TOM UTLEY: At 71, I'm mortified when people offer me a seat on the train... but I'm furious when they don't. That's growing old for you!
One of nine signs that we're growing old, I read somewhere this week, is a feeling of embarrassment when people start offering us their seats on buses and trains.
I should say at once that I can think of a great many more than nine signs of my increasing decrepitude, both physical and mental, as more than 50 years of chain-smoking and enthusiastic drinking begin to take their toll.
It's also true that in my home city of London, at least, it's extremely rare to see anyone giving up a seat for a fellow passenger these days, no matter how obviously ancient or frail the strap-hanging passenger may be.
On my Tube to work in Kensington, indeed, I'm often surrounded by parties of screeching schoolchildren, in the peak of health, occupying every seat in the carriage on their way to the museums of South Ken. Meanwhile, every adult has to stand – and that includes those who are burdened by old age, or encumbered with walking sticks or shopping.
I'm told this has something to do with official school-trip guidance to teachers on the precious little souls' health and safety. But to me it just looks like appalling manners.
It was very different in my childhood, I can tell you, when failing to stand for an adult was almost a capital offence.
Indeed, I still remember, with undying shame, an agonisingly embarrassing bus trip I took with my beloved godmother, Winnie, 60 long years ago when I had just turned 11.
With extraordinary generosity, she had sent me £2 for my birthday, and invited me up to London for the day (we lived in Kintbury, Berkshire, at the time), to spend it at Hamleys toy shop in Regent Street.
To the 11-year-old me, £2 – worth more than £36 today, according to the Bank of England's historical inflation index – was a sum beyond my wildest dreams, vastly more than I had ever possessed before. I fondly imagined I could now afford almost anything in Hamleys.
You'll have some idea of how rich I felt, when I tell that in those days my siblings and I received in pocket money one old penny a week for every year of our age. At 11, therefore, I received 11d a week (a fraction less than 5p) – which meant that £2 represented more than 43 weeks' worth of pocket money!
This would surely be more than enough, I reckoned, to buy the Scalextric set – all the rage among my boarding-school friends – on which I had set my heart.
But it wasn't enough. Not nearly. When we arrived at the Scalextric counter, the assistant told us that the basic set I fancied cost an unbelievable sum – as much as £10, if I remember rightly, which is worth nearly £180 today.
In the shock of that moment, I did something of which I'll be ashamed until my dying day. I burst into tears.
But it got worse. To shut me up, Winnie fished her chequebook from her handbag and bought the Scalextric set for me. I was mortified, begging her not to, and telling her I couldn't be more sorry for behaving like Violet Elizabeth Bott, the spoilt little girl in the Just William books.
As if this wasn't bad enough, then came the hideously embarrassing bus trip I mentioned earlier. When Winnie and I boarded, there were plenty of seats available, and we took a couple at the front on the lower deck, where I sat guiltily clutching the present I'd acquired through my disgustingly girly display.
But the bus filled up at the next stop, and I noticed an old woman standing next to me, clutching shopping bags and clearly in need of a seat. Every instinct told me I should leap up and offer her mine.
The trouble was that Winnie – herself in her 60s or 70s at the time, which seemed as old as the Parthenon to me – appeared not to have noticed the new arrival, and carried on telling me a long and convoluted story (I can't remember about what).
Where did my duty lie? Should I risk affronting my generous godmother, by cutting her off in the middle of her story to give up my seat? Or should I leave that other old lady standing, and reveal myself to Winnie as not only a cry-baby but a boorish lout?
Not knowing the etiquette, I sat frozen to my seat in horror and mortification for the rest of the journey, wishing I was anywhere but there.
Clearly, it was the wrong decision. Indeed, my recollection of my behaviour that day has never lost its power to bring a blush to my cheeks, in all the six decades that have passed since. Funny how these trivial incidents from our past come back to haunt us.
But I'm straying from my point about those signs of ageing. The fact is that at 71, I've now reached that time of life when once in a blue moon, even in London, a young person offers me a seat on a bus or a train.
When it happens, I always find it slightly embarrassing and hurtful to my pride (do I really look so feeble already?) – never more so than when my kind-hearted fellow passenger is a woman. But though I almost always decline the offer, just lately I've been known to accept it.
The paradox is that I now find it infuriating when I'm strap-hanging in a carriage full of fit men in their 20s and 30s who refuse to budge from their seats while we older folk stand and wilt.
Embarrassed when they offer. Angry when they don't. Ah, well, that's growing old for you.
As for the rest of those nine signs of ageing, I can tick quite a few. Yes, I ask them to turn down the music in restaurants when I can't hear myself speak, let alone anyone else – and, yes, I much prefer eating off proper plates to having my food served up on roof-tiles or slabs of wood.
I can also tick the box marked: 'You're baffled and smarting that your adult children don't trust you around their little bundles.'
For heaven's sake! Mrs U and I managed to bring up four healthy boys without any major mishap. Do we really need instructions on how best to look after our grandchildren?
As for railing against the injustices of the world when we watch the news, I must plead guilty to that one, too. Indeed, I had more than a few choice words to scream at the TV this week when our morally bankrupt House of Commons voted by that huge majority to decriminalise the murder of fully-formed unborn babies in the womb.
But surely you don't have to be old to feel aghast at that.
Meanwhile, scores of signs of ageing failed to make it on to this week's list. I'm thinking of the time I waste trudging upstairs to retrieve my specs from the bedroom, only to forget what I've come for when I get there.
Then there's reading a whodunnit almost all the way through, before suddenly realising, two pages from the end, that we know the answer because we've read it before.
But of course readers could add scores of their own, while I've left room for only one more.
OK, I admit it: a sure sign of ageing is rambling on about the good old days, when children by and large were more respectful of adults than they are today. My only excuse is that it's true.
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