Elderly

Earlier this week - having heard three consecutive songs on the radio that I didn’t recognise - I realised I haven’t properly listened to new music in quite some time.

With the exception of one or two albums and the odd track, new additions to my regular playlist over the past year have been extremely rare. In fact, the last album I downloaded was a Christmas carol compilation - because I thought it was a nice way to celebrate my 91st birthday.

This isn’t some deliberate hipster thing where I only seek out bands who play at venues that exist inside the walls of other venues and whose names are never spoken aloud - save for the whispers of only the most enlightened Tibetan monks and that guy with the sweet scarf you see at gigs sometimes. I’ve just gradually, for whatever reason, drifted out of the loop.

Continue reading "I’ve rocked out of my generation’s la-la-loop" »

My grandma will never own a computer.

She has a mobile phone, one with a flip screen that her kids and grandkids have programmed contacts into. Lately she has become a big texter, messaging grandkids to see how they went at footy or whether they want her to pick them up from school.

But the family probably won’t get her a computer. Logic is she doesn’t need or, really, want one. Besides, she’s got plenty of people who are happy to look things up for her. It’d be a challenge to teach her computers - the learning process would be long, the jargon difficult. And there’d be big questions about her security online.

Continue reading "I’m sorry Nanna, you haven’t won a million $$$ on the net" »

Last week I was standing at a pedestrian crossing at the Adelaide Airport with my two kids, aged five and eight. There was a car coming towards us, moving fairly slowly and appearing to slow down. In one of those split-second moments which people without kids will pontificate about, but which parents understand, we started to step onto the crossing.

The driver didn’t stop. He went straight through, missing us by inches. I shouted at him, as did a bystander, but he kept meandering along the road for about another 30m. He stopped his car smack-bang in the middle of the road, right on the white line between two lanes, where a security guard approached him to inquire as to what the hell he was doing.

The driver was so old that he possibly didn’t even know he was in a car at all.  He looked like he was 90 in the shade. At least.

Continue reading "Doddery old drivers should not be a protected species" »

Earlier this week, 86-year-old Leroy Luetscher temporarily became my idol. The Arizona pensioner was reportedly enjoying a spot of gardening when a freak accident left a pair of garden shears lodged in his eye socket. That’s right, his eye socket.

The handle went past his eye and through his neck, eventually resting on his external carotid artery, leaving him to walk around like some sort of Edward Scissor-Face.

Luetscher, who is expected to make a full recovery, said he was “grateful to the doctors and staff” and left it at that. No blog. No finger-pointing. No attempt to use the incident to become a breakfast radio star or get a retweet from Snooki. The guy was all class and dignity. Elderly blokes like Luetscher make Jack “check out my one arm push-ups” Plance seem like no big deal.

Continue reading "Blades to the head can’t stop old people from being badass" »