Old Lad

A journey through old age

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  • Happy New Year

    So here we are at 2026. To quote John Major when he became Prime Minister – “Who would have thought it!”. This year marks two milestones in my journey through old age. In the Summer when I reach 78 I will be the longest living person on the paternal side of my family. The maternal side were longer livers well into their eighties. And this year marks 60 years since I left the grammar school and launched into a career.

    Interestingly I recently found a copy of a school science magazine published in 1966. In it was an article written by me entitled “Surgery or Science Fiction” which described the introduction of the Heart Lung machine for cardiac bypass surgery. The sixties were an interesting time scientifically. Computers were large reel to reel things housed in a large room and being fed by punched cards ( remember those) . Microchips did not exist – in physics we grappled with new fangled things called transistors. NASA was preparing for Moon landings.. In medical school when I started CPR was the new way to deal with cardiac arrest and external defibrillators had just arrived.. The horror of thalidomide was casting a shadow over new pharmaceuticals and Valium was reckoned to be the best thing since sliced bread for treatment of anxiety! The sixties were probably the decade for the amount of knowledge my brain had to absorb – surprisingly much of it still seems to be there.

    I don’t make New Year resolutions, I go with the flow. But in this journey through old age I look back on the last 12 months and do a physical and mental MOT. So what does the checklist show. Vision and Hearing still ok. Sleep pattern ok apart from the twice nightly loo. I feel a bit stiffer physically, I often need to sit down to put my trousers on and rising from a chair is sometimes a challenge, but I have managed my goal of walking a minimum of 6000 steps a day. Adapting to widowhood has had its challenges.

    So will being 78 feel any different? Who knows! In February I am taking a voyage up the Norwegian coast into the Arctic Circle. Can a 78 year old go dog sledding? Watch this space!

  • The ghost of Christmas past

    So here we are again – Christmas Eve! Am I excited- well not really. I must confess that for a long time I have had mixed feelings about Christmas. It probably started when I qualified in Medicine and had to endure the false jollity of Christmas on the Ward. On the surface the public reckoned that it was all jolly japes between doctors and nurses but underneath it could be sad. And we always had deaths. When I became a GP in the 1970s the weeks leading up to Christmas always seemed to include sad things happening to families. We went through a spate of teenagers being killed on motor bikes around Christmas and I always felt desperately sorry for families who would thereafter have Christmas as a sad anniversary. So as the years went by I had this sense of apprehension in the weeks leading up to the festival. Of course there were happy times when our children were young enough to believe in Santa. There is nothing quite like waking at 6am on Christmas morning and hearing shouts of “He’s been!” And we had some memorable family get togethers. So there were some positive things to look forward to.

    However now Christmas doesn’t produce the same sense of anticipation and I think the reason is that a lot of the things that were special about Christmas have been diluted by the way we live now.. Let me give some examples. Christmas shopping was an annual ritual involving a day out in one of the bigger towns or cities – now we do it on line. There were certain foods that were seasonal to Christmas – dates, mixed bags of nuts, chocolate oranges, twiglets, sprouts, tangerines, spiced biscuits – now they are in the shops all year round, and chocolate oranges have got smaller! ( I digress to say I await the first prosecution under the trades description rules for supermarkets that describe tangerines as easy peelers!) We have become a society which expects everything all the time and seasonality has gone. And I suppose part of the attraction of Christmas was that it was this festival in the midst of the dark nights which offered something different.

    I am not a grinch by any means . I do enjoy Christmas things – Christmas lights, carols, family get togethers, silly jokes in crackers and dressing up as Santa Claus for our Rotary Club sleigh. But as the years go by it just seems like an ordinary day. Although if you are a five or six year old I’m sure it doesn’t! Merry Christmas.

    t

  • Nanny State

    It’s been very windy up north. Yesterday, however, I received advice which was life changing. The RAC no less published advice that when I am driving when it is windy, I should slow down and hold firmly on to the steering wheel. Well who would have thought it! I don’t know if it is a feature of becoming an old lad, but there does not seem to a day goes by when some official body or organisation gives out advice which falls into my definition of statements of the blindingly obvious. In the last week I have been told to wear warm clothing when it is cold, to not attempt to wade through or swim through flood water, to hold on to my dog’s lead firmly, and be careful on icy pavements. I’ve also been exhorted to not cough or sneeze over people if I have a cold. What happened to good manners!

