It’s never a happy thought, but we are all getting older. Those of us boomers are into our sixties now with the rest of the pack starting to catch up. This is the time when things really start going wrong with our bodies. Most of us have been lucky up to now. But despite the best efforts of medical science, there’s no pill to slow down the years. Worse, the most likely first symptom of age is going to be erectile dysfunction. All those high cholesterol meals we crammed away will come back to bite us as layers of platelets build up on the walls of our blood vessels. Some call this arteriosclerosis, others artherosclerosis. Whichever name, the result is the same. The muscles in the walls of the arteries needed to dilate start to fail. Without the dilation, there can be no erection. It’s an unhappy thought, but loss of sexual power can be the first symptom of a lifestyle with too much fat and too little exercise. When someone invents a time machine, we can go back and give ourselves good advice. Until then, we have to make the best of our golden years.

Curiously, the world is growing old with us. When we were young and living through the fifties, the television was a novelty. Replacing the radio and its world of advertiser-sponsored programs came the future with moving images and all the new ads. They were simple sales pitches, very naive by modern standards. But they got the message across. And what were those messages? Well, for the most part, housewives were told what food to put on our plates, what drinks to offer us. Then came the things to make the household run smoothly and the latest model vehicle to get us from A to B. In between were sometimes disturbing news reports which grew worse as we came into the sixties and the Russians took over Cuba as a missile base on our doorstep. In some senses, it’s actually more relaxing to have the modern coverage of world events. For the most part, our media have forgotten the need to tell us what’s happening outside our shores. It’s more important to package our local politics as the news and give us the messages most important to those controlling the content. The ads have changed as well. The networks have decided the silver-haired crowd has the buying power. We boomers hold what’s left of the purse strings. So we need to know about the adhesive to keep our dentures in place, heat wraps to keep the arthritis pain under control and the latest pills to keep Alzheimer’s away. Oh, and the pills to keep our sex lives going.

Living through the last sixty and more years has been living through a cultural revolution. Who would have thought we would see erectile dysfunction openly discussed on TV with viagra available to treat it. It’s something no-one could have predicted in the buttoned-down fifties when Bob Newhart could so innocently poke fun at the police with a sketch about a nude line-up to identify a flasher. The only thing that we can rely on now is viagra. That gets a rise out of everything still important to us.

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