picton

I used to think that one had to always behave very properly and correctly in front of old people, to the point of hypocrisy. I suppose I thought that after some undefined age, people stopped being fun and having lives and turned into boring and conservative monsters. However, since I started travelling with older people I have understood how totally wrong I was. Take alcohol for example.
Old people can drink, and they have no inhibitions about when and where they choose to get totally plastered. They have no problems taking me off to a vineyard for wine testing at 10am and proceeding to drink excessively before lunch. “what the fuck do I care?” asked Suzanne (age 85) “I can get drunk, eat loads, and if I fall asleep, everyone will just think it is because I am old!” Suzanne is amazing. She qualified as a medical doctor at a time when few women were going to university at all, and has an incredibly sharp tongue. The other morning I asked her how she was doing and she answered “terrible, I am old and decrepit, how the fuck do you think I feel?” It is refreshing to get honest answers to routine questions.
But back to the vineyard, we went through all the steps of seeing how wine is made, and then moved on to the sampling. Four glasses later, they brought out huge quantities of food, so we could see how the wine went with different tastes, although my mouth had already lost all sensitivity to nuance. But I sat there and still tried to behave correctly. Suzanne through her glass in the air and smashed it against a wall. Another old man got up to dance. None of them gave a toss about what anyone thought. I suppose this is the privilege of being old.