Being Discriminated Against

 Judy was clearly outraged when she regaled her audience of three in Coffee Club with the details of what had happened.   As for that audience, we sat in horrified silence, flat whites and long blacks untouched for the moment at least.   It would be true to say that the entire episode depressed us and made us understandably edgy.   Anna maintained that it was decidedly unfair whichever way you looked at it and we were being picked on just because we were old.  Jo nodded in enthusiastic agreement but added that she rather worried there might be something we were getting wrong because in New Zealand 2023 - it was late November last year when this happened - it just didn't seem right.   By the time we got around to drinking the coffee it was barely warm.    Then someone from an adjacent table who had heard the discussion was hovering over us telling a tale of her own but hers involved a list of items she might buy from the supermarket whereas Judy's list had been one of animals.   

It all happened when Judy was sent a reminder to apply for her driving license to be renewed as she was about to become an octogenarian - in fact she had planned a celebration party.  She needed a supporting medical certificate she told us which seemed simple enough but that was where the problem began because she was told she had to complete a test - a Cognitive Test which the nurse proceeded to give her.   The test seemed quite straightforward to begin with and she confidently believed that if she still remembered the Times Tables impressed upon her at that primary school in Opotiki all those years ago, all would be well.   She certainly knew which day of the week it was and the date and could even recite the months of the year backwards.  The list of thirty animals is where she fell down, she was quite confident of that.  And the address of someone she had never heard of who lived in a Wellington suburb had also tripped her up.   Nevertheless she had not expected to actually fail!   But fail she did and was now without a driving license which meant that future coffee meetings would have to be held much closer to where she lived in Meadowbank.    She added in a small, depressed voice that when she thought about the unpleasant incident she concluded that it had very little to do with driving and a great deal to do with discriminating against the elderly.   

Over the following weeks it was surprising how many similar relicensing horror stories were to be related in low voices by octogenarian applicants.  Such tales were rife in the ranks of local Probus and U3A members and even the library Book Club was not totally exempt.  The prevailing reaction was universally one of disbelief as those who had been found wanting enumerated the areas where their lives would now be altered - how would they get to Church on Sunday? - get to the supermarket? - visit the library?  It was all very well to advise them to use the buses, take an uber, organise a lift but it wasn't always possible.  George said glumly that he supposed staying at home from now on wasn't going to be the end of the world but it did rather seem that way;  he admitted that he had been a car owner since the age of eighteen and in fact had never boarded a bus in his life.  When he was growing up, he said, there had been no buses.   

And it did rather seem that in New Zealand, the oldest members of local communities were being singled out in a way that was likely to have a devastating effect upon their overall psychological well-being.   Raising the topic, somewhat tentatively on social media platforms Failure stories began to creep from every corner, invariably accompanied by feelings of humiliation and outrage, occasionally retold with humour.  Peter recalled that he had perhaps provoked his Examiner - when she requested that he draw a clock he had  done so after establishing whether she would prefer Arabic or Roman numerals.  

Overall the feeling amongst those who had failed to meet the grade was confusion and distress coupled with a degree of shame.   Several months spent at home watching afternoon TV did nothing to improve matters.  As one they agreed that it would have been far preferable to have re-sat the old fashioned driving test where three point turns and reversing around corners were the points of horror.   Judy, whose experience began this saga says at least it incorporated something concrete relating to the ability of the candidate to drive a vehicle.

I have to be honest because with a re-licensing of my own looming up I have become pre-occupied with repeating the months of the year backwards and listing four legged animals in the shortest time possible.   I've even added interesting choices to my list such as the Kinkajou and the Sloth just to try to make the task less monotonous.   My fervent hope though is that this side-lining and discrimination of the over eighties will before long be totally abandoned.  

  

  

The Fly in the Ointment

 There was a time when I was overwhelmingly attracted to the idea of becoming As One with the Beat Generation.  At that stage of my life achieving such a goal from the wastelands of industrial North Kent in the late 1950s seemed hopeless despite the fact that I had read Jack Kerouac's On The Road from cover to cover.

To be fair I had only the vaguest concept of what the Beat Generation was aiming for as a counter culture but I was aware that aligning myself with it would hopefully mean that I would become part of a movement that I was assured influenced literature, music and art.   I had made it my business to discover a little about Alan Ginsberg since I read somewhere that he and Kerouac were great friends.   However, all I really knew was that he was a poet and at seventeen years of age I was not yet familiar with his poetry except that he had recently written something called Howl, a portion of which I hoped to memorise.   I had already realised that there were times when quotes increased status - or it could simply have been that I had not so very long ago left Miss K Smith's Wombwell Hall Language & Literature class behind me.