    As I say this sort of thing seems more prevalent which begs the question- Why? Perhaps we now have a generation which requires hand holding and advice rather than being expected to use common sense. There is a suspicion that the tide of advice and information may have something to do with the growth of Communication Teams in public bodies. Certainly when I was working in the NHS there were incentives for staff to produce advice to justify their existence. And there were inevitable award ceremonies for teams who garnered publicity. The paradox is that the majority of people have never had so much easy access to information via the internet and reliable methods of searching for it. This week we are in the midst of a flu epidemic and there are concerns about slow take up of the vaccine. A representative of care homes was using the excuse that people did not know how to get a vaccination, and that the “Government “ should provide more information. Really? Google flu vaccination and you will instantly get the information. The whole thing becomes a downward spiral with people expecting to be told what to do rather than thinking for themselves and so the nanny state grows.

    It may be that we are gradually removing resilience from younger people. When I moved from junior school to the grammar school It involved a journey using 3 bus routes morning and evening. I had a couple of guided dry runs and then had to deal with the journey, the occasional bus running late or not turning up and the fogs in industrial Lancashire which would disrupt the journey. And without the benefit of mobile phones. It was a good exercise in problem solving and thinking for yourself. Perhaps I should be more tolerant of the nanny state but at the moment it’s a bit of an irritation.

  • The Trivial Round, The Common Task

    One of the questions you get asked after retirement is “What do you do all day?” Its an interesting one and if I stop to think about it I do indeed ask myself what do I do? There’s all sorts of expectations about if you read the literature on retirement, much of it engendering a guilt trip. People extol the virtues of taking up new past times – learning to paint, playing a musical instrument, taking out gym membership, cycling across Europe. But I suspect in reality most people live a fairly quiet life. Professor Roger Clough in his book “Oldenland” divides us into two categories – those who disengage with their former life of busy busy all the time at work, and those who find it hard to disengage and need some almost full time occupation. I was out to lunch with a group of friends recently and posed the question to them and, not surprisingly most were a bit nonplussed when forced to think about it. One person said she felt she was studying for a degree in “Faffing About”!

    I am now 77. I worked until I was 72, admittedly the last couple of years part time and stopped when the Pandemic hit us. After that period of forced idleness I then found myself in a full time caring role for my late wife who was quite physically disabled and then sadly developed dementia. So its only in the last 12 months since she passed away that I now experience the state of being retired. And it definitely is a time requiring considerable adjustment. I am fortunate in still being part of social groups – a Rotarian, a member of 41 Club (aka The Old Codgers) and am still involved in a small way with our local Hospice at Home service. I also am fortunate in living on the edge of the Lake District so plenty of opportunities if weather permits to get out into the natural world. The days have fallen into a routine pattern – a boiled egg and soldiers for breakfast, read the paper on my iPad, take the dog for a morning walk and then think what to do. Although I think I have disengaged from my former life I still feel a sense of guilt if I just sit and read a book, even though I am an avid reader. Why do I feel guilty? The quote at the beginning of this piece is from an Anglican hymn which goes “The trivial round, the Common Task should furnish all we need to ask”. And perhaps that is the answer. Take enjoyment from the fact that I am still healthy enough to to do simple day to day things and as is taught in Mindfullness, live in the moment.

