Another view of 70- and 80-somethings

My last post was about the difficulty of getting used to dramatic changes in our appearance in our seventies and eighties. Thank you for your comments, my friends: so it’s not just me who is struggling with identity problems at 76?

I can’t resist posting this photograph of my friend and role model Sunny Amey on the left and the heroine of my novel, Fixing Mrs Philpott, on the right. Sunny is probably about 86 (ages are so forgettable).  She is wise, brilliant, naughty, witty, and always and forever her inimitable self. By contrast, that Mrs Philpott really is stuck in the past. She inhabits a fantasy world where there is no need ever for rudeness, which she abhors.

That’s Sunny splitting her sides with laughter, and Mrs Philpott expressing her prim disapproval of the speech that Sunny made in praise of the author, Rachel McAlpine. She also insists that the novel, which is fiction, and therefore not true, is not rude as in 50 Shades of Grey, but more like 31 Shades of Salmon Pink—much nicer.

If that’s not an identity problem, I don’t know what is. And that’s not the half of it.