I was struck by the difference between her and other 80-somethings I know: by her physical wellbeing (although she is losing her sight), her mental agility and general sparkiness, as well as how amazing she looks.
Barry Norman, who conducted the Radio Times interview (and who is himself 81), brought up the subject of aging:
She will be 80 this month, but when I mentioned it she got quite upset. “No, steady! The moment you say an age, people think bath chairs and sitting with your feet up. They say, ‘Take it easy.’ Why do they say that?
“The worst thing you can possibly do is stick somebody in a room in front of the television and not speak to them. No stimulus at all – not a jigsaw, not a game of cards, not a nice dog to cuddle. People immediately associate old age with infirmity. They say, ‘Oh, you must take it easy,’ and I think, ‘Get off!’ I don’t mind people being helpful, because I can’t see very well [she has macular degeneration] but I don’t want them to help me.”So is Judi the exception that proves the rule that old age equals infirmity? Almost as an afterthought, my dad handed me a book as I was heading back to Leicester after Christmas. Called Coming Up Trumps, it's the memoir of Baroness Trumpington, a rather astonishing woman who I'd heard interviewed on Radio 4's Midweek back in April. It reads like a cross between PG Wodehouse and Forest Gump but with (slightly) more swearing. I read it in two sittings over two days.
Born Jean Campbell-Harris to an army officer and his American heiress wife, she grew up in privilege before her family lost everything during the Wall Street Crash. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war and in Madison Avenue (of Mad Men fame) in the fifties before marrying an Eton master. She was Mayor of Cambridge before being made a Conservative peer by Mrs Thatcher at the age of 58, becoming first a health and then a agriculture minister. At the age of 92 she still attends the House of Lords whenever it's sitting. The list of people she's met - and the circumstances under which she met them - is genuinely astonishing.
Towards the end of the book, she mentions that she was featured in a Channel 4 documentary about six women in their seventies and eighties, Fabulous Fashionistas, which I had, co-incidentally, stumbled across on 4od but never got round to watching. So watch I did. I'll be honest - I'm not sure why she was included in a programme about clothes, but it was interesting to see her interviewed.
But even more interestingly, it meant I stumbled across five other older women who are defying the stereotype of age equalling infirmity, including Gillian Lynne, 87, choreographer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, who still works full time.
So are these women exceptions? Is their collective unwillingness to retire about vanity? Money? A desire to stay young? Or are they living lives that are stimulating and inspiring, surrounded by interesting people and new opportunities? Are they, or their circumstances, fundamentally different to those of the eighty-somethings I know?
One of the things that struck me was that all these women (including the ones I haven't named) has the ability to embrace change, to roll with the punches of life. Each has suffered significant loss. Almost all has had some kind of second wind in the second half of their lives - as the oldest female minister at 69, as a shop assistant at 71, as an Oscar-winning film star at 62. Clearly it helps that they've all enjoyed good health - consider today's news that most types of cancer can be put down to bad luck. But to what extent is it significant that they have chosen - and they do appear to have chosen - not to succumb to the pervasive social stereotype that old age means infirmity?
I'm really grateful to have stumbled across these women at this point in my life - perhaps over the course of this year they'll inspire a new perspective on the big 40...
