A Survival Guide to Later Life
Marion Shoard Robinson, 644pp, £9.99
ISBN 1841193720
We know little of the horrors confronting the elderly, because we prefer not to. The unwelcome fact that we must one day join them has caused us to shut the grim realities of their existence from our minds. From time to time, news bulletins recount some spectacular instance of abuse out there on the granny farms, that ever-expanding Gulag from which no traveller returns. Yet such dispiriting tales invariably slip swiftly from the headlines.
Soon, however, this may change. Later life is about to grip the unwilling attention of the most assertive generation in history - the baby boomers. Still clutching their Rolling Stones vinyls, the spoilt children of the mid-20th century find themselves on the brink of an experience that threatens to make nonsense of all they hold dear. Are they going to go gently into that netherworld of meals-on-wheels, hearing aids and Zimmer frames, like their un-complaining predecessors, to exit oh-so-finally into the banal embrace of the council crem? Are they hell.
The much-touted grey revolution is upon us, with the result that issues hitherto deemed too boring to contemplate, such as pensions, are forcing their way up the news agenda. This revolution is being driven, like previous baby-boomer indulgences, by sheer muscle-power. For the first time, at the next general election a majority of voters will be either retired or within five years of retirement. As the boomers' consumer consciousness, fixation on rights and honest-to-goodness selfishness collide with the dismally unreconstructed world of eldercare, we can expect an explosion.
Any self-respecting revolution requires a manifesto. In The Survival Guide to Later Life, Marion Shoard has provided a text that ought to mobilise even the most laid-back children of Marx, Coca-Cola and collagen. This all-encompassing manual has little in common with the anaemic fact sheets hanging limply from the noticeboard of your doctor's surgery. The vast but little-known world of care homes, social services, voluntary organisations and rip-off commercial eldercare operations is subjected to the relentless glare we take for granted elsewhere.
It comes as a shock to discover the fate to which we have been blithely consigning our elders. We might not expect life to be all fun for care-home residents, but surely they should not be routinely murdered once they become too much of a bother. If someone finds it difficult to grip a cup, "care staff" can apparently hasten their passage to the next life by the simple expedient of keeping that cup just slightly out of their reach. Those who escape slaughter, it emerges, are still likely to suffer endless indignities: they may be "toileted" at two-hourly intervals throughout the night, lest they soil the sheets, or their weekly bath may be timed for 4am.
Even before older people lose their liberty, plentiful affronts await them. Hospital doctors inscribe "do not resuscitate" on their medical records when they pop in for minor treatment. Public authorities urge single parents and asylum-seekers to claim benefits, but go out of their way to conceal their obligations to the elderly. Local councils cheerfully close public lavatories, essential to the mobility of those with ageing bladders.
Against the vast array of such iniquities, this book assembles the paraphernalia of consumer action, political protest and the culture of complaint now so familiar in other spheres. Official weak spots are identified, routine scams and dodges by which the elderly are cheated of their entitlements are exposed. Practical guidance is infused with Messianic zeal. Afflictions such as dementia, incontinence and macular degeneration, it is implied, merit the kind of attention currently given to illnesses such as breast cancer or Aids.
As those who hoped to die before they grew old start to rage against the dying of the light, this book offers to transmute their pain into action. Its potential impact can hardly be overstated. Dr Spock's 50-million-selling Baby and Child Care managed to turn parenthood into a religion. Shoard's Survival Guide may mark the beginning of the end of the long hegemony of hitherto gilded youth.
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