Terry Prone: Getting old means wanting to smack anyone who describes you as “feisty”

Getting old means trying to stand on one leg because that’s one of the giveaways. If you can’t walk fast and stand on one leg, you’re goosed. Not at the same time, of course.

Getting old means being surprised and grateful when the GP clinic doesn’t charge you for your visit. Even though they didn’t charge you the last time either, because now the State stumps up for your visits.

Getting old means watching old couples and wondering at how uncivil they are to each other. Not all of them. But a lot of them seem to have a marital lifetime’s worth of impatient venom stored up, ready to apply. They’re really pleasant to other human beings. Just constantly snappish at each other.

Getting old means using phrases like “on point” in the hope they will demonstrate you’re not ready for life’s redundancy package, even though you vividly remember teachers doing this sort of thing to impress students with how current they were, and remember, too, that it never worked.

Getting old means wanting to smack anyone who asks if you’re “still” working.

Getting old means that your pedantry matures into a self-sustaining awfulness, so you mutter at the radio that “a narrative story” is tautologous. Pompous pedantry is reasonably OK if other people are not forced to witness it.

Getting old means wanting to smack anyone who tells you you’re marvellous, all the same.

Getting old means wanting to smack anyone who describes you as “feisty”. Getting old means secretly believing everybody of your age looks ropier than you do.

Getting old means that any encounter with anyone as old as you are involves Maeve Binchy’s “organ recital” — the shared litany of mechanical failure.

Getting old means the unbreakable rule about accidents, diagnoses, medical tests and surgical procedures is: “If you can’t be funny about it, shut up about it.”

Getting old means hearing older people say: “I’m busier since I retired than I ever was.” This consequent upon Parkinson’s Law, which holds that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

Getting old means entering a room and asking it out loud: “What am I looking for?”.

Getting old means noticing lapses in memory, yet finding, when they are mentioned to your offspring, that they remember you doing exactly the same thing when they were kids. Then you worry about not remembering that you couldn’t remember stuff back then either.

Getting old means being mystified by that poem that goes: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.” Who cares? And why would you want to wear a colour that establishes you as not just old, but as pain-in-the-ass old?

Getting old means relinquishing the hope that you will ever do things such as ice-skating again. This is less traumatic than it sounds, because you weren’t any good at most of them in the first place.

Getting old means wanting to tell the Pope not to retire because if he does, we’ll have a superfluity of retired Popes and anyway, he’s the best we have to be going on with.

Getting old means bleeding profusely from injuries you never noticed you giving yourself. Your home would be a great learning experience for new Forensic Science Ireland folk: spatters, smears, and drips everywhere.

Getting old means making involuntary moany noises when you stand up, sit down or bend over.

Getting old means despising others who make involuntary moany noises when they stand up, sit down, or bend over.

Getting old means wondering how awful the Irish Times obituary of you will be, stored in some electronic vault just waiting for you to pop your clogs.

Getting old means thinking you’re maybe not famous enough to figure in the Irish Times obituaries.

Getting old means refusing to wear clogs, anyway.

Getting old means having it assumed that you adore all children. This is not true. Particularly other people’s grandchildren, pictorially saved on their smartphones, all the better to annoy you with. You have to let on that they’re pure gorgeous. They never are.

Getting old means getting up constantly, doing stuff that doesn’t need doing and that you don’t want to do anyway. You do it because experts say you have to keep moving. Healthy old people are like sharks that have to keep swimming or snuff it. There’s days… 

Getting old means people do that not-smiling smile and ask questions such as “should you?” and “is that wise?” when you wear four-inch heels.

Getting old means they are surprised and affronted when you tell them to shag off.

Getting old means warning a 14-year-old cat that if, as you suspect, it’s becoming incontinent, it’s going to permanent sleep. Nothing personal, but your diminished sense of smell means it could be stinking up your whole house without you knowing. The cat purrs.

Getting old means remembering Cary Grant’s observation that when people tell you how young you look, what they’re thinking is how old you are.

Getting old means reading novels with an added fervour when you discover that the current trend is for people to abandon fiction for non-fiction when they age because they can no longer follow a narrative.

Getting old means remembering culinary atrocities such as blancmange, sago, and semolina and being grateful they died off.

Getting old means enjoying gardening, but not admitting it because it is such a stereotypical activity.

Getting old means that when international banking authorities predict only mild inflation, you know they are wrong. We may not end up transporting banknotes in wheelbarrows, but if you have a wheelbarrow, don’t sell it.

Getting old means not being expected to care about Love Island.

Getting old means paying attention when Lidl announce that their staff can choose to work beyond retirement age as the company ends mandatory retirement at 65.

Getting old means that the only phone number you can rhyme off is that of the house you lived in when you were a kid. This is because you have outsourced your brain to your phone. This worries you until you encounter a study where neurologists found constantly using your phone to store and access data frees up synapses in your brain for other stuff, rather than causing your mind to go in a corner and nod off.

Getting old means spending half your life reading studies on how to prevent bad stuff associated with ageing. And finding you should have adopted said behaviours half a century earlier.