You know you are getting old when you spend more time leaving condolences on rip.ie than throwing shapes on the dance floor. But if I’m being entirely honest, the last time I was in a nightclub Westlife members were still honing the art of rising from their stools in perfect sync to herald a rousing key change.
Some of us prefer to ignore those little signposts that we are hurtling along the highway of life. Yes, you may be using the light on your phone to read a restaurant menu but that small smidgin of light coming from the butt of a candle is no help at all. Another indicator of longevity might reveal itself when you are faced with one of those pesky online forms which demand that you scroll interminably to find your birth year. Why does it start at 2025 anyway? How many babies are looking for a home insurance quote?
By the time you’ve found your birth year, you’ve forgotten why you visited the website. But your memory is as good as ever because you can still remember all the words to The Ballad of Father Gilligan 40 years after you learned the Yeats poem. Let’s not dwell on your propensity to forget the reason you went upstairs as soon as you reach the landing. It will come to you as soon as you have returned downstairs.
But while you are up there, you may find yourself peering into the hot press wondering if it’s time for a spot of Swedish death cleaning. In the event of your sudden death, could you be posthumously shamed by the slovenly manner in which you maintained your hot press? And should you get rid of that box of Now That’s What I Call Music! tapes now, so your children don’t have to do it after you die?
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I successfully ignored all these indicators of age until I had an epiphany while watching the Great British Bake-Off. I realised that if I were a competitor, I would be the token older woman. Kindly judge Prue Leith smiles benevolently at her while fellow judge Paul Hollywood describes her as a mother figure in a futile attempt to make himself feel younger. The token older woman holds her own in the competition in the early stages but you know she will crash out around the midway point. That’s when the youngsters start bedazzling the judges with yuzu and miso while she struggles to get the lid off the almond extract bottle.
Realising my place in the Bake-Off line-up was bad enough until I read that the actor who played Blanche Devereaux in The Golden Girls was only 51 when the sitcom started. The series hammered viewers over the head with the fact that these women were old, yet no one over the age of 63 played a main character. But then again, a 51-year-old is old if you are studying home economics for the Junior Cert. I was glancing through the textbook and noticed with horror that the section on meal planning for older people defines this age group as 51+. It recommends easy-to-chew food in case of missing teeth or dentures.
Angela Lansbury never worried about dentures or feared that a surprise sneeze would put her back out. She played the old writer Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. Old? The actor was a sprightly 58 when she began playing the high priestess of cosy crime. She spent a lot of time in Ireland, so perhaps Glenroe was a fixture in her Sunday night viewing schedule. If so, her eye might have been caught by Dinny Byrne, the wily old farmer with the gammy hip. But wait, was he really that old? The actor Joe Lynch was only 53 when he first took on the role in Bracken – Glenroe’s predecessor.
He wore the clothes of these older characters with ease. He was only 54 when he played Bull McCabe in The Field. His screen son in Glenroe, Miley – played by the much-mourned actor Mick Lally – was also pressed into older roles before his time. He was Old Mahon in a Druid production of The Playboy of the Western World when he was just 37, thus achieving that rare theatrical feat of playing both father and son in the same play – he had played the character’s son Christy Mahon years earlier.
And in an even more surreal twist, his Glenroe screen father played young Christy Mahon in an Abbey production in 1952. Imagine telling Mick Lally, who was seven years old at that time, that he would one day play that character’s father while the man playing his son would one day play his father in Glenroe? The only sane response he could have made to that was: “Well, Holy God.”
