Perhaps there are more elderly Londoners in my part of the city than there used to be. Perhaps I’m just noticing them more for some reason we’ll get on to. I noticed one a while back I won’t forget. She had one foot (or was it both?) encased in some sort of medical support and her legs were wrapped in bandages. She walked with a stick, just about. She was out on her own and wanted to cross the wide, busy, fast-moving road. Only pity was going to make that possible – the pity of motorists, encouraged, perhaps, by the pity of a passer-by.
“Do you need any help?”A stupid question, but necessary – it gave her the option of telling me to get lost. That didn’t happen, and soon I had one hand holding her arm through the sleeve of a well-worn winter coat and the other raised aloft like a traffic cop, trusting that the pair of us wouldn’t get mown down together – double death in Lower Clapton, shock. It worked. On the other side, I helped the lady to the bus stop that had been her distant goal. Would she be all right now? Yes she would, came her tiny reply. Yes, she knew where she was going. Yes, she would be fine.
Feed that fragment of another life into your imagination and form a mental picture of unrelieved fragility, vulnerability, discomfort and just sheer slowness – slowness about doing even the simplest things until, one day, it stops. And all around, the vast, fast city hurries on.
Londoners do care, though. Sometimes they care when you would sooner they did not. A sweet young woman once offered me her seat on the Overground. I was baffled. Did I look ill? “I try to be considerate to elders,” she explained after I had gently declined. She seemed a bit embarrassed, which I regret. My priority at the time had been concealing how crestfallen I was.
That was a couple of years back, an isolated incident. But twice this month female strangers have addressed me as “my love”. The first was serving at a café in Bloomsbury. The second, a bit younger and in charge of two or three children, I encountered at the entrance of a corner shop in Leyton. Had I looked incapable of choosing what I wanted for my lunch? Did I appear unable to cope with briefly being blocked en route to purchasing a Magnum Classic?
I suppose it showed that cared. And there’s more of that stuff to come. How much more depends partly on a Freedom Pass holder’s health and beauty regime and partly on how many years he or she lasts. You start to think ahead in backwards milestones. How long before more people overtake you as you walk down the pavement than you overtake? How long before you can’t run for the Number 56? How long before London starts to feel, as it never has before, like the wrong place to be living at your age? All things considered, not for a while.
Follow John Vane on X/Twitter. Buy his London novel Frightgeist here or here. John Vane is the pen name of On London founder, publisher and editor Dave Hill.