Fun is For the Young, Not the Elderly!
- Category: Peering Eye
- Date 30-04-2006
- 365 views
You are invited to a party by some folks to celebrate with them their particular accomplishment in life. You hope to join a jolly crowd and rejoice with food, drink, dance, shaggy dog stories, and all manner of fun. All you find is a crowd of eighty-year-olds, only able to support themselves to stand and go around with the help of walking sticks. Some are merely glued into wheelchairs, their limb muscles totally clichéd by age.
Such a group can only dampen the mood of festivity. Reason? There is roaring music but they are demanding that it be tuned down or off completely otherwise it would blow apart their eardrums and wipe out what remains of their hearing capacity. There is no possibility of dancing therefore because any of them shaking their hackneyed bones might fall down never to recover. The only body movements involved are uncontrolled: a trembling hand here; a quivering head there.
A celebration where the partakers are careful not to be excited or they could injure their health and endanger their own lives. A merrymaking festival where food and drink are plentiful but the guests are unable to do justice to it. For how much can an 80-year-old contain in a tummy that shrinks with age?
Whenever merrymakers are literally unable to chomp through feast victuals, I doubt if they could really deal with the banquet drinks. Wine is a predictable constituent of any swanky activity and folks of good cheer. But not when the festivity features anachronistic persons, as central characters. Thus the spirit of celebration will inevitably be so low.
I am thinking of celebrations to mark Queen Elizabeth’s 80th birthday a week ago Friday 21st April 2006, which was quite dramatic. Tottering old women and men who celebrated with tears and grunts as their inflexible old bones cracked and pained at every turn, action and movement dominated the revelry. Ninety-nine people – seventy women and twenty-nine men – who were born on the same day as the Queen, turned up to celebrate their birthday together, and she described them as her "exact twins".
Reports held that for many of the 80-year peers, all born on 21 April 1926, the occasion proved to be an emotional one. One age-mate, sipping on a glass of sherry and shedding tears, described the event as the best day of her life.
A former navy serviceman named Mr. Hucklesby, bore a cut on his nose and a sore knee. He groaned, "My knee … if I sit down I think it will seize up.” He was later given a plaster to put on the bridge of his nose and was taken to lunch in a wheelchair – he was lucky to have brought his grandson to the banquet. Earlier, he had tripped and fallen as he left his car to walk up the palace steps.
Another wheelchair-bound America, Julia Real flew in from New York to share her own eightieth birthday with the Queen of Britain. Wouldn’t such age-mates have done better staying at home to relax other than exhausting their imaginary liveliness?
Well, the Queen is ostensibly undeterred by age – her sparkling warmth, down-to-earth disposition and witty temperament remain quite unmistakable, even as she turned eighty. Whereas many of her guests wobbled and stuck to comfy chairs, Elizabeth went on a walkabout for forty-five minutes talking to fans and acknowledging cheering supporters.
Analysts say that the sprightly working grandmother showed no signs of slowing down: she is set to live even longer, if she keeps on her side the genes of her mother who died aged 101.
It is confounding nevertheless to encounter a squad of snivelling old women and men gathered together to rejoice; but instead, they are pinning their ears back to the cricking of their worn-out bone-joints, ligaments and muscles. Fun befits the young indeed.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen