| Topic: | "Lat of the Summer Wine for Pensioners" - from today's Times :) | |
| Posted by: | Mark Perry | |
| Date/Time: | 23/06/11 09:44:00 |
| Calling last orders on the elderly is cruel. With pension worries and terrible care, they need to drown their sorrows So, let’s recap on this week’s Reasons To Be Cheerful About Getting Old. It’s been quite a week. We’ve had the prospect of working until we’re 70, which everyone’s thrilled about, especially people in minimum-wage jobs or whose work involves heavy lifting/scaling telegraph poles. Then, once we’re sick, alone and bedridden there’s the promise of waiting a mere 17 hours for a carer to come and hoist us on to a commode. And let’s not forget that in an elderly people’s day room at Cardiff Royal Infirmary, patients who needed to summon a nurse were told to bash a tambourine. Yes, in 2011 the hospital emergency call system was a small percussion instrument. If it broke they were told to use a pair of maracas. This was obviously demeaning for patients, though on the upside they must have learnt to belt out a cracking rendition of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord. No, you’re right. It’s no jesting matter. Old age is shaping up into one hellish package. To the middle-aged it feels like one of those monster motorway traffic jams that you are still a distance away from but keep being reminded of by dire warnings flashing overhead. We’re told in a consumerist society that everything is about choice. And it is. Some visits from council home helps are so brief that the elderly must choose between being washed or being fed. Paltry pensions, smelly care homes and 24-hour stints on a rubber sheet. Aw, ambassador, you are spoiling us. But cheer up. There’s always alcohol. Oh no, sorry — there isn’t. The crescendo to a dismal news week for the elderly is this: the Royal College of Psychiatrists wants the Government to cut “safe” drinking levels for the over 65s because of their “growing alcohol and drug misuse”. Men over 65 should never drink more than 1.5 units of alcohol in a day, women no more than one. Got that? Probably best to measure your nightly tipple from a teat pipette. Can we possibly make ageing any more depressing? Perhaps we could smash elderly people’s dentures so they can’t chew sweets, then ban them from bars altogether, hiring bouncers to throw them on to the pavement? I’ve always thought one of the main consolations of getting old is that you can slip into a daily alcoholic haze, mixing your medication with gin, safe in the knowledge that you won’t need your liver for much longer. How else do you anaesthetise the pain of being skint, sitting in a wipe-down chair and banging a tambourine? That was always my “pension plan”, anyway. But, oh no. Even that has been snatched away by killjoys who say too many pensioners are using drink as a “coping mechanism”. Well, of COURSE they bloody are. This is why alcohol exists. Are we saying that after a lifetime of work, people can’t sink a few glasses of red in front of Emmerdale? Experts mean well when they issue advice to help the elderly to prolong their lives into advanced old age. But for what? If the picture painted this week is anything to go by, your reward for waving away the wine bottle is several more years of sitting braised in your own wee. Thanks for the tip, psychiatrists, but if I live that long mine will be very much a treble. Followed by a fag. |