doubt anyone could ever make now. Wouldn’t you like to be old too?