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Who wants to be hot at a hundred? Last night’s Intelligence Squared discussion pitted cultivating glamour into old age against comfy waistbands and freedom to wear purple. I’m on both sides. The saving grace of pregnancy was my limited maternity wardrobe: I simply couldn’t worry what to wear. And yet when we went through a difficult time a few years ago, one weapon I used to fight the depression dogging us all was a new care of my body and meticulous pride in my appearance. Hands up who agrees that beauty should present as a dangerously idealised, sexualised youth: women as tall as men and skinny as children? Or indeed that the elderly, who can’t possibly conform, deserve to be incarcerated in homes where they can be slapped, left for hours in their excrement and referred to as numbers not names? Of course we don’t. But how far dare we challenge these ideas of age or beauty? Aging isn’t for the fainthearted. The keepers of the house shall tremble... the grinders cease because they are few... You shall rise at the voice of the bird, and the daughters of musick be brought low, runs the beautiful, evocative poem on old age in Ecclesiastes. Dignity for the old is enlightened self-interest: we all hope to be there one day. Honour your father and mother, runs the commandment, that all shall go well with you. Respect starts with our own parents. However old we, or they, are. Paul of Tarsus, writing to adults, cites disobedience to parents as among the worst forms of immorality. Do we genuinely hold older people, our own parents, in higher regard than ourselves? Anne Karpf, one of last night’s speakers, referred to age-apartheid. I believe we inflict this on the young as well as old. Our Pakistani friend and lodger Abdul came from a household of... seventeen, eighteen, depending on who’d just died or been born. We in the West complain of a housing crisis, yet moan if our grown-up children still live with us and leave old people to survive alone. We’re shocked at the abuse in the Old Deanery, in the news this week, but perhaps the real abuse comes from the concept of Care ��ѿ��ýs itself? It is a rare Western family, Western meal, even Western party, with more than two generations together. Yesterday my father received a handwritten letter from a head mistress. “So busy,” he marvelled, “and yet she finds time to write to someone over ninety.” Why should this be rare enough to draw comment? Judeo-Christianity, like other faiths, is full of respect: Rise up before the gray-haired and honour the aged. Gray hair is the crown of glory. The honour of the old is their gray hair. Note the glory of age is visual: true beauty perhaps? As Wilde demonstrated brilliantly in Dorian Gray, beauty being ultimately created by character. Indeed. My mother was far more beautiful as a woman of ninety than she was even as a girl of nineteen.