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I ONCE saw a cartoon showing a
young woman of the chorus girl persuasion, with more curves than a scenic
railway, her face suffused with smiles, and sipping champagne while
sitting on the knee of a glum-looking, portly, old gent in a night-club.
"Nonsense, darling," she says, "85 isn’t old."
By the
beaded bubbles blinking at her glass’s brim and her high-kicking heels,
her reassurance is, nowadays, too true. In biblical terms, the old boy was
a stripling. Moses, who had lived an almost filmic early life in a series
of rushes and failed to get the promised milk and honey franchise, knocked
up 120 years before his eyes dimmed and his natural force abated. Noah,
buoyed up with a variety of liquid assets, lasted for 950 years, while
Methuselah, apart, probably, from a bit of mildew round the edges and
cobwebs in the armpits, reached a never-beaten 969 years before
disappearing into the dustbin of Middle Eastern history.
Compared
with the last two long-lifers, we modern humans haven’t a look-in. The
greatest, fully-authenticated age reached by anyone in the world is the
122 years, 164 days of a Frenchwoman, Jeanne Louise Calment (1875-1997), a
formidable breaking of what was regarded as mankind’s natural span - the
"good innings" of three score years and ten.
Now, people are living longer,
and growing numbers in their sixties and even older, while not swinging
from chandeliers or sliding down banisters, are engaging in white-water
rafting, massed formation parachute-jumping, hang-gliding, Japanese-style
mud-wrestling and Thai kick-boxing.
ALL these are activities once
regarded as suitable for the madcap young and now open to vigorous,
sometimes liposuctioned veterans, even those with replaced joints, liver
and heart transplants who carry ephedrine inhalers, emergency wig
sticky-tape, haemorrhoidal rubber rings and an rattling armoury of
pill-boxes.
All very commendable - I look forward to the
construction of motorised Zimmer race tracks - although all that
hyperactivity may be nature’s way of getting rid of persistently-energetic
wrinklies who, like tropical flies, refuse to be discouraged.
To become
a centenarian and get royal back-slaps is regarded by society as a
magnificent feat of clinging to life’s cliff-edge, thus avoiding the
shifting sands at the bottom.
That achievement, in the
developed world, may, one day, be regarded as having only reached middle
age according to predictions that, by the century’s end, people could be
living for 200 years.
According to the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine,
out of 60 experts on aging, asked to predict life expectancy for a baby
born in 2100, over half believed it would be above 100 years. Seven who
were interviewed for the journal’s research project, believed it could be
between 150 and 200 years; the great longevity leap fuelled by advances in
genetic engineering to counteract the effects of aging and the defeat or
control of mass infectious diseases.
WHILE I am so old I remember
Heinz having only one variety, am of the generation that puts £5 in the
church collection plate as an investment rather than a contribution and
whose massed birthday cake candles constitute a fire hazard, I would not
want to live to an over-ripe old 100, let alone a further century, unless
I was in a mental and physical state to eat a soft-boiled egg without
help.
Undoubtedly, there will significant advances in
organ and other body parts replacement techniques. The great terminal
diseases will surely be conquered and, as a lesser but welcome
achievement, new teeth may be grown from stem cells implanted into gums to
give people flashing smiles to face the, perhaps, years-weary world.
When it comes to the crunch, will people rejoice to know that, when they
have reached 100 after about 80 working years, they may have around
another 50 or more years before retirement?
Leaving aside possible
planetary overcrowding by death-defying oldies, what will people look like
aged 200? Will they resemble Gagool, the age-shrunken witch-finder in
Rider Haggard’s novel, King Solomon’s Mines, whose face suggested a
malevolent prune, or look like a relief map of the Apennines? While many
people will struggle to feel comfy with new organs, others will be on
hospital waiting-lists for face-lifts or transplants.
"Nonsense
dear, " says the 65-year-old curvaceous lass, "195 isn’t old." A longer
life? Do me no favours; it sounds like a life sentence. |
