Joan Bakewell

AS the days pass, it grows more and more clear that memories flood the mind. Oh, we can be engaged with friends and outings, golf clubs and theatre visits, holidays with the children and grandchildren. But when we’re alone, which will increasingly be the case, it’s the memories that count. They jostle round the most mundane things. Flowers seen in a flower shop; remember how lovely they were at so-and-so’s wedding? A drift of tune caught through an open window: wasn’t that sung at a concert long ago?

And it’s not just when you’re waking that memories come. They reform themselves and emerge as dreams, troubling, sometimes, often comforting. After my father’s death, I dreamt of him standing alone on a station platform left behind as we were pulled away in the moving train. It was poignant, but full of fate and love. I try to revisit that dream in my waking days.

The truth is that we have more to remember. If you’ve had a full life, then different eras creep up on you unexpectedly and memories of decades past are suddenly vivid. Television has a way of making this so.

I had the good fortune to be one of the first women to appear regularly on a television programme, that went out daily and made minor celebrities of its presenters. This was in the Sixties when only men read the news, and ran not only the BBC, and ITV but the country. So I got a high profile. My skirts were higher still, and got me in the papers.

I was asked my opinion about everything and gave it. I once named the Pope as the biggest obstacle to women’s liberation. Whenever I hear the music of that era – the Beatles, the Stones – it all comes flooding back, how giddy and irresponsible we were then. And how full of the bloom of confidence in all the new ideas. I can reminisce about such times endlessly, colouring the tales of pop groups and fashion, late nights and giddy parties in exaggerated colours.

Indeed the old can be notoriously boring waxing on about the olden days. I was a child during the war and have regaled my grandchildren over and over with tales of playing on bomb sights, and sweet rations and the blackout. They can’t believe there was once no television. But I explain we led full lives then, what with the youth club, tennis club, the choir, the church. I tell them they should get out more.

That’s another joy of age, pointing out what’s going wrong with the world today. They won’t thank you for it. So it’s better to get together for a good grouse with one of your own generation. “Whatever happened to manners?” my friend Pat and I exclaim, then go on to reminisce – memories again – of how children were once attentive and polite, men given to gallantries, and raising their hats as you passed. What a strange greeting that was!

Britain was a more confident place in the Forties and Fifties, and we inherited that sense of pride though we had been roused to the importance of politics and went on marches and demos at the drop of a hat. I’m glad today’s young care about the planet, saving the whale, and not experimenting on animals. We took the planet for granted, of course. Wouldn’t it be here for ever just as it was? As for global warming; don’t be silly, it’s just a hot summer!

But we are wrong to be so confident. The world turns out to be a frailer place than we had assumed. Tales of poverty and wars spill out of the television set. In memory, the world seems a cosier place until I recall the Cuba crisis of 1962 when Kennedy and Khruschev brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. No, the past isn’t a cosier place at all. It’s just that memories make it seem like that.

Gabriel Ronay

AGEING, what ageing? Ageing is in the mind. But if you are thinking of what The Times’ top hatchetman was thinking when he made me redundant, that is ageism. Just as my quarter of a century on The Times was to be celebrated with a party, the hatchetman said: “The new editor wants new faces”. And he spelled it out, in case I did not get the message: younger, not someone at the portal of the Big Six O.

So what to do? Accept that my pen, like my face, has passed its sell-by date or that my skills are irrelevant? Learn to play bridge and walk slowly with my wife, Lois, into the sunset?

No, I was not prepared to play this senseless age game. I took The Times to court and made Rupert Murdoch pay for wrongful dismissal. Then I changed my priorities, sharpened my quill and looked for challenging, new work according journalism and medieval research equal interest. An invitation to write for a Scottish paper – this one – brought back the joys of journalism.

With Lois’s help and support, the adjustment from salaryman to freelance work proved less difficult than expected. My escape from Fleet Street also allowed us to open up our lives and seek new vistas. As both of us are alumni of Edinburgh University, we revived our Scottish connections: Lois, her family links and I, my elective affinity with Scotland. Dividing our time between London, where our grown-up children live, and our Edinburgh pied-a-terre has been rewarding. Instead of fogeyish shut-down, we revived old friendships and forged new ones.

Admittedly, this was not my first new start. It was not for the first time that I had had to go back to “start” and not collect £200. Having fought as a young undergraduate against communist tyranny in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, I was forced to flee my homeland. In one fell swoop, I lost my language, culture, way of life and identity. But with the help of Edinburgh University, I completed my studies and started a new life as a Fleet Street journalist and author.

My working life began here in Britain. I married and raised a family with Lois in Britain and my books on historical topics, both medieval and contemporary, were published in Britain. In Hungary, I remained an Un-Person for 30 years.

It has been a good life and I don’t feel any different from when I was 39. With the help of young Lois, ageing has been kept at bay. Writing is easier, research more effortless and work enjoyable. Several friends, who have been made redundant or took early retirement, have abjured work and are filling their days with hobbies. Some feel unfulfilled and complain of aches and pains. They are shutting down. Going the other way, I have broadened the scope of my journalism, increased my workload and started a new book.

It is being said that one is as old as one feels. True. The ticking of the biological clock can be muffled. With so many fascinating things to do, I am not about to sit back and watch the grass grow. There are, however, occasional intimations of mortality. Recently, a young woman offered me her seat on the London Underground. The shock of it!

Tom Shields

IF I had known the advantages of life in the declining years, I would have got old when I was much younger. It was the desperation of middle age which made me give up a salaried day-job and spend more time in sunnier places. This was a decision I should have taken with the courage of youth.

There are times when you don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows. When the job you have been doing for the last 28 years no longer seems like fun. When your new boss is a dolt and you realise life is too short for dolts. You don’t need an actuary to see which way the wind is blowing when you see contemporaries pop their clogs shortly after retirement or hand in their dinner pails just before their carefully planned passage to a late-life idyll in Provence or Broughty Ferry comes to pass. I decided to get my hands on my pension before someone else did. I am getting my semi-retirement in early. I will spend the money while I can and fear not for the future.

I am blessed with a legion of nephews and nieces who surely will not let their UT (Uncle Tom) starve. A larger legion of great nephews and nieces surely will not let GUT (Great Uncle Tom) go without a drink. In these circumstances, I am happy to answer to GUT.

With one bound I was free in my mid-50s to spend a lot of time in a warm place. The main advantage of the lifestyle is the ability to cut about in the tartan shorts I bought from M&S for the world cup in 1998, a faded Cuba T-shirt, and sandals with no socks. (One of the curses of age is how hard it gets to put on your socks.)

In this warm Mediterranean place, it is easier to follow my precept that life is too short to drink bad wine and eat bad food. You can get a pensioner portion of gambas for £1 at the market and a half-litre of decent rioja for £1.50.

It is more expensive in Glasgow to follow this code, but it is possible thanks to the fish department at the Seewoo Chinese supermarket in Possil and the bin-end bargains on the Wine Society website.

Technology is on the side of us new oldies. I receive on a daily basis emails urging me to embark upon cheap flights. Canadian pharmacists are even more solicitous with offers to get up, up and away with Cialis and Viagra. It is nice to feel wanted.

There is no rage against the dying of the light. The lights are still on, if at a slightly lower wattage. But there are some aspects of the ageing process you cannot change. The roseate coupon, courtesy of too much of that rioja. But if Sir Alex Ferguson can live with it, so can I.

Then there is the hair going from auburn to grey. I would actually prefer a total transformation to Santa white, but have had to put up with various shades of mange. I may have to resort to the dyeing of the hair. Ash blonde, I think.