WEEKEND COLUMNISTS I am not ageist. I have friends and colleagues older and younger than me, and their age has no effect on my hiring decisions, firing decisions, or on how much I seek or enjoy their company. It is true that as the years go by I prefer the company of ever-older men, and these days anyone asking me out for lunch or dinner has to be pretty well starting their seventh decade before they are likely to be interesting enough for me to want to spend a whole evening with them. (There are honourable exceptions, including the 45-year-old hedge fund manager who recently squired me to Harry’s Bar. Even if I did feel like his granny.)
I am energist, though. I find life such an exciting journey and crammed with so many things worth doing and seeing, that people who sit around doing nothing much, especially those who have no excuse, irritate me greatly. Cost Centre #1, who is busy writing his first book and determined to find a publisher before the end of his first year at university, tells me that in it he has included a discussion about his theory that apathy is the curse of the middle class. I have not seen the manuscript (there’s a surprise) but apparently his argument is that he and his generation have suffered from being enclosed in a “gilded cage” of overprovision by their parents that has left them unused to having to achieve for themselves.
Personally, I know plenty of young people with lots of get up and go – and plenty of older people, too. My solution to needing energy is to exercise as regularly as I can, which makes me feel better and allows me to sleep fewer – and better quality – hours. As regular readers know, I work out at a boxing gym, and when it was announced recently that the International Olympic Committee was going to grant Olympic sport status to women’s boxing, I was asked to give my views on a live radio show on BBC Radio Oxford.
I had 30 minutes’ notice of this and took the call in the ticket office of Paddington Station, so I didn’t have time to Google my interviewer, Bill Heine. After asking me my views on the IOC decision he then asked how old I was! I was taken slightly aback – is that a suitable question to ask a lady live on air? I admitted to being 47 and then pointed out that whatever sex you are, boxing is something you can do at 17 or 57. I certainly won’t be aiming for an Olympic place, I never box competitively, and I can’t see why my age should have a bearing on my views on the suitability of women boxing at the Olympics. How dare he? As it was radio, I probably should have just lied and said I was 35. I could also have said I was thin – who would know? You can live out (almost) all your fantasies on radio.
How old is Mr Heine, anyway? I called up the BBC and asked them, as it does not appear anywhere on the internet, not even on his Wikipedia entry. Bill Heine is something of an Oxford legend, a US citizen who came to the UK to study as a postgraduate student in the decade that I was born, and has never left. He is probably most famous for living in a house in Headington with a 25ft fibreglass shark embedded in its roof.
The answer, by the way, is that he is 64. Why does the BBC not make more of this? If I were them, I would have plastered it all over the internet, a strong counter-argument to those who called them ageist for retiring Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing. And Mr Heine comes from a country where people run the Federal Reserve Bank until three weeks short of their 80th birthday, so I assume he plans to go on working for a while.
While I have never met him, he doesn’t seem to be short of energy. And he is in his seventh decade! Sounds like a suitable dinner companion to me.
