. . . and also at peace with me blogging about this fact. Yesterday Sarada was sixty-four, also known as five dozen and four or exactly four times sixteen, in years. Consequently the Beatles song has been going through my head all day and I can also remember my maternal grandparents reaching that age and thinking of that same song. I was five at the time, and also at the time the Beatles were a recent memory for most people in this country, since it was 1973. ‘Sergeant Pepper’ had been issued only six years previously. I remember my grandfather growing vegetables in his back garden and hence “digging the garden, doing the weeds” stuck in my head, and I have a persistent memory of him sticking a gardening fork into the soil in Barming, a suburb of Maidstone. Since we are fairly vainly trying to address the garden situation, this also strikes a chord today.
My abiding memory of my grandparents, only three of whom I met, was that they were very old. Nonetheless in my earliest recollection, the maternal pair weren’t even sixty yet. Being the memories of a small child, this is hardly surprising but I also think people age more slowly today, as a rule, than they used to. I’ll rephrase that. Middle class White people in richer countries age more slowly today than they used to. It’s said, for example, that “sixty is the new forty”, in which case sixty-four is approximately the new forty-three, and since life begins at forty, Sarada’s life has only just begun. She’s also taken great care of her health, and this has contributed to her apparently very slow ageing.
At this point I should mention two related facts. Sarada’s birthday is only three days after our wedding anniversary, and I am a decade younger than her. This means we have an odd two days between the two events I never know what to do with. We also got married twice, so in fact the wedding anniversary we celebrate is the day after we went to the register office. We think of the second one, in the Friends’ Meeting House as a venue since at the time neither of us were Quakers, as the real one. I would also say that my attitude to marriage is reflected in this double event, since there is the legal institution of marriage or civil partnership and the more emotional and intimate, though public, ritual of a wedding. It’s a misrepresentation of my beliefs to say that I don’t believe in marriage. I actually believe that if two people choose to signal their commitment publically, in a ceremonial way, nobody should stand in their way, but this is not to be considered the way for everyone to go, and that there needs to be some kind of legal framework for a variety of issues such as custody, next of kin and probate which means that civil partnerships should also exist, given that there should be laws at all. This, as I see it, is reflected in our own double marriage. We made a legal agreement in the Register Office, but the real marriage is about Us and was performed in a secular ceremony a day later.
The decade difference in our ages means that I have been married for just over half my life for the past three years or so, but Sarada has not (yet) been married for half her life. I would say the age difference currently makes little difference, but to some extent I suspect the generational difference is significant, though not necessarily a bad thing. I’m a Gen-Xer but Sarada is in the little-known and little-considered Generation Jones. Since this is often ignored, I’m going to go into some depth as to what this means.
Most people are familiar with both the Baby Boomers and Generation X, but there’s a tendency to ignore the fact that the period between the end of the Second World War and 1965, the supposèd start of Generation X, is twenty years. This does make sense to an extent because it’s close to the time taken for children to be born, grow up and have their own children, and it shows up in the demographics. There’s a peak in population growth in 1946 and another smoother one in the late 1960s, into which I was myself of course born. However, there’s also a lull between the two, meaning that there is a distinct set of influences and experiences for people who are born between those two peaks, and Sarada was born near the halfway point between them. Therefore, if anyone is Generation Jones, it’s her. The word “Jones” has several overtones. It refers to “jonesing”, or craving after something, to “keeping up with the Joneses” (ironically, my next door neighbours as a child were called Jones but they didn’t try to keep up with us, unlike the previous neighbours), and to being anonymous, since Jones is a common surname. This last refers to their tendency to be, and to feel, ignored. They live after the peak. Lots of the cool kids did their thing, after which they hankered, and they then collide with the experience of being of an age group “after it was cool”, so for example there might be the perception of a load of swinging stuff happening in the West End which they are just a bit young to be part of, and this goes on throughout their lives. Now, for example, there’s the issue of pensions for older women in Generation Jones due to the movement of the female retirement age, and yet again they miss out. Their parents were not usually adult during the Second World War, although this isn’t true of Sarada’s father. It’s also notable that both we Gen X-ers and the Baby Boomers get a lot more attention than them because there are more of us and we tend to be better known and perhaps caricatured. They weren’t even named until 1999, whereas the Boomers were called that by 1950 and Generation X, weirdly, was coined in the early ’50s but the term was first used to refer to us lot in 1983. Hence I was fifteen or sixteen when my generation was first named, Boomers were only four or five, but Sarada’s generation didn’t get named until she was forty-two, another sign that their identity and distinctiveness stayed unrecognised for a long time. The very unfamiliarity of the term is significant.