    I have posed the question of What’s it like in retirement ,when I was working, to lots of people and usually got a stock answer of “I don’t know how I found the time to work”. But I do wonder as time went by and they got fully into retirement whether the reality was much less busy. One critical factor in coping is of course keeping healthy and maintaining strength and balance, and as I wrote in Sod 70 adopting a discipline of daily exercise. Its surprising how active a bit of vacuum cleaning can be! But so far I am averaging 6000 steps a day, so that’s all good. So if you get the chance ask your retired friends – What do you do all Day?

  • Christmas Post

    Christmas is approaching with amazing speed. This year I have decided to stop my annual donation to the Royal Mail and am not doing Christmas Cards. Instead I have made a donation to our local Hospice at Home service. However the appearance of cards in the shops reminds me of the time I spent working on the Christmas Post. This was a temporary job and you had to be 17 to apply for the job – I couldn’t wait to apply -like everybody else in the sixth form. It was a 10 day appointment and the school used to let us have the last few days off if we got the job. I duly turned up at the local sorting office and was introduced to the other posties and (best of all) given an official Royal Mail armband to signify I was an official postman. There were 4 of us taken on at our office and we were allocated a round. Our bags were efficiently packed by the sorting office staff with bundles of mail in the right order and off we went.

    It was a good introduction to the world of work and we rapidly learned about workplace banter. One abiding memory I have was how much knowledge a postman would have about the people on his round – who was employed where, how many children were in the house, who had the dogs to avoid and occasionally some salacious gossip! The mail service also acted as an unofficial social care service and the postmen and women kept an eye on elderly people who were living alone. we also got the occasional mince pie – which I now blame for a lifelong addiction to mince pies. I am known to buy them as soon as they appear in the shops. (If you are interested Gregg’s Mince Pies are the best!) Christmas post was my first foray into work and I went on to have some other memorable experiences. I previously have written about driving for the Co-op but another job that had an impression was some time spent in the warehouse of an Engineering company. This was a traditional manual job and involved de-greasing large valves used in water pipes. You got to join the dirty fingernail club. It taught me a lot about the sort of conditions people had to work in year after year – valuable stuff years later when I was a GP.

    I read this week that Morrisons the supermarket chain is stopping employing paper boys and girls. I never had a paper round largely because the school I went to was some distance away from home and was a journey involving 3 buses and leaving home at 7.30. Newspaper deliveries ceased some time ago in our part of the world and so another opportunity for young people to learn the discipline required to have a regular job has gone. In fact it has become harder for teenagers to obtain the traditional “Saturday Job” as regulation creep has occurred and small businesses are under financial pressures. Most opportunities in our part of the world are in hospitality and these jobs do give young people the opportunity to learn about customer service and how to interact with people, but they are not easy to get. A particular disappointment to me is how the NHS has virtually stopped young people to have the opportunity to help on hospital wards and experience what a job in health care is really like. Elf and Safety!!

    I know we are quite away now from child labour and I am not advocating sending children up chimneys but I think growing up in your teenage years without the opportunity to experience work is a shame. Pity we can’t bring back the Christmas Post!

  • Consequences

    Here is a message for my local authority battling with flooding today. For thousands of years there has been a season called Autumn. During Autumn leaves fall off the trees .In the midst of this leaf drop and towards the end of October we get heavy rain. The leaves have now blocked the drains and culverts, so the roads flood with what the Met Office describes as surface water, causing disruption and sometimes flooding to property. So how long will it take the local powers that be to realise that leaf fall has predictable consequences! When I was growing up the drains in the street were regularly cleaned out by one of those wonderful vehicles that sucked up debris and then washed the drain through.. have you seen one on the roads in recent times? Me neither!

    As I grow older it seems that actions are being taken across all public services and nobody appears to predict the consequences. We are now heading towards an economy based on electric power – vehicles, home heating, large data centres to cope with the internet and Artificial Intelligence. The consequence of this is that we need to generate more electricity and fast. And yet the Government and Politicians dither and argue about sources of power. Living in a part of the world that was the first to generate electricity from nuclear power the consequence of closing down ageing nuclear plants before new ones had been built seemed blindingly obvious..

