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When old is new young we'll be a perkier country
Brown is the new black, gardening is the new sex, pets are the new partners, Manchester is the new London, home decorating is the new rock'n'roll, new is the new old. This is standard neophilia-speak these days.
It can be confusing. No sooner does one get used to something being the new something else, than it all changes. I was just learning to like the thought that 50 is the new 40 when I discovered, last week, that it's just the opposite now. Forty is the new 50, at least if you're a man. There is no rest for the neophiliac.
A midlife money survey by Virgin Money loans revealed last Wednesday that men turning 40 these days are having the midlife crisis they used to have at 50. Forty-three per cent of them actually say, poor creatures, that 40 is the new 50. Forty is old.
Terrified of losing their youth and their prospects, these unhappy men in what used to be their prime are driven in despair and in huge numbers to personal trainers, beauty parlours, Botox shots and cosmetic surgery. They are spending, if this survey is to be believed, Ï2 billion a year on fighting the ravages of time.
This does not surprise me. The last time I visited my nail technician, as we say these days, the customer having a manicure next to me was a man. In fact he was a man I recognised, a successful investment banker, good-looking despite being well over 40 and not in the least embarrassed to be discovered in a beauty therapy centre.
The beauty parlour is going the way of men's clubs and gyms. It is ceasing to be a place where you can escape from the opposite sex. The only surprising thing is that it has taken men so long to discover what women have always known: youth is well worth hanging on to.
For years men have laughed at women for lying about their age, and trying to pretend they aren't painted thick in anti-wrinkle cream or haven't just had a secret nip and tuck. Now they are discovering that the laugh is on them too, and for much the same reason. As Shakespeare put it so succinctly in King Lear, age is unnecessary.
Traditionally women who were no longer young were considered past it or, in the nasty new expression, past their sell-by date, from a largely sexual point of view.
In recent years, with much more female employment, they have discovered, as any television presenter could tell you, that unyoung women are past it from an employer's point of view. Where a grizzled old male anchorman was a sage, a grizzled old female anchorwoman had surgery.
But now men are finding they have a sell-by date too, one that is getting earlier and earlier.
The main reason, I have been told by several consultants, that men have cosmetic surgery (as they now are doing in rapidly increasing numbers) is not to become beautiful but to stay young, to avoid looking as old as they really are. Last week there was even talk of a new cosmetic operation for your vocal cords, to keep your voice sounding young.
Surgery is the new keep fit, quite literally, both in terms of survival of the fittest and in terms of fit in the new sense of attractive. Germaine Greer wrote very movingly in a book about older women called The Change that there comes a moment, when the last traces of youth have disappeared, that a woman becomes invisible. Nobody is interested in her any more; their attention is drawn away to the young and she becomes an unperson.
These days I keep meeting men who are having the same experience.
In America these phenomena, as always, have appeared and been recognised much more quickly than here. That ugly word ageism is an American invention, and I'm told that in job interviews in the United States you are forbidden by law to ask a candidate's age, to avoid any suspicion of ageist discrimination.
The absurdity of this is glaring: every candidate presents a CV and even if there are no telltale dates on it, these days there are armies of fact checkers checking them out, in the process of which it will be impossible not to discover precisely when the applicant went to Harper Valley High and, therefore, how old he is. Still, however futile, it is a noble gesture against an obvious unfairness.
I cannot count the number of readers who have told me that they are unable to get work if they are over 50. They write bitterly, saying it is pointless to tell everyone they must work until they are 75 to pay for their retirement — 75 is the new 60 — if nobody will give work to a man of 55 when there is someone younger to be had. Nor can I count the conversations I've had with people who feel almost ashamed of being old, meaning 50 or more.
Last week I went to a school careers afternoon, at which parents described to conscripted teenagers what working life is like; one intelligent, successful, man, very attractive even though approaching the senility of 60, ruefully told me he was completely out of date and nobody would want to hear his thoughts on life.
Every charity or voluntary group I've had anything to do with spends a lot of time expressing serious embarrassment that far too many of those involved are male and old. Older men are just not wanted, it seems; they are a bit of a embarrassment.
They themselves earnestly agree, whenever recruitment is raised, how dreadful it is that they are in place (doing much-needed work) instead of a lot of much less experienced young people (who incidentally can't or won't do such work).
It is hardly surprising that the poor dears, only so very recently at the centre of an ageless male chauvinist world, now suffer an almost permanent life crisis, from uselessness and failure in boyhood and adolescence to a midlife crisis lasting from 35 to 70, and are driven to spending billions in the pursuit of youth and a full head of hair.
I am not sure how to understand this desperate pursuit of youth and inexperience at the expense of maturity and experience. It must have something to do with meritocracy. The old boy network has been badly frayed, if not quite unravelled, by meritocracy and by positive discrimination, and old boys are suffering as a result.
It must also have something to do with our culture of restless neophilia, of commercially stimulated addiction to novelty and, quite clearly, old is not new — whether it's a computer game, must-have trainers or a person.
We are also suffering as a society, if not thee and me,
from hyper-sexualisation, and there are obvious sexual reasons for our obsession with youth. But it is all an error; anyone of experience and maturity knows that both are extremely valuable in almost every line of life — even in bed — and sooner or later people will be driven by practical and commercial forces to recognise that. Then perhaps old will become the new new.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 25, 2004 | Comments (0)
Our dash for a place in the sun doesn't put Britain in the shade
Many years ago in the final months of the decadent old Labour regime, I was taken for the first time to the opera at Glyndebourne. There we sat, on a warm and scented June evening on an immaculate English lawn surrounded by the best-chosen of shrubs, in the interval of an astonishingly beautiful and expensive production of Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses, eating choice little picnic morsels and swigging champagne.
