Don't make me laugh
17/12/2006
Here’s one you couldn’t make up, even if you tried.
A memo from South Gloucestershire’s personnel chief, sent to 10,000 members of the council’s staff warns that: “Even sending a birthday card that says colleagues are ‘over the hill and past it’ could be taken as ageist behaviour.”
According to a spokesman, the Council insists there is no general ban on sending cards… but it was simply reminding employees of new legislation, which recently came into effect.
Obviously a sense of humour failure on a massive scale.
But, more worryingly, this could be mark the end of jokey birthday cards as we know them, for be rest assured that there are many far more PC organisations out there than South Gloucestershire. Someone was recently hauled before the courts for “revving his car in a racist manner” while two more faced a reprimand for “biting the heads off black jelly babies with intent to offend”. The PC brigade don’t need encouraging. They’re already running the asylum.
Go any further down that road and soon it could be an offence to wear a cardigan and slippers in a manner blatantly designed to mock an older person; or referring to a badly behaved senior as a “Saga-lout”.
I’m all for showing older people respect, especially as I’m now one of them. But it has all gone a bit bonkers. The fact is that the senders of many of these “over the hill” cards are themselves people of the same age or even older than the recipient.
When it comes to getting older we’re all in the same boat, and personally I think it’s a far preferable option to the alternative. From the age of 21 onwards, as far as I can see, people are mocked for getting older. Footballers are over the hill at 35. Models well before then. Swimmers almost as soon as they get out of waterwings.
Invariably it’s a good humoured leg pull. If it’s more than that, or if it amounts to bullying, then it’s a different matter.
But we shouldn’t be too sensitive about our perceived frailties unless we want to unleash something we can’t stop. Every jokey card could be offensive - if you want to be offended. What, for instance, happens when I next get a traditional seaside postcard which has a beer-gutted, balding man leering at a buxom lady in a miniskirt, and being threatened by the wife-figure wielding a rolling pin?
That presses almost every PC button: it’s mocking the folically-challenged, it’s fattist and sexist, and for good measure it also portrays women as perpetrators of domestic violence. That lot would keep half of the lawyers in Britain going for a month.
The fact that the card failed to include a prescribed ratio of disabled people and those from ethnic minorities would keep the other half going.
Stop joking about getting older, and people will start thinking about it as something serious. There’s a wonderful running club made up of people aged 50 and over who call themselves “The Coffin Dodgers” (after a reference in everyone’s favourite Radio 2 show). Their motto: better to be over the hill than under it. That’s the way to deal with the ageing process: poke it in the eye with a sharp stick.
To me, going past the 50 mark was a badge of honour. I didn’t mind the cards reminding me of my increasing decrepitude because they were all intended to tease rather than hurt; and they reminded me that – hey, great, I’ve got this far. In fact, I’d say that I was proud to be grey.
But what do YOU think?