"Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four"
WHAT'S MEANT TO HAPPEN PAUL?
I'm 64 today. Happy lockdown birthday to me. (Although I'm one of those weirdos who's quite enjoying the whole lockdown thing on a personal experience level.) And when you hit that number there's only one song comes to mind. But has it aged as well as... us?
Although the song first appeared on vinyl as a track on 1967's Sgt Pepper album, it seems McCartney first wrote the basis for it when he was a teenager in the fifties. To a sixteen year old I guess anyone in their sixties looked very old. Paul's father died at the age of sixty four. People of that age looked older than we do now, looked more homogenous, colourless, in the background. In the nineteen fifties the average life expectancy in the UK was around seventy. There were good reasons why sixty four seemed elderly, especially in working class communities.
Life expectancy is now over eighty and, if you've had a reasonable amount of luck with your health and employment and life in general, being in your mid sixties now is not the same as it was when the song was written. We're the fittest old codgers in history. Yes we're slowing up, creaking a bit, grunting from the odd ache here and there, the skin a lot loser and the wrinkles deeper, but still functioning, still going out and doing stuff (when we're allowed again...), still reasonably sure the incontinence hasn't kicked in. More importantly, nowhere near as close to the end as we might have felt ourselves to be sixty years ago. No sense of any milestone today - sorry Mr M.
The cute Beatle's 77 now, so maybe he'd agree those lyrics are overdue a change. But "When I'm seventy four" doesn't scan too well. And a decade of austerity politics has stalled, in some cases reversed, the progress made since the sixties.
So there may be a very long wait before "When I'm eighty four" becomes appropriate...
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