future oldies

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When I was a nipper, old people were a bit freaky. They had wrinkles and curly grey hair. They smelt of compact powder, lipstick and lavender. Their teeth came out at night and slept in a glass beside the bed. When they drank tea it was always poured from a teapot into a teacup, and there were always biscuits to go with it. Rich Tea, Digestive or - if they were old people with a slightly better pension - Custard Creams or Iced Fancies. Yum. They dressed appropriately. Shirt and trousers for the gentlemen and pretty floral dresses for the ladies. Fancy doilies protected furniture from damage. They tended to only buy what they could afford and joined each other on coaches that took them to exotic foreign lands. If a man had a {crude} tattoo you knew he had been in the Navy and had a plethora of illegitimate children wandering the earth. But times change. And this change is good. Granny doesn't sit in her rocking chair, knitting booties all day. Grandad isn't now the grumpy old man in the corner who just watches cricket all day whilst smoking a pipe. Today's oldies are more modern. They are younger in their outlook, and they don't let society mould them into a ball of boring grey fluff. And will this be true of future oldies? I have a fear that fifty years from now the older generation is going to be a trifle ... odd? They'll all be listening to really loud music, not because they have a need to impress, but because they have no choice after all those years of ear damage from loud music when they were trying to impress. Their communication will be completely via technology and they will be living their lives through photography and video. Not only that, but their ears will be saggy where they stretched them, and their tattoos - which once looked beautiful on smooth young skin - will now look scraggy and terribly faded. Their formal written communication will be like the text-speak they mastered as teenagers and they'll spend their days grumbling about how the youth of today have such an easy life, with their technology and their opportunities and their sense of entitlement ... we had to get a bus to school, none of this teleportation business, they will moan. But their teeth will be beautiful.