Dear bald men. If you wonder where your missing hairs went, they’re on my chin.
They have been for a while, but as I become eligible to register for the vaccine, much consideration has been given to body age versus year age.
Sixty is not old anymore; it’s the new 40, “they” say.
Bah humbug.
It may be for some, but there are some for whom it seems like 80.
When the idea of body age first started becoming a “thing”, this cynic pooh-poohed it as a marketing tool for health products. Much of that scepticism remains and was reinforced when the subject was Googled for couch scientific research.
There is A LOT of stuff people want you to buy, so you can get your body age the same as your year age. Obviously, for those sellers, people’s body age is always eons over the year age because otherwise you wouldn’t need to lose weight, get a six-pack, eat their health foods, do their exercise or whatever.
Sometimes, however, having a geriatric body age is down to other health issues, and I say this with the disclaimer that I am not a doctor and this is my ageing opinion only. It is not backed by any Google search because all that is about product marketing. But us oldies can be quite smart, having been around a couple of blocks, quite slowly the last couple of times.
People who have chronic diseases, like diabetes, or in my case Addison’s disease, are told that with the correct regimes/drugs, they can live a normal life. Off they trot from the doc’s, armed with medicine and new diet plans, into the sunset which they have been told will be the usual distance away.
Of course, they are better off than people who get deadly diseases, which leave them little time to care about or compare the two ages. Just helpless fury for them and their loved ones.
But the “reassurance” chronic patients get, in my experience, deals with the situation as it is “now”, in the doctor’s rooms. They do not advise you of that wonderful saying: getting old is not for sissies. You will get to the sunset, but the journey is a lot rockier, on roads of long-term medicine use that demand, and take, their toll on bodies.
But year age is remarkably liberating. If you are willing to be labelled a batty old person, you can wear what you want, plaster make-up on your face or wear none at all and say many things you would have been too embarrassed to say in your youth.
You may have learnt that all those things that kept you up and worrying at night don’t matter at all and your tolerance for BS is gone.
What you do worry about is living too long for your pension, or how you will afford all the drugs you need to keep you on the rocky road. Food, except for the dogs, not so much.
Knowing you have lived longer in the past than you will in the future is kind of a blessing. It resets your priorities.
Having learned to love solitude, the six-oh day will come and go with no big party or celebration.
Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin.
The Independent on Saturday