I see the signs

I’m afraid I’ll get dementia.
I’m afraid I already have dementia.
I can see all the signs.
I fumble for words.
I lose my train of thought.
I have trouble concentrating.
I forget people’s names.
I feel vague and confused.
I don’t feel I’m fully functioning.
I forget how to do things.
I don’t understand what people are saying.
But maybe all those things happen to other people too.
Maybe they just mean we’re fallible human beings.
Maybe I hope for perfect behaviour and can’t accept it’s normal to fall short.
 
My mother had dementia.
My mother and father in law both had dementia.
So I’m not confident I’ll dodge it.
Dementia affects one in six people over the age of 80 in the UK.
I’ll be 80 next year.
I don’t want Jenny to have to look after me for years as dementia worsens.
I don’t want to end up a gormless shadow of my former self.
I don’t want my life to end in such wretchedness.
But dementia strikes at random.
There’s nothing I can do to stop it.
No vaccine.
No drugs.
No surgery.
All I can do is hope to be spared.

Act your age

Thankfully I don't often get told to "act your age". If people think I'm behaving in an unseemly way age-wise, they have the tact to let me get on with it and not tick me off.

What on earth does "act your age" mean anyway? What behaviour exactly is suitable for someone of sixty? Or seventy? Or eighty? Should we wear clothes that hide every square inch of flesh? Should we never say anything rude or controversial? Should we avoid contentious subjects like sex, drugs, religion or politics? Should we avoid doing anything that might be seen as childish or immature?

You could tie yourself in knots trying to act the way people expect an oldie to act - whatever that may be. Who gives a damn? The way I see it, we oldies have spent decades being bossed around by employers, bureaucrats, relatives and big companies, and in our final years we should be able to behave however we like and ignore any age-based remarks.

Perhaps "act your age" should mean act like someone who's old enough to have seen plenty of life, who's well-informed, experienced, worldly-wise and confident enough to expose young people's naivety and wishful thinking. That would be a definition worth pursuing.

No aversion

Hannah suggests I have an aversion to children.

Not so. I have nothing against children, and in general I'm very tolerant of them. After all, I was a child myself once upon a time. But I have an aversion to children who behave badly, just as I have an aversion to oldies who behave badly. If a child is being rude or demanding endless attention or throwing things, of course I don't like it and I'll want them to be better behaved.

There are four children in the house next door and I have no problem with them. They're very well-behaved and mostly don't bother us in any way. The only minor annoyance is from the oldest son, who regularly kicks footballs into our garden. We chuck them back and that's that.

Grown adults can be much more tiresome, making tedious complaints about parking or dog mess or litter or bin emptying. You can't say, oh they're just having fun, you know what children are like, because they aren't children. They're meant to be intelligent and interesting, not a lot of dreary whingers and moaners.

Children come up with all sorts of intriguing ideas and observations. They're full of life and bubbly curiosity. Why would I have an aversion to them?

Going to the dogs

How often do you read that people's conduct has declined, the country's going to the dogs, nobody knows how to behave any more etc etc?

Supposedly people are more angry, abusive, lawless, corrupt, neurotic, selfish and lazy than they used to be - and what's more it's getting worse.

But is this really true? Is people's behaviour actually slipping or is this a false impression? How on earth do you measure such things when there's no way of directly comparing behaviour now with behaviour, say, twenty years ago?

Today's bad behaviour is much more visible when it's constantly flagged up by the media and made out to be more common than it is. And yesterday's bad behaviour is not so noticeable because we've forgotten a lot of it. So of course it seems like people's behaviour has got worse.

The fact is that there's a large number of people who are badly behaved and always have been. There are plenty of people who get drunk on planes, insult shop assistants, jump queues, feign sickies and so on. Such wrongdoers didn't simply jump out of the woodwork last week.

And I admit to making these false comparisons myself. Just recently I was saying that people seem to be angrier than they used to be, but of course if you ask me for evidence or statistics, I don't have any. It's simply my personal hunch, based on nothing whatever.

I need to take the media's sensationalism with a large pinch of salt.

I blame the parents

There are different opinions about psychological problems in adulthood.

