Third Age
July 2013
Someone told me recently that “the old are the new black.”
So there you have it. We are the fashionable new source for statisticians, for thesis-writers, and for whoever else wants our personal information. We old people are the means of getting younger people grants and contracts. We are not useful in ourselves, but what box we tick is interesting to those who know nothing about what it’s like to be old (and, indeed, may not care), but see us as a new field of research.
And I say to them, go ask your granny. (When did you last have a good talk with her about what she wants to talk about, eh?) If you want to know what it’s like to be old, how it feels, what are the special needs, then come and ask me, or my friends. Make an appointment, to which I may or may not agree. Bring evidence to show that my identity and information will be secure. Don’t just front up with some printed questions or send me an email with question boxes to be filled in.
If you want me to answer questions devised by someone I don’t know, then how much is my information worth? Information is valuable. Let us old pensioners gain some financial benefit from giving it up. My message to my peers is: Never be flattered by someone you don’t know asking personal questions. They are making something out of it, so why shouldn’t you?
“Oh, it’s worth heaps,” I am told. “It’s the means of finding out what old people need for the future, what sort of nursing homes and that sort of thing. Oh, and whether you are obese and how we can stop that.” It’s my duty then?
Possibly you heard the loud explosion that was my response to that.
I went to my nice GP. Reception asked me to answer some questions for the doctor for a survey first. I did not object because then I wouldn’t have known what the questions were, would I? I knew I could refuse. But perhaps some of the old people strewn about the waiting room did not like to deny expectations. I thought it was rough asking people questions even before they had a chance to say what was wrong with them that brought them to the doctor’s.
As it happened the questions were about my weight and height, neither of which I actually know these days, so I made a guess. Guesses are not exactly useful for research, are they? Pity. It took me back to the old days (80s) when I fought and won against the then Bureau of Census and Statistics. With a clever lawyer, I might add. That institution wanted to know an awful lot about me over a period of months under threat of heavy, accumulative fines; all the while knowing, as everyone does, that information gained under compulsion is often useless. One of the questions was about whether I had wheezes in my chest. What insolence. I gave them a flea in their ear. But whether you do likewise is up to you. Check out the fines and your resources before being brave.
Nothing has changed much, except that now any little upstart researcher thinks she or he can tell me that it is my duty to the future hordes of the elderly to cough up. I intend to charge by the hour. And I don’t promise to tell the truth. Don’t ask me to tick boxes.
I heard last month that an old persons’ home offered patients colouring-in books. You would give even a chimp some decent paint to play with, wouldn’t you? Where is the box about nursing homes into which I can squeeze my despair about that?
There is none, of course. People who want you to tick boxes don’t want to know actual things in our experience of life, like despair and sorrow and pain and loss and fear. They will decide what they want to hear and you will tick to confirm their prejudices. Improved lives for the old are not going to come from this, but from understanding hearts and listening ears. Most of all, from old people properly employed to share their information.
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