ALAN FRANKS:
By turning 60, as he did yesterday, the Prince of Wales is, of course, typical
of his generation. It is what has been happening these past 11 and a half
months to all his fellow baby-boomers who were born three years after the
end of the war. In another sense, however, his case is unlike any of his
contemporaries', and not just because he is Royal; his career is all
back-to-front, with the last few decades taken up in the passionate but
amateur pursuit of his interests - architecture, polo, organic farming - and
the real job, reigning, still to come through.
His situation is tragic-comic. He has been trained for a position that might
not fall vacant until he is 80, while his contemporaries look forward to
retirements with greater expectations than any previous generation. Their
health is rude and their awareness of it is at unprecedented levels. If ever
they smoked, they don't any more, at least not like they used to. If they
drank too much, they've probably taken action on that one too. Likewise
fatty food. No good digging in for a long third age if cholesterol, weight
and blood pressure are all over the odds.
Martyrs to hedonism
The ones who did not modify their behaviour in the light of raised levels of
health-consciousness are possibly dead, or getting there, unsung martyrs to
the hedonism of their youth. There is 60, and there are the Sixties, and to
be the one entails having lived through the other. Yet the resemblance
between the two is nominal, or numerical. Doing 60 properly means looking
soberly at your condition and its fitness for the still-long future. This
may be a practical means of prolonging your capacity for fun and leisure,
but it is also a violation of the instant gratification that amounted to a
creed for the young of that decade.
Who could blame them? For many, particularly the sons and daughters of the
consolidating middle class, everything was on offer. The war was over and
there were to be no more such eruptions in Europe in the course of their
lifetime to date; at least, none close enough to impinge on them. They were
the literal children of the National Health Service. Higher education was
expanding and you weren't even going to be lumbered with a loan that would
weigh you down into the foothills of your middle years. An unimagined window
of opportunity flew open between the arrival of the Pill and the coming of
Aids. You clambered through it as you would through the windows of a
fascinating and long-forbidden house.
Inside, everything was a splurge of colour and the best bands in the world
were playing. Some of them haven't stopped. Your parents' eyes were so
dimmed by the monochrome of austerity that they could not begin to envisage
it, although you could catch the most enlightened of them humming “When I'm
64”, and naturally getting it wrong. You did the Hippy Hippy Shake. They did
the Shaky Shaky Hip.
One of the most ardent self-images of the newly 60 has them as being far
closer, socially and emotionally, with their own adult young than was the
case in the previous generation. You see a version of this in the Royal
Family: Prince Charles is more au fait with the pressures on William and
Harry than Prince Philip ever was with him. Gordon Brown - still only 57,
it's true - doesn't sound quite right when he says he likes the Arctic
Monkeys, but you can see what he's up to.
The newly 60 have not lost the taste for partying (see panel). Not all of them
can afford to do it like Elton John, who threw a 400-guest bash at the
Cathedral Church of St John Divine in New York. But they use their
ingenuity, often to fulfil long-standing ambitions, such as an evening
defiantly devoted to the tango. One party I went to this year was crammed
with ageless wigged hippies obeying the Sixties motif of the invitation.
Parties like these are acknowledging the Big Six milestone, but they are
also thumbing their noses at it as it flashes by. At another a close friend
of mine sang a version of Little Eva's hit from that time, The Locomotion,
to the backing of his musician sons. But he had re-written the lyrics so
that the refrain became “Come on baby, do the Freedom Bus Pass.” It was such
a hit that I got him to do it at mine.
Those who are now 60 have rolled through half a century-plus like a mighty
wave, swelling first the maternity wards, then the schools and universities,
then the workplaces, the suburbs, the timeshares, the fitness clubs, and
then, ultimately - but not for a while yet, oh no - the old people's homes
and the cemeteries.
Old? Who said old? It's not a word you hear in Sixty Street. Very bad form to
use it. Five years ago there was this notion that 50 was the new 40. The
call was taken up by an advertising industry eager to tap grey spending
power, but it was eagerly echoed by the The Generation itself. At 60, they
don't so much claim as grudgingly admit to being the new 50. They would
rather it was still 40 because they remain greedy for youth. Youth was their
prerogative and they are not going to surrender it without a struggle.
Laudable in many ways, but potentially embarrassing too. Prince Charles's
contemporaries might be in the condition of denial that walks hand in hand
with indulgence. Age for them is the place where their mothers and fathers
lived, and perhaps still do. For it is now the lot of the 60-year-old to be
slung between parents of apparently infinite age and technically adult
children who stay at home for a similar infinity. Both categories go on in
this way partly because they can, but also because they have no choice.
Longevity and the economy are the respective causes.
The world is having the nerve to be passing from their control. Prince Charles
may not yet have attained the office of his destiny, but he is not entirely
alone. Hillary Clinton's failure to get the Democrat nomination was a bell
that sounded the passing of the Boomers' dominance. It has happened in our
own capital too, with Ken Livingstone, 63, being replaced by a Boristocracy
nearly 20 years younger. Quite right too, say Mr and Mrs Sixty, but, well,
damn it.
By having paid off their mortgage and drawing an earnings-related pension,
they might be recession-proof. But they might not be; if their future income
is derived from a defined contribution, or pension pot, it's looking
hazardous, stressful even. Whether gambling was a weakness of their youth or
not, they have now been turned into punters on a turbulent stock market.
There is a bitter poetic justice in it.
Still, the house price slump is not all bad news. Obviously you don't want the
value of your home to drop too humiliatingly; self-esteem is inconveniently
vulnerable to crashes in your financial worth. But it could bring the low
rungs of the market into your children's reach.
