Some manage to beat their chronological age into submission better than others. Exhibit A: the perpetually sinuous Mick Jagger, touring the United States and Canada at the age of 80 and still able to dance up a storm. The venerable Paul McCartney continues to leave audiences rapt.
But when you see Rupert Murdoch tying the knot for the fifth time at the age of 93, with a woman 26 years his junior, you have to assume he’s forgotten what’s written on his birth certificate. It’s terrific that Steven Spielberg is still making films in his late 70s, but was anyone really convinced by Harrison Ford stepping back into the action-man role at 80?
A Rolling Stone gathers no moss, even at 80.Credit: Paul R. Giunta/Invision/AP
Coupled with all this striving is the mania for ticking ever more weird and wonderful personal milestones off one’s bucket list. Last week my eye was caught by a BBC headline that read “Veteran finishes Everest marathon in citrus outfit”. I checked the date of the story to make sure it wasn’t reheated from April 1. It wasn’t. The intrepid Sally Orange, a former army major, had not only raced around the Everest circuit dressed as a lemon, but is said to have run a marathon on seven continents dressed as a vegetable or fruit. Now with that record, Sally is quite likely to make it into her 70s or 80s running marathons. And good on her. But you would have to say she is an outlier.
Far more depressing are the hordes of cashed-up strivers determined to round out life’s bingo card by getting to the top of Mount Everest – leaving a trail of refuse, human waste and, occasionally, bodies behind them. Nepalese authorities are reportedly trying to enforce new rules requiring climbers to carry at least eight kilograms of garbage when they come back down from the mountain, a small attempt to repair the damage wrought by these grimly labouring over-achievers. I do, however, have a sneaking admiration for 85-year-old Nepalese man Min Bahadur Sherchan, who died in 2017 while trying to regain his title as the oldest person to climb the sacred mountain.
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Finally (and I admit, provocatively), one has to ask why it’s usually the 60-something man coming to grief and not the 60-something woman. Dare one suggest that those 60-something men have more in common with their 14-year-old selves than the average mature-age woman has with her adolescent counterpart?
Deborah Snow is associate editor and special writer at The Sydney Morning Herald.
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