You can trace them back to childhood and blame parental failings.

You can say that blaming your parents is a cop-out and you should just work through your hang-ups.

Or you can say that your parents did their best by the standards of the times and so you shouldn't blame them for their failings.

Personally I take the first approach. It's clear to me that my parents sent me to an entirely unsuitable boarding school that didn't equip me properly for adult life and left me emotionally and intellectually under-developed.

I don't think it's a cop-out to blame my parents if it's quite obvious they made a major error of judgment and there's no way they could pin it on anything else. That error is a reality and should be acknowledged.

I also think referring to the standards of the times doesn't absolve my parents. Whatever the standards of the times, they picked an unsuitable school and they should have noticed I wasn't happy, I wasn't thriving, and the quality of teaching wasn't good enough.

Of course if your parents are still alive, you don't want to upset them by telling them they were deficient parents. So you're likely to hide your criticism and pretend they did a great job. Which simply sweeps everything under the carpet.

Falling back on "the standards of the times" is dangerous, as it can excuse all sorts of negative behaviour - like domestic violence, homophobia and sacking pregnant women. Behaviour should be judged by today's standards and not the standards of 50 years ago, as if the following decades of cultural changes never happened.

Dodgy adults

People tell their children to behave like an adult - or behave like a grown-up. Either way that leaves plenty of scope as the behaviour of most adults is far from exemplary. The reality is that adults:

• Lie
• Make things up
• Commit crimes
• Drink too much
• Eat too much
• Smoke
• Drive dangerously
• Sell addictive drugs
• Start wars
• Cheat on their spouses

If anything, children should be telling adults to behave more like children. Because most of those adult tendencies/ nasty habits are absent in children, who still boast healthy and harmless lifestyles. They may lie or make things up, but that's about it.

Adults are in fact a thoroughly bad influence on children, and nothing like as superior as they would like to think. Unfortunately there are adults everywhere you look and children are easily swayed by them.

The average adult, if promoted as a role model for children, would probably be horrified. They would say, for goodness sake don't copy me with all my neuroses and all my failings. Find somebody more worthy of inspiring you.

So the immediate question when told to behave like an adult would have to be - which adult? Do I behave like Uncle Charlie, who drinks like a fish, flirts outrageously and drives like a maniac? Or do I behave like Aunt Delia, who's sensible and considerate and kind?

When I was young, I was indeed inspired by a lot of adults. Not because they were adults but because they had qualities that I admired and wanted for myself. I was especially influenced by an English teacher who made mastering English a whole lot of fun. Yes, he was an adult but that was irrelevant.

Curiouser and curiouser

I'm a naturally curious person, and Jenny is even more so, which is one reason we get on so well, I guess.

I'm insatiably curious about all sorts of strange things. Such as:

• The relentless social media trolling of public figures
• The damaging effects of second homes on localities
• Over-tourism likewise
• The survival tactics of squirrels
• What cats might be thinking
• Detransitioners and "gender identity"
• The re-writing of popular books to prevent offensiveness
• Why people have cosmetic surgery
• Advances in medical treatment
• Witch-hunting cults
• The shortage of women's toilets
• The psychological toll of sudden fame

I'm not content to simply "take things as they come". I'm not content with superficial knowledge. I want to know more. I want to know why people behave in a certain way, why crazy ideas become fashionable, why people's lives go off the rails.

My mum was remarkably uncurious. I could spend an hour or two with her and she'd show no curiosity about anything. She would follow the news but never questioned any of it. Although she knew I was left-wing (while she was very right-wing) she never probed me about my opinions, she just ignored them.

But how can people not be curious? The world is so full of bizarre and inexplicable behaviour, how can anyone not want to ask a hundred questions? How can anyone just carry on as if nothing unusual is happening?

People often lose their child-like curiosity as they get older. According to behaviourist Ian Leslie we ask 40,000 questions a year between the ages of two and five - around 110 each day - while adults ask a mere 20. No wonder so many peculiar ideas become mainstream - not enough people query them.

Curiosity killed the cat? What nonsense.

