Celebrated author, journalist and broadcaster, Joan Bakewell introduced her talk (at the Rye Arts Festival on September 28) by saying: “I’m getting near the end, and I’m just about the oldest person I know . . . I watch television with the subtitles on and I’m held together with bits of metal”.
In this light amusing vein, she entertained her decidedly elderly audience, pointing up the gains and losses of what she called her “harvest years”. Skating around infirmity, and how one is regarded by the younger generations, one could stake a claim to wisdom, tolerance and experience. These for her were not by any means declining years: “the passing of the day is as exciting as when you are in your twenties”, she averred.
“What are the things we have lost? – handwriting, hats and gloves – essential items on reporting on one’s first day working at the BBC. What else has changed? – sex, the status of women, the nucleus of family life. The days when the pregnant unmarried daughter was thrown out of the family home have gone together with a load of hypocrisy and male domination”.
On what advice to give to the young, Joan Bakewell was absolutely positive: “create your own agenda, find a niche to enjoy what you are doing, listen to your own small voice and find the strength to follow your own path”. She never needed to be part of a hierarchy and realised that the pursuit of promotion, material wealth and power “are deeply flawed rewards”. She scorned too the abundance of gratification, the excess of choice instantly available. “We are being loaded with information input, we are becoming virtual robots, responding to some kind of hunger”, she said.
“What about all those usual comforts of old age, the family photographs, the favourite recordings?”, someone asked. Her answer came in a flash: “the moment I’ve snuffed it, my children will put them all in the bin”.
This blend of humour, realism, and yes the sense of the whole person came across in her zest for life, encapsulated in the title of her new book “Stop the Clocks”.
Photo: Kenneth Bird