Around us were prosperous men and women in smart dinner jackets or rather less smart evening dresses in the English style, doing the same and all saying the same like a Greek chorus, "life here is beginning to be hardly worth living", "the country is going to the dogs", "things can't possibly go on like this" and "quite frankly it's so bad that Johnny's thinking of emigrating". And so on. "Have some more champagne, darling."
I was reminded last week of that absurd moment by the news (according to a survey) that disillusioned Britons are leaving the country for a better life in the sun and that a third of them say that Britain's decline is their reason for getting out. Two years ago a YouGov poll found that 55% of Britons were seriously considering settling in another country and gave general discontent with things here as the reason.
The general idea is of an ever-growing swarm of rats deserting the sinking ship Britannia. However, I am sceptical and not just because people tend to talk nonsense to pollsters or because surveys tend to be unreliable.
It is certainly true that the British are buying properties in sunnier climes in huge numbers (and have been doing so for many years) though there are no official figures about who or what or why. It seems to me that almost every time I get into a taxi the driver tells me he is planning to emigrate to Spain, whereupon I always say that my husband has the same dream and we get into earnest conversation about the joys of Andalucia.
Several taxi drivers have advised me that there is a huge weekly Spanish property taxi-boot sale of some sort somewhere off the M25, where you can get a villa-with-pool fixed up at a bargain. Huge depopulated swathes of la France profonde deserted by the French have been discovered and repopulated by Albion to the point when discriminating Brits are moving on to places less well known to their fellow countrymen. The same applies in southern Italy, Croatia and even unlikely sounding places in the former Soviet bloc.
However, property buying is not necessarily emigration. And I do not think this mass property grab has much to do with disillusion with Britain, although of course one must admit that people here are disillusioned and angry in some ways.
The German magazine Der Spiegel last week published a ferocious attack on brutal and brutalised Britain, and not all of it was unfair although it was riddled with schadenfreude -a word for which there is incidentally no English equivalent.
It's true that Britain has some shocking social problems -Der Spiegel interviewed Theodore Dalrymple, the British writer and prison psychiatrist who was as eloquent as always in his despairing condemnation of this country, its barbarity, its moral bankruptcy, its overcrowded jails, collapsing hospitals, feral youths, feckless welfare mothers and condom-littered streets etc, etc.
However, the truth is that the countries where we dream of having a little sun-filled farmhouse or villa have most of the same problems or are getting them, and sometimes they are worse. For instance my mother-in-law for many years had a house near Montpellier in the heart of Le Pen country. One of the reasons we sold it recently was the growing and alarming tension in the village about north African Muslim immigrants, the sudden rise in crime and the desecration of synagogues.
The beaches and rivers we had walked beside for so long were beginning to look positively English with their new detritus of used needles and condoms and fast-food litter. There are ghettos in France -and all over Europe -every bit as bad as Britain's. And we learnt during our time there that French schools are rapidly going the way of our own and that the excellent national healthcare system in France is too cripplingly expensive to last for much longer.
The reason that the British flock to foreign countries (and always have) is not that they hate their own (much though they love to grumble) but that they are (and always have been) exceptionally enterprising in their pursuit of pleasure and adventure, combining both with profit. The British have been ceaseless, world-beating travellers and traders, and long after the loss of a world empire they remain backyard imperialists in their pursuit of private property abroad. We are a nation not just of shopkeepers but of property purchasers -more than any other Europeans.
For centuries the British have been the first and the best at discovering not just new places but also new pleasures -infuriatingly no doubt in countries where the natives could have done so themselves but didn't.
It was the British with their genius for inventing sports that would become international obsessions who "discovered" the sport of skiing in Europe's mountains, discerning what the Swiss and French and German natives didn't.
It was the British who "discovered" Tuscany and bought cheap unwanted farmhouses worth millions now that the rest of the world and the Italians have caught on. It was the British and the Anglophile Americans who "created" the Riviera early in the 20th century, the British who took over and developed the port industry in Portugal in the 18th.
In southwestern Andalucia, where my husband dreams of living, there were until recently hardly any country houses in the English sense and those there are belong to Scottish and English pioneers who were first to perceive that beautiful country as a poor man's Tuscany. It is only recently that the middle-class Spanish in Seville have begun to want weekend properties around there; the Brits were first.
I feel quite sure that the couples grumbling at Glyndebourne so long ago about the decline and fall of Britain were the sort of people who would have had, or longed, for a place in Umbria or in Portugal absolutely regardless of the state of the nation. I am sure they continued to do so once Thatcher had destroyed old Labour, seen off the IMF, slashed taxes and made the picnickers rich.
What's changed between then and now is that so many more Britons, now that we are almost all much richer, can afford to buy a place in the sun; it is no longer the preserve of the upper-middle classes. People much lower down the social scale can do so and are doing so in large numbers. Many of them are starting up property-related businesses abroad.
This foreign property frenzy is a sign not of British lemmings racing over the cliffs of Dover in a mad rush of national despair. On the contrary it is a sign of enterprising Britons at their best and most annoying -confident, pleasure-seeking, greedy, shrewd and smart.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 18, 2004 | Comments (0)
