Dear Geraldine

I turned seventy last month, and I find I have strong opinions about it, none of them printable in a family newsletter.

I taught mathematics for thirty-eight years, and I am accustomed to things adding up. So you will understand my irritation at a body that no longer does. I can walk to Lanston and back without so much as a wheeze, yet I stood in my kitchen last Tuesday defeated by a jar of marmalade, reduced to running it under the hot tap like a man defusing a bomb. I sleep for an hour after lunch without meaning to and lie awake at three in the morning instead, doing the crossword by torchlight. And my palate has apparently been swapped for someone else’s. I crave sardines. I crave spinach. As a boy I would have gone to bed hungry sooner than touch either.

I still take on a little private tuition—two boys and a girl, GCSE level—not because I enjoy it particularly anymore, if I’m honest, but because I’ve a horror of what might happen to my mind if I let the numbers go quiet. I look at these children, baffled by simultaneous equations, and I think: at least I still know this. At least this much still adds up.

My father became a difficult, silent man in his seventies. My grandfather was worse. I remember being warned, as a boy, to tread carefully around Dad after four in the afternoon. I don’t want to become the man nobody wants to visit after lunch. But I feel the grumpiness gathering, Geraldine, the way my joints feel a change in the weather.

You, on the other hand, seem to sail through the whole business—age, illness, and whatever indignity presents itself next—without once appearing defeated by it. I watched you at the market stall last month, laughing with Mina Goodacre as though you hadn’t a care in creation. I don’t understand how you do it, and I would very much like to know your secret. Not spells. Not Work. I want no mumbo jumbo.

Yours, arithmetically defeated,

Mr Crumbly

Dear Mr Crumbly,

Let’s deal with the marmalade first, because it’s the easiest thing in your letter and the least important. Buy the jars with the flip-top lids. Life is too short (a phrase which, at seventy, carries rather more weight than it used to) to wrestle a jar for your breakfast toast.

Now. The rest of it.

You’ve written to me about sardines and sleep and sluggish afternoons, but what you’re actually telling me is that your body has started sending you memos about your mortality, and you don’t much like the tone. That’s not vanity, and it isn’t weakness. It would be strange if it didn’t rattle you. I’d be more worried about a seventy-year-old who felt nothing at all.

I won’t pretend I sailed through life. What you saw at the market stall wasn’t a woman who’d made peace with getting older. It was a woman who’d decided that being frightened and being finished are two entirely different things, and that only one of them was actually true. That’s not a secret. It’s just an argument I have with myself, repeatedly, and mostly win.

As for your father and grandfather, I’d gently suggest they weren’t ruined by seventy. They were ruined by refusing to let seventy change them for the better as well as the worse. There’s a particular kind of man who treats every new limitation as an insult to be avenged on whoever’s nearest, generally over the Sunday roast. You’ve noticed the pattern in yourself, which already puts you streets ahead of both of them. Noticing is nine-tenths of not becoming.

I’d also gently poke at those tutoring sessions, if I may. You’re teaching two boys and a girl not because you love it anymore, by your own admission, but to prove to yourself the numbers still work. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, but a man who teaches from fear rather than pleasure will eventually resent the pupils for it, and they’ll feel that resentment whether you mean them to or not. Find one thing (just one) that you still do purely because you want to, not because you’re afraid of what happens if you stop.

The truth about seventy, as far as I can tell, is that it hands you a body that keeps different hours, wants different food, and occasionally holds you hostage over a jar of preserves. It asks you, repeatedly, whether you’re going to let any of that decide who you are. Mine decided to keep laughing with Mina at the market stall. Yours could decide to actually enjoy those afternoons with simultaneous equations, sardines and all.

Yours, still doing the sums,

Geraldine