When David Attenborough turned 100 last week I remembered my mother. She had no wish to live till 100 but in her 90s she paid great attention to all nonagenarians. When Queen Elizabeth appeared on television she said admiringly she was still climbing steps. When a film star in his 90s died she compared him to her age. She measured people by knees and hearing and speech.
She would have approved of Sir David.
At 100, he appeared at the Royal Albert Hall, on his own steam, without a walker or cane.
DA1: I had rather thought that I would celebrate my 100th birthday quietly. But it seems that many of you have had other ideas. I've been completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings from preschool groups to care home residents, and countless individuals and families of all ages.
King Charles sent a special video message.
KC1: you have shared my determination to highlight the urgent need to protect and preserve this precious planet of ours and all life on earth for future generations. Thank you then, for all that you have done. And on behalf of the whole nation, I wish you a very happy 100th birthday.
Sir David might be celebrated as the greatest storyteller for the natural world but in my mother’s book he would have been one more member of her elder citizens club.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
The first centenarian I remember meeting was the ceramic sculptor Beatrice Wood. She was 103 or 104. I remember her home in Ojai in southern California the afternoon sunlight flooding in through the window. She was delightfully vain, tucking her hearing aid out of sight behind her silver white hair when we took a photograph.
She had seen Monet paint and made costumes for Isadora Duncan and was the inspiration for Rose of the Titanic. But what I remembered most was her appetite for life. I’ve never loved the men I married and I never married the men I loved she told me with a flirtatious smile.
When I got a cat later I named her Beato in her honour. Beatrice Wood was delighted.
We relegate the elderly to lives of ailments and aches and pains. We talk about elder care and insurance. All of those are no doubt urgent needs. But what the likes of David Attenborough and Beatrice Wood remind us is that old age is not necessarily just about all that.
In 2020 Attenborough told CNN what he would tell world leaders like President Trump, Prime Minister Modi and President Xi of China.
DA2: The time has come to put aside national ambitions and look for an international ambition of survival
I have met other centenarians each with their own zest for life. San Francisco poet laureate wasn’t quite a centenarian when I met him but well past retirement age. He was recording an operetta he had written and wanted me to read a small part in there of Gandhi. It was about world peace.
When I met bodybuilder and Mr Universe 1952 Manohar Aich in Kolkata he was over 100. ’411” at his peak, he was now even more shrunken, like a gnome, sitting in the winter sun, reading a Bengali newspaper.
He had spent much of his life as a circus strongman bending iron nails with his bare hands and lifting 600 pounds on his shoulders. Just to make a living. Now there were ticker tape parades in his honour. HIs son had opened a gym next to the house. He wasn’t interested in the new fangled gym culture with its supplements and shakes. But even at 100, he still had dreams.
He wanted to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger. Good body he told me.
“Good body. Give my regards.”
MA3: bhalo chehara.
MA4: Best wishes. My best wishes to him. Live Long
I hoped when I taped that interview it might find its way to Arnold and he would somehow make his wish come true. Alas that didn’t happen. And I am not sure Richard Attenborough’s dream of a world where leaders put aside national ambitions to save the planet are coming true.
But still he keeps going with indomitable faith. Recording yet another show.
DA3: The centenarian is busily producing his next show, Blue Planet 3. She must perfect her mating call. A seductive song.
My mother never quite made it to 100. But after she died I found she had made entries in her diary for things she needed to do the next month.
She never got to do them. But the unfinished tasks are also a reminder that the torch passes on. That in the end is their legacy. They leave us with things to be done.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata