Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age

Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age
Julia Neuberger

Why we need to be better at ageing…Julia Neuberger addresses the question of what life will actually be like for us as we get old, and suggests answers for making our later years as good as when we were young.Britain is getting old – and fast. Due to the combination of a decline in birth rates and an increase in life expectancy we are rapidly heading towards a crisis – in health, housing, finance and long-term care.Despite this seismic shift in our demographic makeup, the way we view and treat the old has barely adjusted. It is shocking, for example, that despite less than 1 in 20 British people wanting to reside in a care home in their old age, 1 in 5 die in one.It is time that we examined how we look after ourselves as we age – and address the issues that when young we take for granted as a right, not a privilege.• Why is housing not being built so that the less mobile amongst us can continue to look after ourselves for longer?• Why when we have so much experience and no less intelligence are we not able to find work which benefits everyone?• What are we supposed to do for fun? There must be more to life than bingo and bowls!• Why is our approach to care so poor? If we neglect carers, will they not neglect us?The opportunity to make life better as we age is being missed, but not necessarily because the solutions are so difficult… Are we even asking ourselves the obvious questions?How I want to grow old is a call to arms – a manifesto on age that aims to change the way we think and to galvanise ourselves into action.

Not Dead Yet

A Manifesto for Old Age

Julia Neuberger

Contents

Dedication and acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without the extraordinary help and support of Ros Levenson, whose idea it was in part, who conducted much of the research, argued with me, briefed me, and generally helped me make it happen. Nor would it have been possible without the dedicated work of David Boyle, who took an unedited sprawling text and turned it into English – not to mention into manageable prose – as well as arguing through some of it at a late stage, and clarifying my ideas considerably. The team at HarperCollins has been supportive as ever – without Carole Tonkinson, Natalie Jerome, Jane Beaton and Belinda Budge, this volume would never have seen the light of day.

Huge thanks are due to my agent Clare Alexander, as well, dispenser of wise advice, firm encouragement, superb ideas, and lots of wine and sympathy, and to my assistant Paola Churchill, referred to by my whole family as ‘my boss’, because she tells me what I have to do, including finishing this book.

But this book would not have been possible without the help and support in quite other ways of my beloved parents, Walter and Liesel Schwab, wise to the end, whose old age I lived through with them and for them, of my uncle, Harry Schwab, and of my mother-in-law, Lilian Neuberger, who aged with astonishing grace and died at 94 whilst this book was in preparation. So Not Dead Yet is dedicated to their memory, as well as to my thoroughly alive and feisty aunt Anne Schwab, who is busy proving how effective you can be in old age – a lesson to us all.

When I was eighty-seven

they took me from my coffin;

they found a flannel nightshirt

for me to travel off in.

All innocent and toothless

I used to lie in bed,

still trailing clouds of glory

from the time when I was dead.

The cruel age of sixty-five

put paid to my enjoyment;

I had to wear a bowler hat

and go to my employment.

But at the age of sixty

I found I had a wife.

And that explains the children.

(I’d wondered all my life.)

I kept on growing younger

and randier and stronger

till at the age of twenty-one

I had a wife no longer.

With mini-skirted milkmaids

I frolicked in the clover;

the cuckoo kept on calling me

until my teens were over.

Then algebra and cricket

and sausages a-cooking,

and puffing at a cigarette

when teacher wasn’t looking.

The trees are getting taller,

the streets are getting wider.

My mother is the world to me;

and soon I’ll be inside her.

And now, it is so early,

there’s nothing I can see.

Before the world, or after?

Wherever can I be?

‘Run the Film Backwards’, Sydney Carter

Introduction (#uef004ae7-4e73-5f4c-93b4-6ae9ead8e937)

Run the film backwards (#uef004ae7-4e73-5f4c-93b4-6ae9ead8e937)

It is a stabbing irony that as we become an elderly country we ignore the elderly with ever greater ferocity: if you don’t look at the Ghost of Christmas Future, maybe it will never come.