Staring down Death.

Myvanwy is fast becoming my favourite nonagenarian (barring of course any close family members of a ripe old age):

Yesterday over a lunch of couscous salad and curried potato and pea soup (she is not averse to my culinary experiments or chillies) we were discussing the issue of homosexuality, a dinner table conversation that I reserve for only the most open-minded geriatics:

Me: Well, I had this discussion with another couple I looked after, she is in her 70’s and he in his 80’s, and they told me that rather a lot of their male friends in the 70 plus age range had suddenly come out as bi-sexual. [Ladle spoonful of soup into open mouth.]

Myvanwy: [Behind dark glasses] Oh, my Godfathers! Nonsense dear, I suspect they were just tired of ‘giving it’ to the old girls and thought up this clever little cover story instead.

Me: Cough, splutter. Ergle. [Blindsided by a 90 year old mentioning sex I promptly chortle into my soup, in the process snorting up curried pea soup – rather singeing my nostrils.]

Myvanwy: [Chuckling at my perplexity]. Well I expect so dear, I was married twice, I know a thing or two about marriage.

Myvanwy’s sexual frankness was a complete surprise to me (as testified by the curried pea embedded in my left nostril). It has been my experience that for most O.A.P’s (old age pensioners) once the ovaries have withered any mention of sex is completely taboo. In my view the homes of most ninety year olds are asexual zones with loud ticking grandfather clocks (except for Hugh’s Playboy Mansion where I’m sure other noises fill the air). But Myvanwy is different - joking about sex and rather pragmatic about death. She tells me that her bridge club has been going through a rough time with everyone ‘falling off their perches’ and she reluctant to spend excessively on a new garden shed with a 10 year guarantee, as she is doubtful she’ll be around to see the warrantee out. Also acutely aware that she is in bootleg trousers when skinnies are in fashion she can’t bring herself to go shopping, “Oh my Godfather’s no,” she cried when I suggested it, “First there is the changing room trauma, the lighting in there is terrible. Secondly, the last time I tried I could barely get the trousers over my ankles and finally at this time in my life is there any point in investing in a new Spring wardrobe?” Remarkably none of this is said with any melancholia, just an acute awareness of the fact that at 92 there may not be too many Springs to be sprung.

I reckon Myvanwy must have been a real live wire in her youth. Widowed in her early twenties after the Second World War, with a young baby she just kept “calm and carried on,” through the wreckage of post-war Britain. She remarried, had more children and taught ballroom dancing all the while smoking 30 cigarettes a day until the age of 72. Now in her 90’s she gets through the day largely unmedicated, which is wildly unusual as in my experience Geriatric Britain is buoyed by the pharmaceutical industry, or the other way round. That's not to say Myvanwy doesn't medicate she does have a few fortifying sips of brandy for the ‘queer turns’.

She is my new Aging Icon, forget Madonna, who at 50, with her teenage body and army of toyboys is fighting the aging process each macrobiotic day at a time, I’m signing up for the Myvanwy school of aging, her motto ‘drive it like you stole it.’ Staring down Death with a steely glint in her eye and Brandy in her hipflask. What a gem.