|
|
 |
| |
Richard Ingrams |
Why grumpy oldies enjoy their jolly gripes
Joan Bakewell finds much to cheer her up in a collection of sharp pieces for the 'older generation'
BLING, BLOGS AND BLUETOOTH
edited by Nick Parker, Profile Books, £7.99.pieces for the ‘older generation’ click here to buy
SOME people are simply ahead of their time. As long ago as 1992 Richard Ingrams – he of the waspish Private Eye – saw a gap in the market.
There was no existing magazine that catered for the literary tastes of older people. So he founded The Oldie, a magazine that has flourished ever since, much beloved of the increasing numbers of old people in the population. He had seen them coming, and knew what they would enjoy.
Now he’s popping up again with an anthology from the magazine, bringing together the sort of columns that play to the particular foibles of the old. There’s nothing old people enjoy so much as grumbling. I should know. I’m one of them.
We love complaining that things aren’t what they were, that young people have crazy notions that have nothing to do with reason or life as it should be lived, and that irritate us no end. Here is a cornucopia of just such irritants.
And here are a wealth of clever and funny journalists picking on the maddening ways of modern life.
Here’s Miles Kington complaining about the “upgrading of everything” from train announcements to call centres.
Here’s Candida Lycett Green wondering when Cycleways were invented, and why official Trails are suddenly disfiguring the countryside.
Leo McKinstry is ferocious about focus groups, and Nick Parker has it in for call centres. Best of all, Michael Bywater attacks dumbing down with a vitriolic turn of phrase that suggests there’s nothing ageing about his mind.
“The worst thing about dumbing down,” he writes, “is that it is hypocritical. The people responsible for it are educated, calculating men of well-developed sensibilities who have no share in the restricted, snarling, sound-bitten worldview they peddle.”
He then goes on to talk of John Birt, former director-general of the BBC, whose regime gave me the sack. My! How I laughed!!
The fact is older people are cross with much that is new, not for its newness but because much of it is crass, unnecessary and is ousting the values that they hold dear.
There is much to laugh at here, but the jokes spring from a rage that good things in our society are giving way to callow and patronising ideas.
The trick of this book is to make all this grumbling seem such fun. Being old carries with it many losses and genuine regrets.
The fact that change is inevitable is hard to reconcile with the belief that we – our generation, whichever it is, – got certain things right.
And we’re loathe to see them go. My particular gripe is the whole matter of “Manners.” I don’t mean sychophantic grovelling, but natural courtesy that springs from a genuine concern to put others at their ease.
This seems so often absent from the language and behaviour of street life around us. It isn’t just that people slam into you without thought and never apologise, they also get stroppy if you look at them for longer than five seconds.
People have been attacked for less. They feel free to be noisy and full of harsh laughter whenever they please. They guffaw away, honking their shallow ideas down mobile phones in every train I ever take.
Draw their attention to their bad manners and they compound the offence by remonstrating with you…Well, no, this hasn’t actually happened to me. Usually I book the quiet compartment, and get on with a good book or a good snooze.
I’ve just been infected by the bubbling rage that underpins Bling, Blogs and Bluetooth to sound off as a grumpy old woman myself.
You see a lot of this quivering irritation is in the air, aided and abetted by the tabloids and Outraged of Tunbridge Wells.
What these jolly articles do is laugh at the world, both the irritating ways of the young and the new world order, and at ourselves, grown crusty and irritable that our stride is losing its spring and our bones are beginning to creak.
But now we have the buoyant good spirits of this book to cheer us up. It should be in every Oldie stocking this Christmas.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
