In praise and reproval of the elderly: slow, itinerant, violent – and revolutionary

It’s been a good week for old people. On Friday, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra celebrated his 100^th birthday, and at midday people in Chile stopped whatever they were doing to read one of his poems. On his annual visit to Skegness, a 104-year-old man called Sid Pope was delighted when he was welcomed by local dignitaries and the town’s mascot (a jolly fisherman). Meanwhile at Sadler’s Wells, the over-sixties are limbering up for a dance festival for oldsters. And in Iraq aged Peshmerga warriors who retired years ago are returning to the army to help fight the Islamic State.

Recent Spectator writers have been rigorously unsentimental about old people. Theodore Dalrymple was grimly intrigued when he met a truly evil woman in her eighties. And in 1995, Tabitha Troughton described how six of her friends had been assaulted by old age pensioners. Two had been beaten with walking sticks, three were punched (one in the head) and one was clawed in the face.