Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

of central importance. Others may have a game of bowls, or baking cakes, or carpentry, or macramé, or watercolors. I have reading.
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    Writing this chapter, I have sometimes felt that I am eerily attuned to the thought processes of 10 Downing Street, where clearly some are much exercised about the new demographic. This morning the paper tells me that one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s advisers says that elderly people should be encouraged to go back to work and move into smaller houses. It is not their welfare alone with which he is concerned; he wants their family-sized houses for the next generation, while to advance the retirement age would of course have an impact on the ever-increasing pension bill, though he masks this by insisting that the elderly need the social contact supplied by work – many of the old complain of isolation. True enough, I’m sure, and apparently the Swedish prime minister has floated the idea of seventy-five as a potential retirement age. The prospect of a future in which a great swathe of a nation’s resources has to be set aside for the sustenance of an entirely inactive slab of the population is indeed challenging. But seventy-five-year-old refuse collectors? Seventy-five-year-olds digging the roads, erecting scaffolds? I don’t think so. Office work, maybe, and indeed all those occupations without an element of physical labor. Many septuagenarians might well welcome that. I hope the Swedish prime minister has thought this through, and indeed our own, who has apparently said that he loves the idea of an automatic “life expectancy based adjustment” to the state pension age – which is already due to go up from sixty-five to sixty-eight over the next three decades. This is all very well, and I’ve advocated finding a means for those elderly who are able and keen to be useful to continue to be so, but the increased expectancy will have to be accompanied by increasingly robust hips, knees and everything else.
    Professor Tom Kirkwood has written: “There is a little progress with age-related diseases.” But he went on to say that in his study of a group over eighty-five not one had zero age-related disease, and most had four or five. Doctors’ offices and hospital waiting rooms are well stocked with those over sixty-five; it is the old and the young who demand most attention. On a trip to University College Hospital Accident and Emergency a couple of years ago my companions in the waiting room were seven elderly men and women, and three mothers with babies or toddlers, all of us supervised by a stern-faced security man in case we started causing trouble. My visit was purely precautionary, insisted on by my doctor: I appreciated the resources and the efficiency but felt very much that I was indeed cluttering up the system.
    Well, we do, and we can’t help it. Over the last years, I have had surgery and treatment for breast cancer; hips and knees are holding out so far but my back gave in long ago: I have been in intermittent pain for fifteen years – discomfort always, tipping into real pain. My sight is dodgy – myopic macular degeneration, which may get worse (but also – fingers crossed – may not). There is a shoulder problem – a torn tendon. The worst was a cracked vertebra, four years ago, which required surgery – balloon kyphoplasty – which left me in intense, unrelenting, and apparently inexplicable pain for three and a half months. Pain that had the specialists shaking their heads, baffled, passing me around like the unwelcome parcel in that children’s game – and I am sorry, apologetic, through the miasma of pain, sorry to be such a challenge, but sorrier still for myself. I want my life back. I want to be able to sit, stand, walk to the supermarket, watch the TV, meet a friend. Write my novel. We have run through the entire repertoire of pain-killers, starting with kindly and ineffective paracetamol and ibuprofen, moving through flirtations with co-codamol,