    My old employer, the NHS is a master of introducing systems without any thought of the consequences. Consider the never ending saga of hospital Accident and Emergency Departments (known in my day as the Casualty Department). Most A&E departments now resemble a battlefield clearing station reminiscent of MASH – although I recollect that 4077 MASH was more efficient at coping with demand .In my view the current A&E debacle stems from two major driving forces. The first is a major change in the way people are admitted to hospital. In my day (not an expression I like using) if I as a GP felt a patient needed to be in hospital I would ring the doctor on call for a specialty, make the case for admission, and then the patient would be sent straight to the ward. As a result of the closure of beds in the last 30 years the NHS decided that all admissions should go via A&E. So this unholy mixture of people with serious illness, the walking wounded and victims of major trauma all funnel into departments that physically are not big enough and without sufficient staff. Consequences! The second major driver – and I have spoken about this before – is the restrictions in getting a GP appointment with complex systems being put in place by Practices to filter requests, including the dreadful 111 system.. So out of frustration the public default to the only bit of the NHS which has open doors 24/7 – A&E. So patients who really could be dealt with by a GP are added to the mix. The frustration here is that about 30 years ago some of us could see the consequences of these policy changes, and I remember research showing the value of a GP being stationed in A&E departments, and also the concept of an admissions unit separate from A&E. But it never caught on.

    Lack of planning for consequences goes right across the board. Replacing high street shops with takeaways makes us get fatter. I recently visited a town in Lancashire where there were 5 takeaways all next door to each other. Do planners think of the consequences? Our rapidly shrinking Royal Navy will soon be at the stage where it could fit into a Boating lake (I exaggerate of course) but we are an Island Nation dependent on shipping which requires protection. Consequences again.

    I was always a great fan of C Northcote Parkinson who promulgated Parkinson’s Law. He was also someone who wrote of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Perhaps this should be required reading for those responsible for our public bodies. Meanwhile each Autumn the leaves will fall, the drains will block and we shall have floods!

  • Characters

    I’ve been spending a week away in a cottage in North Yorkshire. It’s very relaxing with lots of time to read and muse on life. There’s a good local brewery nearby which also helps! For some reason I have had lots of thoughts about childhood and in particular the local characters that were about. I don’t know about you but we don’t seem to have these people any more, partly I suspect because we seem to be in an age of deep suspicion where any odd behaviour is seen as a threat. But when I was growing up we had these odd harmless people that as a child were just part of the fabric of small town life.

    We also had characters who did provoke anxiety, none more so than the “School Board Man”. His proper title was a School Attendance Officer and his job was to seek out truants and return them to school. In my case this role fell to Mr Brimelow who would be a familiar figure around town. A tall man with what you might call a military bearing, an ex policeman, always accompanied by his dog called Trigger, and wearing a long overcoat. Exactly what he did with truants I never found out but the threat was often voiced that if you didn’t go to school Mr Brimelow would come for you!

    Another character who remains in my memory is Billy who wandered around. Looking back he was a person who would now be described as having learning difficulties but Billy unfortunately was also deaf. This meant that he would shout loudly when he spoke. To children this was unnerving and although Billy was affable and tried to be sociable, we would often hide if we saw him coming.

    There were also characters who were regarded with awe by us children. None more so than the man who drove the local steam roller! Our town had its own highways department respond for road maintenance and as far as I know had one road roller. The man who drove it – and as I recall always wore brown corduroy overalls – was a figure of envy to us little boys. We would all gather if tarmac was being laid just to watch the roller desperate to have a ride on it. We never did. On the subject of tarmac there was also the strange belief that if you were chesty it would help for you to be taken where fresh tarmac was being laid an inhale the fumes! We also had a greengrocer lorry that came round twice a week selling fresh fruit and vegetables. This would be followed by children just in case the occasional apple or orange fell off it. The greengrocer also shouted to announce his arrival with a phrase to my child’s ears sound like “Terry ayup “ , which looking back was probably a version of potatoes. But for a long time I knew this man as “ Terry Ayup”! Another memory is the Salvation Army band who would appear in your road and play stirring brass music – alas sadly gone now.

