Any trip home to my mother’s is littered with a litany of stories of death, cancer, injury and illness. Just before we arrived last week, the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse seemingly rode through the town to spread the love. Within minutes we'd heard of one prostrate cancer, two dog deaths and I swear there was a quadruple bypass in there somewhere. She insists I know the afflicted personally and I nod and uh huh. "You know, driving instructor who lives next to the alley up the road." I think so, I reply, "Well, he's dead." So and so’s knee was accidentally replaced with a green bell pepper and Aunty Joan, she’s got scrofula. It’s like a perpetual episode of Debbie Downer.
My feeling is that the generation in their 60's and 70's are better versed in death and disease, whereas mine, Thatcher's boys and girls, have no sense of it - no-ones actually dying any more. 50 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 20, 20 is the new 10. At the top end of the scale, perhaps dead is the new alive.
Of course, eventually a special brand of NHS famine, pestilence and death will come to us all, but as we increasingly fail to die, I’m really hoping I don’t have to rely on my Facebook friends to come round and peel me off the lino and take me off for a burnin’.
Let’s face it, Facebook will suck and blow simultaneously when you’re in your 80’s. My mother’s plague analysis brought to you on your daily feed via friends you’ve not actually met for over 65 years all playing I-just-bought-the-Farmville.
So if 50 is the new 40 and so on, someone has just given us an extra 10 years of life and what have we done with it? We aren’t celebrating that fact, we barely acknowledge it. In fact we seem to be simply taking the opportunity to borrow more and take longer to pay it back. It’s not like ten years is a breeze – you could probably get a low grade murder in and be out with two to spare.
So here’s my question, someone just gave you ten years back, how are you going to spend it?
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