RULE TO BREAK
“Respect the elderly”
I can clearly remember being told, when I was a boy, to ‘respect the elderly’. I couldn’t see why, to be honest, except because I was likely to get a belt round the ear if I didn’t. Old people seemed to me to be out of touch, inflexible and in many cases cantankerous old stick-in-the-muds.
Looking back, I think a lot of the problem was that expression, ‘the elderly’. It bundled everyone over the age of, oh, I should say around 40 from my childish perspective, into one homogeneous mass. One grey-haired, humbug-sucking, whingeing collective of people, all burbling on about how it wasn’t like this in their day.
Of course I didn’t include my grandparents in this. I knew them personally, and they weren’t like that. ...
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