Authors Electric

After Rembrandt - Wikimedi a  In recent months, several Authors Electrics have written about growing old. I grow old also and, in recent years, have been increasingly met with a particular attitude from younger people, and I wondered if fellow Electrics were also familiar with it. I first fell foul of it when I was a mere slip of a thing of 60. I went to the dentist, where I was treated by a very likeable and friendly dentist and nurse. The conversation (when my mouth wasn't full of implements) was perfectly normal. The kind you might have with any adult person in the world. I can't remember the details of the treatment -- it was some kind of filling or tooth-repair. As I was collecting my things to leave, the dentist apologised because the repair would only last about twenty years. Oh, that's okay, I said. It will probably see me out. Oh no, she said. In another twenty years, it would have to be done again. She was sorry about it, but that was the best she could do. Well, ...

  It’s amazing how stealthily new stages of life creep up on us. Just a few years ago I considered myself to still be a middle-aged father, with much of my life still ahead of me. Now I find myself a grandfather to three, with a fourth on the way. Having downsized from the family home of the last thirty five years, we are living in a rental in a pleasant village, watching our children ascending the property ladder in order to house their burgeoning broods. The flow of work hasn’t changed all that much, Zoom and Skype having replaced exhausting hours in airports and hotels, thanks to the current plague, but much of the pressure of the previous forty years seems to have floated away. I still don’t have as much time to read or daydream as I would like, but I dare say that comes with the next stage. Watching my mother-in-law lose her grasp on reality is a sobering reminder of what might lie ahead. Although it is sad for the rest of us to watch her slow decline, she seems remarkably...