The age delusion

I missed Gordon Brown’s Peter Andre act last night (which reminds me, I hope there is a follow up series: The Browns Stateside or What Gordo Did Next for instance) Alas, last night I had a prior engagement: I was putting out the rubbish. Whilst performing this solemn duty I chanced upon a Sunday Times article by Bryan Appleyard. He has contributed to the cultural topic of the moment: Gerontophobia. Martin Amis’s publicity tour for The Pregnant Widow, David Willetts’s The Pinch, even The Last Station (the film of Tolstoy’s last weeks) – age has become Britain’s obsession.

Appleyard is the eminence grise of reasoned disgust and he denounced society’s ‘cult of youth’, an insidious belief system that regards age as worthless. Appleyard argues that the old are a resource that can be exploited. Employers, advertisers, artists, museums, leisure companies and the taxman, all could make more of Britain’s ageing and increasingly long-lived and healthy population.