On ageing

My dear friend Het sent me a link to an interesting article this week about maintaining your cognitive abilities as you age -

https://verycryptocurrency.substack.com/p/neuroscientists-studying-cognitive?r=77padt&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true 

which was both interesting and challenging. It’s worth reading. The gist of it is that it’s not doing puzzles and word games that keeps your brain cells sprightly as you age, it’s challenging your brain in unfamiliar ways. Here’s a section of the piece:

I found it very convincing. Look at David Attenborough and David Hockney as two examples.

Het is currently learning Cornish and it’s a struggle, so she’s doing OK in the challenge stakes, but what am I doing? 

She was very encouraging: “I think grappling with a blank canvas and engaging with all the micro-decisions involved in completing a painting” counts. Everyone should have a friend like Het.

But painting aside, I obviously need to engage in more such challenges. For one thing I need to stop watching reruns of favourite TV programmes, such as Call the Midwife. But while we’re on the subject, I really think Trixie should have stuck with the lovely dentist. The man she ended up marrying was such a dud. What’s his name? Don’t you think?

I cut Dave’s hair yesterday, and while bemoaning his receding hairline and thinning crown, he suggested that at the age of 40 you should be given a choice as to which signs of youth you would be able to retain as you got older. He’d like to keep the whites of his eyes white, and not to have hairs growing in his nose. I’d like my two front teeth, top and bottom, not to show the signs of tea and coffee drinking, as they do, and I’d also like my eyelashes back. Oh yes, and the whites of my eyes.

This is me at the age of 38

Now:

See the teeth?

A dentist once told me that if you drink your coffee and tea through a straw it helps. Hmm. 

Garrison Keillor is a good example of happy ageing. In one of his recent pieces he talks about appreciating summer days much more than he did when young - ignoring the newspaper -  “a catalogue of decline, despair and dereliction” - and going for  a walk in Central Park.  I feel the same. On one of my favourite walks above the village this week, I stopped and lay down in the buttercups and looked at the blue sky for a while - it was all so beautiful.

A Mary Oliver poem…