While looking for a suitable image for this post I came across this poster.
For once, the words more so than the image got me thinking, 'profound dignity', not something I automatically associate with ageing I must admit. Sadly I think I have quite the opposite expectation. I dread the thought of ageing and the increasing possibility of becoming vulnerable, physically and emotionally. Like everyone I hope and pray my own experience will be different, but in today's society, in Britain just as it is in India, the elderly are shamefully disregarded all too often. We all know it, we see it everywhere we look. But what are we prepared to do about it? Surely if we don't change this trend it will indeed become our own fate too.
The other day I was driving along, passing a few small shops clustered along a street I knew from my childhood. It was one of those streets that used to have a proper butchers, a greengrocers, a shop that sold model airplanes and tanks, a newsagents and an old fashioned hard wear shop where I remember collecting wood shavings for free for my hamster.
Today this same street looks unrecognisable, and yet all too familiar. It has a sort of stripped bare, grubby 'takeway' vibe now. The vibrancy I remember has gone, drained away over the years along with the independent shop keepers, replaced by a lone mini mart, a kebab shop and a betting shop.
Looking out my car window as I sat at the traffic lights I saw a little old lady, a remnant of my childhood. Someone who no doubt had lived her whole life around this street, as had my Nana and Grandad. She might have been my Nana once upon a time, today she was someone's Nana, maybe yours?!