The spectre at the table
Nasty old Alzheimer's stalks the scene. Between them Mr and Mrs Sixty probably
have a parent who has been kept going for years by the care at Downview, but
who hasn't the faintest idea who anybody is. This is straining beyond
endurance the fairly new commonplace of a relationship with a parent that
stretches into your own late middle age. They see a spectre of their own
future and privately pray that someone will come up with a cure in the next
20 years.
After all, there's glucosamine for those joint pains that you thought only
other people got; now there are statins that will stop you getting heart
attacks. If things get sluggish downstairs, there are “apparently” those
little blue pills whose name you pretend to forget. Surely they can come up
with something, anything, to stop you going ga-ga and failing to recognise
yourself in the mirror. Surely it will be all right in the end. Won't it? It
always has been up to now.
YEAH, BABY - TEAR UP THE RULE BOOK - Lucia van der Post
Nicky Haslam, the interior designer, celebrated with a facelift. Stephen
Hawking went for learned discussions on warping spacetime and wormholes with
fellow cosmologists. Lady Annabel Astor (the mother of Mrs David Cameron)
sailed around the Aegean with 30 of her nearest and dearest in three yachts,
while Lord Lloyd-Webber celebrated twice - once with a house party for 40 of
his closest friends at his home in Majorca and more publicly with a
star-studded concert in Hyde Park.
Meanwhile the Prince of Wales, who was 60 yesterday, has celebrated with a
banquet at Buckingham Place (given by his mother) on Thursday for 170
guests, and a smaller party (organised by the Duchess of Cornwall, with Rod
Stewart singing free) for 60 family and friends at Highgrove tonight.
But it seems that when it comes to 60th birthday parties there are no rules.
The mood seems to be that you've made it this far, so it's to hell with
convention; you've earned the right to do it your way.Since 60 is the new 50
it's clear that the world - funds permitting - is still your oyster.
With luck, nobody's yet in a wheelchair and, as Johnny Roxborough of the party
and events organisers The Admirable Crichton, who has organised more 60th
birthday bashes than Nicky Haslam has been to, puts it: “It's almost like
the last hurrah. You're all still active enough to do something physical and
you've also worked out who your friends are so you don't have to ask a whole
lot of hangers-on, which is why 60th birthday parties are often smaller and
more intimate than the celebrations for 40th and 50ths.”
Roxborough is busy, as it happens, planning his very own 60th, which comes up
next May. He originally wanted a big bash but is now thinking of something
more low-key. “Instead of taking all my friends abroad [as he did for his
40th and 50th] we're going to have a tent in our wonderful garden in
Norfolk. I'd like to say that I was going to keep it simple, but I know it
will end up being exotic and glamorous and then we'll have drinks in our
barn, which will also be decorated and magical. We'll move to the tent for
dinner and back to the barn for dancing afterwards.”
But the charm of abroad, as he points out, is that however lavish or exotic
the celebrations they “aren't in anybody's face the way they would be back
home”. More importantly, the celebration abroad - whether in a Venetian
palazzo, a Rajasthani fort, a Mediterranean villa or (think of Sir Philip
Green's 55th at Soneva Fushi in the Maldives) an eco-spa - allows friends to
bond and share an experience. This seems to be key to the 60th birthday
bash. “People want to have an adventure with their friends or discover an
amazing new place together and get to know each other in a deeper way.”
Organisation is all. You can't, after all, just invite people to Rome and
leave them to mill around, waiting for their dinner. A whole new breed of
travel agents and party planners have grown fat on their ability to deliver
the essential surprises and the military-like battle plans these
celebrations require. Everything starts with the invitations. The aim is to
be different and inspiring. Sophie Lillingston of the party planner
Lillingston (www.lillingston.co.uk) has sent them out in the shape of
artists' palettes (friends had to paint a reply), flip-flops (for a
beachside party), miniature orange trees (a three-day bonanza in Majorca)
and olive trees (a Grecian idyll).
Now the world seems like a different place. Lavish is not going to be the
catchword. One of Lillingston's clients was pondering what to do for her
“big O” and she finally came to the conclusion that instead of a great big
bash for all their friends where she wouldn't be able to have a proper
conversation with any of them, she would have a dinner party a month for the
whole year. The numbers were between ten and 16 each time and on each
evening there was a different theme and a different chef.
Perhaps the classiest thing of all, though, is to do what Lady Helen Hamlyn
did when her husband, Sir Paul Hamlyn, turned 60. She took over the Royal
Opera House for a night and filled it with people who had never seen an
opera or a ballet before. He was so thrilled by his present that he decided
to go on funding Hamlyn nights for the next 20 years and now more than
200,000 people have had their eyes and ears opened to the wonders of music
and dance. And one other thing: invitations for 60th birthday parties should
always say “no presents”. Anything else is naff.
AS TIME GOES BY
2.2bn Number of times your heart will have beaten by the time you are
60
1.5m The average number of hairs you will have moulted
6,570 Number of days spent sleeping
2.16 Number of metres your nails would have grown if you had never cut
them
NADIA GHANI
Thanks to the tyranny of 'cool' that arrived in the 1960s, we weren't allowed to be young in our own individual way. Now it seems we aren't going to be allowed to be old either. I'm 58. Personally I shall demand to be O-L-D. I shall embrace age's dignity, its white hair, its cardigan and slippers.
Steve, Evesham, UK
Unlike our parents' generation, a contributing factor to our surviving in large numbers, other than being born in large numbers, is that we never had to fight a world war in which we might have perished in large numbers. Aren't we just the Cat's Whiskers?
George Strelnitz, Central, Hong kong
You think the fifties went fast..each decade goes faster and faster...Slow down the clock...I want to have a lot of fun yet.
Carol Stanley, NEWPORT, USA
any way,happy birthday your royal highness
ali, cairo, UAE