The question
What scares you about getting older?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Getting older doesn’t scare me.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 December 2024 source ↗
Instead of saying, “I tripped up”, you have to use the words, “I had a fall.”
Pain and loneliness.
I was looking at ageing in action, in black-and-white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved. My 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischaemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white matter hyperintensities – there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point on it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.
Certainly not. As a young child, I remember just dreaming about the Nobel Prize, but that was just a dream. It’s not something I would have ever thought was possible for me.
My dad, because he died before I could say goodbye.
Somewhat disconcerting, but not unpleasant.
A ban on music in restaurants.
My local Tesco stopping stocking Häagen-Dazs Peanut Butter Crunch.
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, which was one of the set texts for my English literature A-level. I have almost finished it.
That rather assumes I have grown up.
Peter Sarsgaard, Marina Abramović, Juliet Stevenson, Kurt Vonnegut, Milton Jones, Margaret Atwood
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