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Gathering poems from Shakespeare to the present, Don't Bring Me No
Rocking Chair addresses ageing through the several ages of poetry.
Now more than ever, as more of us live for longer, the idea of what
it means to age or to grow old engages and concerns people of all
ages. One of the problems of ageing is the language we use to
define it and the list of pejoratives associated with it, with
attitudes to ageing ranging from 'fatalism, denial, negative
stereotyping and tunnel vision to fantasy' (Professor Tom Kirkwood,
Newcastle University). Poetry can help to give us a fresh language
to think about ageing and these poems are chosen to fortify,
celebrate, lament, grieve, rage and ridicule. There is not one way
to age but neither can any of us truly stop our bodies from ageing.
Ageing is not a single phenomenon but complex, multiple,
perplexing: experienced historically as well as individually. This
anthology may not console but it can widen our perspectives,
helping us to change what we can change: our attitudes. This
anthology was prepared for the Newcastle Centre for the Literary
Arts as part of the Societal Challenge Theme on Ageing at Newcastle
University with support from the Institute of Ageing and Health,
Newcastle University, and has a foreword by Joan Bakewell.
'An inspiration to anyone who still finds old age too distressing a
prospect to take seriously' The Times Old age is no longer a blip
in the calendar, just a few declining years before the end. Old age
is now a major and important part of life: It should command as
much thought - even anxiety - as teenagers give to exam results and
young marrieds how many children to have . . . I am in my 80s and
moving towards the end of my life. But in a more actual sense, I
have moved from my dear home of 50 odd years into another . . . the
home where I will be until the end. Writing here of how it has
happened is in a sense a reconciliation with what cannot be
avoided, but which can be confronted When Joan Bakewell, Labour
Peer, author and famous champion of the older people's right to a
good and fruitful life, decided that she could no longer remain in
her old home, she had to confront what she calls 'the next segment
of life.' Disposing of things accumulated during a long life,
saying goodbye to her home and the memories of more than fifty
years, thinking about what is needed for downsizing - all suddenly
became urgent and emotional tasks. And then there was managing
family expectations. Some new projects such as planning the colours
and layout of a new, smaller flat, were exciting and some things -
the ridding herself of books, paintings, memento - took courage. So
much of the world is on the move- voluntarily or not - and so many
people are living to a great old age. In using the tale of her own
life , Joan Bakewell tells us a story of our times and how she is
learning to live to the sound and tune of The Tick of Two Clocks:
the old and the new.
In the pieces brought together in Writing Home, Polly Devlin OBE,
most bewitching of writers, covers subjects that range over her
whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her
childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where, in
the late 1950s, the first electricity poles looked 'literally out
of place'); her sudden transition, at the age of twenty-one, to
Swinging Sixties London, where she worked for Vogue and became very
much part of the scene (although - 'it's like being a provincial at
Versailles'), on to New York, back to London, then to the English
countryside, and to Paris, Venice, the world over - and always back
to Ireland, London and New York. She writes about the people she
has known, among them Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick
Jagger, Peggy Guggenheim, Diana Vreeland ('as fantastical as a
unicorn'), Jean Shrimpton ('she looks as though she sleeps in
cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance'),
Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up,
'which I gabbled she didn't need to - she looked at me frostily and
the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid'). And she writes
about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration,
feminism ('I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and
women were secondary'), reading, writing, collecting, shopping,
houses, dogs, rooks, hares, dreams, friendship and the kindness of
strangers; about daughters and mothers; and about wishes . . .
'An inspiration to anyone who still finds old age too distressing a
prospect to take seriously' The Times Old age is no longer a blip
in the calendar, just a few declining years before the end. Old age
is now a major and important part of life: It should command as
much thought - even anxiety - as teenagers give to exam results and
young marrieds how many children to have . . . I am in my 80s and
moving towards the end of my life. But in a more actual sense, I
have moved from my dear home of 50 odd years into another . . . the
home where I will be until the end. Writing here of how it has
happened is in a sense a reconciliation with what cannot be
avoided, but which can be confronted When Joan Bakewell, Labour
Peer, author and famous champion of the older people's right to a
good and fruitful life, decided that she could no longer remain in
her old home, she had to confront what she calls 'the next segment
of life.' Disposing of things accumulated during a long life,
saying goodbye to her home and the memories of more than fifty
years, thinking about what is needed for downsizing - all suddenly
became urgent and emotional tasks. And then there was managing
family expectations. Some new projects such as planning the colours
and layout of a new, smaller flat, were exciting and some things -
the ridding herself of books, paintings, memento - took courage. So
much of the world is on the move- voluntarily or not - and so many
people are living to a great old age. In using the tale of her own
life , Joan Bakewell tells us a story of our times and how she is
learning to live to the sound and tune of The Tick of Two Clocks:
the old and the new.
Joan Bakewell has led a varied, sometimes breathless life: she has
been a teacher, copywriter, studio manager, broadcaster,
journalist, the government's Voice of Older People and chair of the
theatre company Shared Experience. She has written four radio
plays, two novels and an autobiography - The Centre of The Bed. Now
in her 80s, she is still broadcasting. Though it may look as though
she is now part of the establishment - a Dame, President of
Birkbeck College, a Member of the House of Lords as Baroness
Bakewell of Stockport - she's anything but and remains outspoken
and courageous. In Stop the Clocks, she muses on all she has lived
through, how the world has changed and considers the things and
values she will be leaving behind. Stop the Clocks is a book of
musings, a look back at what she was given by her family, at the
times in which she grew up - ranging from the minutiae of life such
as the knowledge of how to darn and how to make a bed properly with
hospital corners, to the bigger lessons of politics, of lovers, of
betrayal. She talks of the present, of her family, of friends and
literature - and talks too of what she will leave behind. This is a
thoughtful, moving and spirited book as only could be expected from
this extraordinary woman.
'Honest and intriguing ... beautifully written.' Observer 'Joan
Bakewell was everywhere at every stage: reporting on the Cuban
missile crisis, interviewing Allen Ginsberg and Vaclav Havel,
taking chunks out of the Berlin Wall when it fell...draped in the
kaftan of Sixties sophistication.' Independent on Sunday Joan
Bakewell's life and times spans the Blitz in Manchester, Cambridge
during the glittering era of Michael Frayn, Peter Hall, Jonathan
Miller et al, London at its most exciting in the swinging sixties
and the world of the media and the arts from the 60s to the
present. As she reflects on the choices she has made and the
influences that shaped her, she confronts painful childhood
memories of her mother's behaviour and describes both her affair
with Harold Pinter and her two marriages with remarkable honesty.
Throughout she uses her own experience to explore the extraordinary
change in women's roles during her lifetime. This is no ordinary
celebrity autobiography but a memoir that is beautifully written,
frank and absorbing, which draws a thought-provoking portrait of
Britain in the last 70 years. Dame Joan Bakewell was awarded the
BAFTA Fellowship in 2019.
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