Jonesers were children in the ’60s, and may have grown up with that idealism around them although it must be remembered that the clichés of that decade are not entirely accurate. In the ’70s, they were hit by economic decline and therefore disillusionment and cynicism, although Sarada is far less cynical than I am. They also tend to be less focussed on monetary gain than the generations on either side, and due to the economic difficulties of their young adulthood, they tend to have experienced deferred plans due to lack of resources in early adulthood. Therefore they tend to desire intensely to live out the ideals of their early lives, which seem to have been postponed repeatedly. There are also a lot of Jonesers because they tend to be younger siblings, and although the boom was over and the second boom had yet to occur, the trough of fewer births was very protracted and ultimately added up to more than either of the others.
I can see how a lot of this applies to Sarada’s life and those of her peers, but this may be like looking at a horoscope and picking out patterns which are there but over-emphasised. She is, however, atypical in a number of ways. Unlike many other Jonesers, she’s the eldest child of her family, and again unlike many others, her father served in the War. I feel I can’t comment on the rest because I’m not her, but she would of course be more than welcome to type a massive long wall of text as is more typical of me at the bottom of this post contradicting me on every point.
The main significance of our age difference is that we’re from different generations rather than our age as such. We’re both of an age where we did O-levels and got student grants, or at least our peers did, and early adulthood was also influenced by high levels of unemployment. However, there are also a lot of differences in our formative experiences, in particular in the area of popular culture such as music, but as we’ve often said, the gulf between music for the generation before the Boomers, the Silent Generation, and the consecutive generations after it is more significant than anything which has happened since in that respect. I do think, however, that we’re both of a time when it was still thought possible to change the world with music, whereas more recent music might be seen as artistically significant but not as particularly political on the whole. I have never had a relationship with someone close to my age, so in a way I don’t know what I’m missing.
Our atypicalities bring us closer, I think. This post isn’t primarily about me, but the combination of my parents’ age and the nature of my memory and cognitive development as a child means that I diverge from a typical Generation X person in a number of ways. My parents are of the Silent Generation, as are Sarada’s. They also tended to be late adopters and consequently I grew up in a world of reel-to-reel tape recorders, black and white telly, mono gramophones and Morris Minors even though this was quite anachronistic. I also inherited some of the stuff from my father’s previous marriage and my elder brother, born in 1959, so for example I read a lot of ‘Look And Learn’ and ‘National Geographics’ from the 1960s and listened to ‘Telstar’ on the record player, which incidentally I called a “gramophone”. We used a valve-based radio and didn’t get a telephone until late 1975. My bike was made in 1929. These are not so much significant in themselves as markers of my parents’ membership of a different generation than my age suggests. Other things are, of course, more of a leveller, such as schooling, pop music and so on. My father was thirty-eight when I was born and my mother thirty-four. If their mean age had been twenty-five when I was born, which was actually probably a bit older than average for their generation, I would’ve been born in 1956. I am, like Sarada, an eldest child although for me that means eldest biological child as I have two elder siblings. The other significant factor is that my cognitive development, though not my emotional development, was unusually fast, to the extent that I was reading up on nuclear physics and molecular biology at the age of seven, and my recall of the 1970s and even the late ’60s seems to be better than might be expected. Consequently there are ways in which Sarada and I did live in the same world when we were younger.
