WORDPRRSS SHUT ME out of my own blog on laptop asking for a decade-old passwornd. I could not get the ‘title’ page to write on.
I found, however, that the WP app on my smartphone enabled me to keep writing. I could resume the blog; I felt I was really ‘unstoppable’.
It was a miracle of technology and though too old to master it, I clung to it desperately.
Writing on phone in a train or plane with auto-‘correct’ changing correct words into meaningless gibberish, has however added to the problems of failing sight and memory.
Though I found quite a few blogs written in poor language and with mistakes of grammar, too many typos in my posts worried me. After all I lived for the last 60 years on writing.
But along with technology habits also changed. Reading has beome out of fashion and Google the repository of all knowledge. S
o you need not have any background or information. You just Google for it when needed.
It all comes back to the basic issue of old, outdated, worn-out brains still thinking they have some knowledge (from just being alive for too long, which they confuse with experience) to pass on to the new generation.
It is not easy for ‘old foggies’ to accept the truth that it is no virtue in being ‘unstoppale‘ just by being alive just on borrowed time, having ‘outlived their utility‘, an expression one of my ex-editors was fond of (and which, I argued then, meant it was time for them to die).
He was right. And luckily he is dead.
I am not that lucky..
When you are over 70 ( unstoppable or not), old age and death never cease to be on your horizon. Your eyes drift to the obituary column involuntarily. Some put up a cheery facade and hide those thoughts. Others like me plan a book like ‘THE OUTHOUSE ON THE FIRST FLOOR – Coming of (Old)Age in India‘ only to abandon it as no one takes it seriously.
The first confrontation a working person has with old age is retirement.