A bonfire of slippers for older people is a ridiculous idea that won’t help anyone
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Version 0 of 1. Sir Muir Gray, NHS ex-chief of knowledge – whatever that means – has announced that older people need a “bonfire of slippers”, for the sake of our health. Here we go again. Someone else telling us to take more exercise, eat properly, stop walking about like tortoises, burn our slippers and generally perk up. Doctors should prescribe Pilates instead of drugs, he told the Oxford literary festival, and our silly relatives must give us resistance bands and dumbells for presents, not cardigans or comfy footwear. Oh spare me from yet another clever-dick dollop of condescension and bossiness. Who is he to tell us to burn our slippers? I like mine. I wear them when it’s cold, to avoid chilblains. Then I jump up, rip them off, pull on my stout walking boots and stride around the parks for an hour with the dog, every day, often passing a stream of elderly neighbours heading for their Pilates class, or out with their dogs. I frequently meet several elderly persons, with whom I have coherent conversations, and many of us wear cardigans, because the weather is still chilly. But the cardigans are different colours and styles, because as Sir Muir Gray also recently pointed out, in case you hadn’t noticed, “older people differ more from one another than they are alike”. Correct. We’re not all exactly the same. We look different, we have varied personalities: dynamic, lazy, chirpy, miserable, personable or obnoxious, much like any other age group. And if we are not zipping around parks, jumping on and off buses, schlepping to the shops, gardening, eating our greens and fruit and avoiding red meat – without Muir Gray telling us, like the squillion other know-all advisors before him –we are toiling away looking after grandchildren, and are completely whacked out by the evening, when we often flop on the sofa and watch telly in our slippers, just like everyone else. One of Muir Gray’s other observations is rather startling too. Marriage usually leads to physical decline, says he, because it doesn’t involve “the type of activity to keep fit.” I’ve never been married, so I wouldn’t know the ins and out of it, but do people give up sport, dumbell lifting, and dog-walking once they’re a couple? My friend Ian has a wife, but is also confused. “I keep getting advice on how to stay alive,” says he. “Live near the Mediterranean, don’t live alone, marriage is really good for you, or really bad. It’s one of them. Not sure which.” Muir Gray is nearly right about one thing. We are often “influenced by the prevailing negative stereotype of old age”, which makes us depressed. No. Not depressed. Infuriated. And he could help us with this. By never lumping slippers, cardigans, and older people together, ever again. |