The right image

Nobody wants to admit it, but one of our key objectives as an adult is giving ourselves a positive image. We approach every situation with an eye to what behaviour will make us look good and what behaviour won't.

There's no return to the days when we were small children and just blurted out whatever came to mind, without any thought for the consequences. We could look foolish or stupid or mean or rude many times a day because we hadn't yet got the knack of image-management.

As an artful adult however I do my best not to look in any way "bad" and I try to manage other people's reactions so they have a positive image of me. I try to avoid any impression that I'm anti-social or a law-breaker or that I'm selfish or arrogant or violent or domineering. I want people to think "He's a nice bloke, a sensible sort of guy, I like him."

Of course nobody wants to confess to ongoing image-massaging, it sounds so calculating and cold-blooded, but that's what we do. Nobody wants to be the bad parent, the bad patient, the bad student, the bad neighbour. So we tweak our behaviour to make it reassuringly "as expected".

And naturally we gloss over those big mistakes, or hastily conceal them. Those embarrassing workplace cock-ups or domestic blunders we'd rather not own up to. The car we wrecked or the kitchen we set on fire or the valuable antique we threw away. No no, they never happened. Or not the way you think.

If we believe our behaviour is spontaneous and unrehearsed, we're kidding ourselves.

The gift of privacy

It's easy to take privacy, and all that goes with it, for granted. It seems like an absolutely routine thing, but millions of people around the world have little or no privacy. People in refugee camps, in shanty towns, in boarding schools, in large families crammed into tiny flats.

I take for granted that I live in a large house with one other person, and any time I like I can hide away in one of the rooms and do my own thing. I can swear for half an hour or watch kittens on Youtube or stuff myself with chocolate. I can read a book for as long as I fancy without interruptions. I can think interesting thoughts without someone badgering me.

It gives me a degree of freedom that a lot of people don't have. When I'm on my own, I don't have to worry what other people think of me, whether my behaviour is "appropriate", or what's expected from me. I can do what I like without the obligations that come with constant company.

But many people don't enjoy that advantage. If they're always surrounded by other people, they have to keep adjusting to what those people demand, which they may or may not be comfortable with.

During my five years at boarding school. there was no way of escaping the other boys or avoiding their endless scrutiny. At times it could be embarrassing or even humiliating. I couldn't wait for Sundays, when we were allowed an hour of privacy to do whatever we wanted. When I left school and was no longer being watched every minute of the day, I went a little mad with the sudden sense of personal freedom.

Privacy is a luxury. It's something many people can only dream of.

NB: Of course I'm referring to physical privacy rather than data privacy, which is a whole different subject.

I'm just me

I've never felt in any way "masculine", and I'm not drawn to any of those things men are supposed to be passionate about. When men talk about being more masculine or more manly, I couldn't care less. It all goes right over my head. I have zero interest in

• Football
• Cricket
• Fast cars
• Gadgets
• Flirting with women
• Sexual prowess
• Heavy drinking
• DIY
• Action movies
• Technical stuff
• Being the "top dog"
• Extreme sports

Of course there are certain masculine behaviour patterns I'm obliged to follow to avoid being ostracised by polite society. And there are things I do quite unconsciously because they were endlessly drummed into me when I was growing up. All men are sexist to some degree, whether they realise it or not, just as white people are all racist. The trick is to suss out those sexist habits and suppress them.

It seems to me that being a civilised human being is more important than being masculine, especially if being masculine means harassing and mistreating women. Behaving decently does more good than trying to be on one end or the other of an entirely artificial spectrum. I'm just me and I can't be bothered to chase after some dubious behavioural norm.

Every so often there's a major debate about what it means to be masculine, how masculinity can be "detoxified", why men feel insecure and confused etc. To me these debates seem quite pointless, when the simple answer to all the confusion is surely, stop pursuing false goals, just behave like a normal intelligent human being and you'll be fine.

Fortunately I always gravitated to workplaces where the men had as little interest in being masculine as I did. They never thought me peculiar for being a light drinker, ignoring the big match, or not gawping at someone's tits. What they enjoyed was witty conversation, idle gossip, good food and weird haircuts.

Masculinity? You can keep it.