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| Biba dress at V&A |
I'm sitting in the gods of Windsor Royal theatre with Mum and a couple of my friends, and I'm wearing a pale brown Biba dress with loops from tight fitted sleeves around my middle fingers. It's my 16th birthday treat and a young Ian McKellan is playing Hamlet.
Roll on a lifetime and I'm walking along Western Road after pilates, talking to a new friend about McKellan's return to Hamlet, on film.
The memory of that teenage theatre trip is so powerful and visceral, that McKellan's name always evokes that Biba dress, how great it made me feel, the sense of life in the wings, the language of Shakespeare.
Life's been stressful recently. Enormously so. Added to the demands of caring is a totally unexpected bout of bullying - a revival of an insidious campaign from years ago that I thought was resolved. I let my guard down, I guess, although the bully will always attempt to make their victim blame themselves.
I'm very lucky to have fantastic friends and what this desperately difficult period of time is teaching me is the need to talk about it, which I didn't do before, to identify it for what it is, which I didn't do either (I was very naive). I am remembering the power of deep breathing, a sense of humour, walking and writing, frankincense for meditation and most of all, I am looking out for my health. Who needs a bully in their 69th year on the planet?
But although we imagine bullying to be most prevalent at work and school the World Health Organisation's statistics on abuse of older people in the community show by far the largest category of abuse is psychological. Worldwide, one in six older adults are subject to abuse but this is often hidden. We rarely talk about what abuse of older people means or challenge the ways it can manifest itself - in a casual abuse of power, for example, in an assumption of superiority. Many older people live alone, are not wealthy, are easily stigmatised and targeted. The abuser may well portray themselves as a pillar of the community, a doer of good works.
And so I'm reminded again of McKellan, that theatre trip to Windsor, the Biba dress. We were studying Hamlet at school, of course, and of the many memorable lines I often go back to is this:
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
(Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5)
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