    I am a regular reader of The Oldie magazine – worth a read if you haven’t tried it. Recently they had an article about the decline of whistling, which when you think about it is true. When I was growing up lots of people would whistle while they worked – the postman, the milkman, the man who swept the streets, builders, joiners , everybody. Now you are more likely to hear a radio blaring. Strangely though I still find myself whistling quietly if I concentrating on a task . Perhaps that’s another feature of being an Old Lad. It’s probably worth a bit of research. Do you whistle while you work?

  • Black and White

    I have a friend who is of the belief that the UK was on a downward slide since we switched from black and white television to colour television. As evidence for this he points to the fact that when we were in black and white, we won World War Two, The Football World Cup and the Eurovision Song Contest. Proof indeed!

    Recently I had a short trip to Edinburgh – one of my favourite cities – and went to see an exhibition in the Kings Gallery at Holyrood Palace. It was an exhibition of royal photography from the time of Queen Victoria onwards and featured the work of famous photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Lord Snowdon and Lord Litchfield among others. What struck me was how much more striking were the black and white portraits than the later coloured ones. They seemed to bring out the character of the subject in a far more striking way. It was particularly noticeable in comparing the coronation photos of the late Queen and King Charles. It is the same when I look through the wedding album recording our marriage – black and white just seems the right medium for formal photographs. It is a bit the same with films. Would Brief Encounter be such an emotional film if it had been shot in colour I wonder.

    Growing up in the 1950s there was not a lot of colour about. Browns and Greys typified day to day clothing and colour only appeared when you went on holiday. Colour exploded in our lives in the 1960s and what an explosion it was. Colour TV appeared, we all bought flowery shirts and ties and bathrooms changed from black and white to bright yellows, turquoise and shades of green. Lighting became much stronger and shopping became an almost psychedelic experience in boutiques and department stores. I remember my mother choosing a wallpaper for our house that had huge bright yellow sunflowers on it, which she regarded as the height of fashion. Looking at photographs of it now would probably induce a migraine! Maybe its the power of the retrospectoscope but life seems to have carried on at a much more frenetic pace since then. In black and white days we communicated by letter or occasionally by telephone from the local call box (Who remembers Button A and Button B!). Now of course communication by E Mail, Text and WhatsApp seems more pressured and we have fallen into the trap of needing to provide an instant reply to any communication. Is that better or worse for our mental well being?

    I am not a dinosaur and am as good a “Silver Surfer” as the next person, and I don’t regret the passing of the drab Fifties. I’ve recently bought a flowery shirt as well but still wrestle with the dilemma of should it be worn outside the trousers or tucked in! But when it comes to photographs I still yearn for the black and white era. Perhaps because it seems to offer a calmness in this turbulent age that we live in.

  • Vaccines

    When I was a GP, I used to often wonder what went on inside people’s heads about their health. Its what academics termed Health Beliefs and used to be taught as part of consultation technique. If I’m honest I think most of the time we had no idea until some bizarre question emerged.. In the case of people with a mental illness it was more challenging to identify the problem. A local Psychiatrist who I worked with had a simple pragmatic approach to this. His view, based on non verbal behaviours, was if a patient made you feel sad chances were they had an underlying depression. If they made you feel on edge it was probably anxiety, and if you sat thinking is it them or me it was probably schizophrenia. Crude but often surprisingly effective.

    Most of the time you would not know what strange beliefs people had apart from the odd people who might corner you in a pub and regale you with the latest conspiracy theories. However the advent of the internet has now blown this wide open and anybody with a keyboard can promote their pet theories, and often, defying logic , get lots of support.(Think Donald Trump!). Whereas most of the stuff is harmless, increasingly it becomes dangerous. And there is no bigger worry now than the growing belief that vaccines are harmful and as a consequence levels of vaccination are falling. Worryingly in the USA the President has appointed an opponent of vaccines as Health Secretary.

