Yes, Love

I have been spending far too much time with 60+ year olds lately. I don’t like it. People of this age group have a great propensity for stating the obvious, gossiping and talking about things which couldn’t possibly hold any interest to anyone else. Yesterday, for example, one old dear (relatively), told the story of someone else’s journey to Perth, giving detailed descriptions of all of the rest stops she took, her detour around Bridgetown, and even got so sidetracked from the point of the story that she told us what kind of sandwiches this woman’s children had (one was honey and the other vegemite). By the time this little story was over, I wasn’t quite sure whether it had actually had a point, or who they had even been talking about. Given the storytellers unfortunate ability to spout a large number of names in one sentence, wander all over the place within one particular theme, and talk incessantly, I was not even actually sure whether the main character of her story was in fact one or two people, seeing as, throughout the course of the plot, she seemed to have come through Bridgetown, gone on a detour through Boyup Brook to get to Donnybrook but was then able to recover from this traumatic ordeal for 30 minutes in Manjimup. (look at a map)
Along with a general inability to tell a story worth listening to, many people of this particular age have tend to over use the phrase “she said”, and it’s variations. For example: “ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now!’ she said, ‘I’ve just gone and dripped bleach on my trousers’ she said. So I said ‘Oh you dill,’ I said ‘you’ll just have to go and change them won’t you’ I said, ‘But I don’t want to get bleach those either!,’ she said.” Around this point, the listeners usually find some unfathomable comedic genius in what the speaker as said, and fall about laughing.
Other topics of interest seem to be describing chores they have done in detail, talking about their dogs and what they do to control them (complete with quality examples like “I just say ‘NO MEMPHIS’ and crack the whip), their own and their friends’ health/nervous problems, the repetition of stories of anything vaguely interesting that might have happened recently (like when they went to the pub TAB and won $57, and, my god, someone was drinking Jim Beam with a straw), and other madly interesting topics on which they are able to talk about for hours on end, all the while conveniently avoiding anything of any importance or significance in the rest of the world. And this is just the women.
The men of this particular age group all seem to think that they have acquired some sort of breathtaking wit with their age, such that it rivals even the likes of Wilde, Cleese and Kissinger. They often seem to forget that the last time they told a joke, no one laughed, and go on to make obvious, unimaginative and sometimes incomprehensible jokes. However, I have noticed during my studies that they often have a back up for the circumstance in which nobody laughs at their little witticisms. For example, one will always, ALWAYS, say “and, uhh…” after they have told a joke, as if this will somehow compensate for a lack of laughter. However, it often only serves to indicate to listeners that what has just been said WAS a joke and that laughter is the appropriate response. Sort of like a verbal-code-version of one of those cardboard LAUGH signs they have on sitcoms.
Anyway, when I’m 64, you’ll be older too, and will probably have grandchildren with names like Vera, Chuck and Dave, and we will insist on watching hospital programmes every night, too.