I was at a wonderful wedding on Saturday, and there were some great pictures – or so I thought – carefully taken by the husband. I then caught sight of a newspaper photograph (which I don’t intend to share, but it was in the Mail!) in which I looked for all the world like an old lady, slightly hunched, talking to another old lady. The fact is that we were talking about global politics and women’s opportunities internationally. But you wouldn’t have guessed that. It could have been about knitting.
Self-images are always tricky. It is one of the perils of modernity that we cannot now escape a sense of what we look like to others. I feel, in a way, wistful for the pre-Renaissance world in which there were no accurate mirrors (just some distorting bits of polished metal), and you were how you felt (though I am also puzzled by what it must have been like to recognize everyone around you except yourself.)
The fact is that there is no image of an elderly woman which invests her with power (young women may have trouble on this score too but try fast-forwarding a few decades and it’s worse). When you are old, let me promise, you don’t feel very much different from how you did forty years earlier. In your head, at least, you are still dancing all night long and running nimbly to catch the departing bus. But you do look different, and so you are treated very differently. Patronizing is the word. I am now fed up with being called “my love” (in a well-meaning way, I admit), even though – yes, I confess to the contradiction here – I do rather like it when people give me a seat on buses and trains. (Knees, dear boy!)
There are a few role models for us old ladies. Margaret Atwood is one for me (and Diana Athill used to be). But generally you’re stuck with the Joan (in Darby and Joan). I notice on social media that “witch” is more common (“where’s your cat darling?” as the gentlemen on X tend to say). But it is not entirely gendered. A male friend was recently asked to come to an “annual review” at the local doctor’s surgery, which he booked and turned up for. On arrival, the nurse said that he had come a month too early. “I came when you asked me (via your online automated message) and having made an appointment”, he explained. “Oh dear”, she said, “you must have got confused” (“confused” said with that intonation which signals dementia!).
He insisted that she did his blood test nonetheless. All fine. But then a month or so later, a new message comes to say that he is now late for his annual review. “This is now overdue.” So, who’s the confused one now, as we oldies say!
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