WHATEVER French I have was learned in the late 1950s, so my slang and colloquial speech is hopelessly out of date and I used to see people wincing when I used words which must be like "spiffing" or "jolly good show". So I got a bit self conscious about it and talked marginally less, which was probably no bad thing.
But recently I heard youngsters criticising someone on the radio as trying to use modern expressions and getting them wrong and being somehow more pathetic than the old farts who just talk their own ancient speak.
And in a way they're right. It is a bit pathetic to see people dressing too young, talking too young or, to use Alan Cren's marvellous expression, "Men parting their remaining hair just above the hip, sweeping it across a scalp and fixing it there with Bostik".
I can't really take middle aged gladhanders moving round tables in restaurants saying "Caught your show" to other people. Not only is it showy, it's false showy, and you feel that the young whose show they caught would use a different phrase.
Who are you fooling by trying to keep up with the words that don't come to you naturally?
I've never been at ease with the word "gig". It came in a bit late for me. And even though I do now know people who are doing gigs or having gigs all over the place, I'd be awkward using the word - so I'd ask them how the show went, or the night, or the performance. I don't at all mind other people using it because it is a perfectly acceptable word with a specific meaning but when people of my age or older use it I wonder are they extraordinarily confident or just chancing their arm.
Another expression is "in your face". I quite like it and I think I know what it means but I feel a bit silly saying it, so I steer way from it.
And the new and horrible word "hurting" is one I will never use. Everyone seems to have taken it and run with it. Nobody is upset, or wounded or even just hurt any more, they are hurting. Bishops and priests are hurting and lay people are hurting. And people on talk shows sympathise with others who are hurting and say that deep down they are hurting themselves.
Who let that in? Will it some day be regarded in dictionaries as an obscure mid 1990s phrase, now obsolete?
And is this a blinding insight into growing old gracefully or is it in fact craven caution and a paranoid fear of making a fool of myself?
If you haven't been young gracefully, there's no point in trying to take up the habit later on. But I suppose there must be a balance between getting out the slippers and the cardie on the one hand, and wearing a spinal corset and going to night clubs on the other.
In an ageing society, where people live longer and often fear the last bit, there's no end of advice books telling you how to cope with the Third Age. Most of it is nice, sound common sense - if you are not obese, don't smoke and take regular exercise, you're looking good.
If your mind is agile; if you don't get stressed over small things; if you keep your friends, remain open to new ideas and don't believe every change is necessarily for the worse, then you're fine.
And of course there are other areas much more specifically targeted. Vitamins, breathing exercises, wise financial planning, pre retirement courses, drinking eight glasses of water a day, memory tricks, an aspirin a day, raw vegetables and roughage.
There are whole sections of publishing devoted to disguising what comes with the territory in the ageing business. The shining face of the HRT success story, the Joan Collins icon, the profiles of those who see youth as being great and fear the jury is still out on being old. The message is loud and clear, we haven't been there or done that so let's keep it at bay. Deny it: be young and it may never happen.
IT WAS very illuminating to see this happen in New York on a personal level. I had to do what they call a "satellite interview", which means you sit in a studio and look at a camera and talk to a whole lot of different television stations one by one. You don't see them, but they see you. The woman in charge kept asking me to sit up straight and not to slump. At interview number 19. I defy anyone not to slump.
"You look younger sitting up straight," she insisted.
I said very reasonably I thought - that surely it didn't if I looked younger or older. It was about a novel for heaven's sake it wasn't as if I were selling a skin cream or a Hip & Thigh diet. But she shook her head sadly.
"Get into the 1990s, Maeve," she said. "If you look old, they won't listen."
It was terribly depressing and not, I think, accurate. It did come as a relief when Catherine McCann, who was at school with me many years ago, sent me her book, out this month, called Falling In Love With Life: An Understanding Of Ageing. It's published by the Columba Press, Blackrock. There isn't a hint about wearing short skirts or classic power jackets, about braving the plastic surgeon and hiring a personal fitness trainer. There is nothing about exercises to firm the jaw or 12 capsules before lunch and 15 afterwards, and lunch presumably being something highly minimalist and unsatisfactory. The only reason she mentions sitting up straight is to avoid getting a stoop, particularly if you have a tendency to osteoporosis.
Catherine McCann seems to regard getting old as normal, which makes a nice change. She points out that there's no reason to equate old age with sickness. So if a doctor says to you about a painful knee "What can you expect at your age?", you can reply that the other knee is exactly the same age and it feels fine.
It's a gentle book; it's not aimed at men in their seventies who see no reason not to run for President of the United States. It's not for the women I have seen who crawl to the beauty salon three mornings a week so they can lunch with the other Ageing Girls in style at smart restaurants. These people are either wonderful or barking, depending on how you look at it, but they, would get nothing from this publication. This is all about seeing the bright side of getting on, because it does mean you have all that stored up wisdom which, if you are wise, you'll regard it as some kind of databank rather than an excuse to say that everything was better in the old days, which it most certainly was not.
She is stern about television watching. A survey in Britain of people aged 65 and over found they watched 39 hours a week. Which is too much.
I agree - ruefully, for I am an enthusiastic couch potato myself: I had been looking forward to more of it rather than less of it as time went on.
The book is cheering about how few older people really do suffer from dementia, and how many are well able to accept their past life, recognising mistakes made and choices taken without brooding over them. She says a group of teenagers will all be fairly like each other due to the lack of variety in their experience, but a group of old people will be very different, each having had a unique set of happenings in their life.
There are practical tips about having good lighting, extra batteries for hearing aids, bright colours to ward off depressions. There are timely warnings about not getting too het up about finance in old age, whatever your circumstances. It would be far wiser to recognise in advance that income may be lessened and to adapt accordingly rather than to panic and become like Scrooge, often quite needlessly, as so many people do, rendering their own lives and the lives of those around them intolerable.
THE alternative to growing old is being dead. Most of us would prefer to be one first and then the other.
You're not going to beat being dead by having hip phrases if they still use that word or by wearing trendy clothes, if clothes are still trendy Of course the quality of life is better if people regard you still as a player rather than an observer from the wings, but surely sometimes the effort is too great.
There's a Harrod's Shop at Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport. I can't get out of my head the couple I saw there. In their seventies, heading for somewhere smart. He was buying a tie. He was saying to the assistant, apparently quite seriously: "I want to make a statement but not too strident a statement with this tie."
His wife was entirely supportive of this view and the dilemma they found themselves in. "You see," she explained to the bewildered young Indian man serving them, "we read all the fashion magazines, obviously, but the language has changed so much. It makes one feel a foreigner in one's own world."
Tell me this before I start hurting about it is it wonderful that they should feel like this as they freewheel down to 80, or is it sad?