There’s a common breakdown of lifespan psychology which I’ve long felt raises more questions than answers. First of all, we have the mid-life and quarter-life crises. The first of these has largely been discredited. Many people, unsurprisingly, do experience adjustment difficulties associated with changes in their lives, such as separation or redundancy, but these are often perceived by those who have gone through them as the most significant life changes and are not particularly associated with age, and mid-life crises insofar as they do exist tend to apply more to men than women. Women experience the menopause, empty nest and the sandwich effect of caring for both parents and children, but generally manage, or perhaps are not given the choice but to manage, these things without them being acknowledged as “crises”. I would imagine empty nest syndrome affects most parents regardless of gender.
Just on the subject of family, there is a particular feature of our nuclear family which is noteworthy here: of the four of us there is only one person who is not an eldest child. Both Sarada and I are eldest children, as is, obviously, our own eldest, but our other child clearly isn’t and that has consequences for us, although I just mention that in passing. Both of my parents are also eldest children.
Back to the idea of life stages. I can’t remember which stages are said to occur during adulthood unless I go back to Shakespeare’s seven ages, but found them hard to accept because each seemed to have a choice of two outcomes at the end, which led me to expect them to bifurcate, but in fact the next stage was seen as proceeding from the previous one regardless of outcome. This has led me to doubt the whole idea. That said, there is, as Chrissie Hynde sang, “the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone who’s grown old”. I don’t think of Sarada as by any means old, although we are grandparents. It’s possible to be a grandparent at thirty though, so being a grandparent needn’t mean you’re old and it doesn’t even make you old. In a way it might even help make you younger, as you usually connect with someone of the youngest generation.
One effect of us both ageing, as is universal, is that the relative difference in our ages shrinks. When we married, Sarada was 13 146 days old and I was 9448 days old, making her 39% older than I. Today she’s 23 376 days old and I’m 19 678, meaning she’s now a little under 19% older. I think the main issues in relationships with age differences, probably larger than ours, are at the beginning of adulthood and in old age. The earlier end is obvious, but at the later end there may be an issue of one partner becoming the other’s carer, although this can happen both the other way round and at a different time of life even where there’s only a small age gap.
There are also other aspects to the number sixty-four which have nothing to do with the Beatles or life stages. It’s a round number from a hexadecimal, octal and binary perspective. Sarada is an exact multiple of sixteen years from her birth, so her life so far could be divided into four quarters. Our children were born in the third of these. It’s the number of different codons in the genetic code, although there’s a lot of redundancy in it. It’s the number of “layers” arrow notation has to be extended to to express Graham’s number, which is so large that if you tried to conceive of it your brain would literally become a black hole and collapse in on itself. It’s the smallest number with seven factors, all of which are powers of two.
On Uranus, like most of us, Sarada would be less than a year old. On Saturn, she’d be two, on Jupiter five, on Mars thirty-four, on Venus almost 104 and on Mercury 265. It might be nice to have more birthdays, but perhaps not four a year, and it might also be nice to be younger in planetary years. There are so many animals whose lifespan is around a year, so maybe we should all live on Uranus. In dog years, Sarada is now 448, except that in reality the lives of most mammals can’t be directly converted to ours due to the fact that we have long childhoods and also extended lives after our child-bearing and more intensively parenting years, meaning that the number of dog years to human is greater when they’re puppies and there is in a way no age corresponding to our post-menopausal stage at all. Then there are other species who are predominantly larval with a brief adult phase used to reproduce at the ends of their lives such as mayflies, who may have a three-year larval phase followed by a five-hour adulthood. For three score years and ten, and assuming adulthood at eighteen, a mayfly larva’s year is six of ours, but a mayfly adult’s hour is more like a human adult’s decade or even longer.
Then again, maybe there are Sarada years. I always tell her she looks about thirty, and to me she does. She definitely looks younger, as she has just observed, than Mary Beard, who is sixty-six apparently. That’s all I have to say really.
A Box Of Chocolates 