    I am the first to admit that there are rare events that can follow vaccination but in the scheme of things the overwhelming scientific evidence is that these are very rare. I think the bigger picture has been distorted because nowadays very few people have experience of diseases that we rarely see precisely because vaccination has almost eradicated them. One of the memories of my time as a Medical Student in the 1960s was being taken to a ward in Aintree Hospital in Liverpool which was full of adults in Iron Lungs -all victims of polio caught in the 1940s and 50s before polio vaccine was introduced. And in the 1960s we still had awful epidemics of measles and whooping cough which debilitated or occasionally killed children. Measles was the main cause of a chronic disease known as bronchiectasis where the air passages in the lungs are damaged and the sufferer has a life of chronic chest problems and infections. If you trawl through social media today you will find all manner of bizarre accounts of what vaccines are supposed to do to people. Often these accounts are peppered with that well know phrase “They say…” And of course in conversation with people there is a sentiment expressed that if its on Facebook or Instagram it must be true!

    It is an awful prospect to think that we would have to wait for an increase in the incidence of some of these historic diseases to make the anti-vax sentiment go away. When I was a GP people used to ask me if I had my own children vaccinated and the answer was always a resounding Yes. Whether this helped the waverers I never really knew. But my message still is if you are offered a vaccination against a particular illness take it! So this afternoon I’m off for my Flu and Covid vaccination!

  • Saturdays

    I am a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph. Before you label me as a right wing extremist I have to say that there are many of the opinions it promulgates that I disagree with. The history behind it is that when I passed the 11 plus and went to Grammar School, my Dad decided that our daily paper should contain some good writing and so chose the Telegraph.(I also was given a subscription to The Children’s Newspaper – anyone remember that). At that time the Telegraph was published in Manchester as well as London so We had a fair share of Northern news. And by and large the writing in it was of a good standard and must have helped me because i was very good at English. However in later years the Telegraph, along with that other quality newspaper The Manchester Guardian, moved its production to London and so by and large we lost the reporting of “Up North”.

    I still stick with the Telegraph because it generally has good writers but it is very London centric.

    For that reason I am now convinced that in the North we live in a parallel universe! The machinations of politicians and the Greater London media bubble are of no interest to me. I don’t really care if Angela Rayner has 300 houses or who scored points of who at PM question time. And I never cease to marvel about how people in the south must be to pay the prices they do for a pint of beer! We are more interested up here about having decent railways and buses, a health service that works and less anti-social behaviour, as well as protecting the good name of the Cumberland Sausage!

    The Telegraph comes into its own, however, on Saturdays when its edition includes supplements covering the arts, food, travel etc.. Invariably though much of the writing about arts and culture, restaurant reviews or other features rarely describe things north of Watford Junction. I read an article recently about the best pubs in the country -only one listed in the North! One particular feature that I always read and which is now my evidence of the different world “Down South” is entitled My Saturday. This is a column where some individual who is famous or in the public eye describes what they do on Saturday. It is often a worthy candidate for the feature called “Pseuds Corner” in Private Eye. Invariably it will describe what the person has for breakfast Consider this one: “I get the scrambled eggs going with avocado and toast with peanut butter. Sometimes I’ll do overnight porridge with chia seeds and banana”. Or this one: “I have a simple breakfast of kefir or bran flakes with dried fruit. Or an egg with really ripe organic tomatoes and rye bread together with an occasional glass of champagne”. The column then usually goes on to describe a walk in one of London’s parks and an evening dinner party with friends.

    Its a far cry from my breakfast of either a bacon sandwich or a boiled egg with soldiers. Of course the other issue about becoming an Oldie is that Saturdays are much like any other day of the week (Every day is a Saturday when you retire!). Although we do have the advantage in the North of being able to watch Rugby League. For all its faults and occasional pretension I still like reading the Telegraph but I do wish we could have a bit more coverage of things of interest up here.