I was spectacularly unsuccessful when it came to tracking down any Beat Generation Visual Art - as in paintings that were easy to relate to.  When cautiously investigating William S Burroughs, said to be another friend of Kerouac, I was relieved to find he was also a visual artist.  In the end I didn't have much luck familiarising myself with his work either but I did find The Naked Lunch relatively easy to read, if a little bewildering.

When I cautiously began to investigate the kind of music I should be listening to as a Beat devotee it was clear I would be safe enough with Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, neither of whom I particularly admired, but at least they were easily located if you tuned to the correct radio station.

Overall, lurching myself into what I saw at the time as an ultra-fashionable intellectual movement was more complicated than I had originally anticipated.  I felt I was trying to embrace a swirling chaos of societal rebellion that I wasn't quite ready for.  The open expression of sexuality was not quite the liberating force I had been promised.  I came rapidly to the conclusion that I needed to remain cosily repressed for a while longer.

You could say that in a small way the outer reaches of the fashion industry saved me from simply ditching the original plan;  by way of shoes - winklepickers in particular.   Daphne Davis who had I think at one time also been a Wombwell Hall girl, and who now certainly caught the 8.10 to Charing Cross from Monday to Friday, was observed on Platform 2, wearing a formidable pair of black winklepickers, the first I had seen in Gravesend.   She said she had bought them in a little shop in Covent Garden and gave me explicit instructions as to how to find the place.   Within days I became the proud owner of an identical pair although I had recoiled a little at the price, being more familiar with the footwear on offer and price range at Bata. 

When a short time later, fearlessly fashionable Daphne was seen wearing an impressively weathered duffel coat she revealed the whereabouts of what she described as an Army Surplus Store in the depths of Victoria.   I couldn't wait to descend upon the place and by the next Friday afternoon I had equipped myself with a similar garment.  It was refreshingly cheap and lasted for years, my brother inheriting it for bird-watching wear on the North Kent Marshes.   That was all in the future of course and over the next immediate months Daphne and I made very sure we did not sit too close to each other on the 8.10 train because to be brutally honest even we realised we looked rather like refugees from a strange post-war cult as far as our fellow passengers were concerned.  It was becoming clear that not a great many of our teenage peers had a similar yearning to join the Beat Generation.  I hesitantly began to wonder if I might be a trailblazer.

The problem seemed to be that rejecting societal norms to embrace rebellion was always going to be a problem whilst living in York Road, Northfleet.  The project had to be shelved until I could transfer my life to a London bedsitter.  In the interim I concentrated on absorbing as much of the language I would need for the future as possible and using it boldly.  Thus I tossed forth jargon such as ..... groovy .... square ...... dig it ....cool cat ......daddy oh .... with finesse and became a Saturday afternoon regular at the first coffee bar to open in Harmer Street where I was hopeful that my mastery of the lingo would earn me respect.

By the time I had added a black turtle neck sweater to my wardrobe and read Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse I was definitely beginning to see myself as an impressive independent thinker and had almost turned my attention towards the Hippie lifestyle which I was told was alive and well in the bed-sitters of West London if not yet glimpsed in Gravesend.   This also coincided with the demise of the winklepickers which to be honest had never been entirely comfortable.

It was a relief to abandon Ginsberg and his like, mostly because I had never felt entirely comfortable with the precepts and principles their disciples seemed to expect and the high level of debate demanded.    The ensuing Hippie lifestyle seemed a great deal more relaxing though I was assured that it had grown out of that which Kerouac and Ginsberg aspired to.

By the time I had moved to Notting Hill and acquired a bearded boyfriend called Adrian who had recently dropped out of University, I had decided that as far as any intellectual Bell Curve was concerned, I was barely on it, a D stream beginner in fact.   I now wore kaftans and beads and talked about being alienated from a London society that was dominated by materialism and repression.      I became interested in accessing spiritual guidance completely outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition and embarked upon a study of Astrology, spending hours in all night cafes observing the rather wonderful Ernest Page who seemed possessed of an uncanny knack of human perception.   It seemed an altogether far more relaxing lifestyle than that the Beat Generation had offered.

I might have been with them still if the Hippie Movement still existed had it not been for the wholesale acceptance and promotion of the recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs - marijuana and LSD in particular.   I was never entirely happy about this manner of expanding consciousness and so avoided indulging wherever possible.   In the final analysis it was my rejection of mind altering substances that led to me retreating further and further from what had initially seemed an idyllic lifestyle.    But as my mother would have pointed out, just when you think things are perfect, that's when you find the fly in the ointment!