In the land of fulfillment.(Evaluation of popular culture)

It was the most sensitive of times, it was the crudest of times. It was the most informal of times (all that cheerful use of first names), it was the most impersonal of times (all those recorded messages). It was the most tolerant of times, it was (where its own pieties were concerned) the most conformist of times ...

Someone once wrote a book--about the mid-nineteenth century, I think--called The Age of Paradox. It is not a very revealing tide. Every age since the Old Stone Age has been an Age of Paradox, just as every age has been an Age of Transition. But at least we can fairly claim that no age has bristled with more paradoxes than our own.

Take attitudes to the elderly. In principle we all abhor ageism; but in a culture increasingly bent on jettisoning the past, ageism can assume strange guises. Sometimes it comes dressed up as its opposite.

The other day I went to visit a relative in hospital, a woman of nearly ninety. Her granddaughter hadn't been able to get there and asked me to take a present she had bought--a newly published anthology entitled A Book of Grandmothers. What gift could have been more appropriate?

On my way to the hospital I dipped into the book, and the first item I came across was a pep talk about the virtues of masturbation. Directed primarily at grandmothers who had been widowed or divorced, it exhorted them to masturbate regularly and urged them to ensure that they did so with dignity (the author's word) by making suitable preparations: turning down the lights, putting on soft music, unplugging the phone.

Two things struck me about this little homily. The woman I was visiting might well have laughed at it--she is by no means squeamish; but if dignity was going to be the issue, she would almost certainly have regarded it as undignified to have such a topic discussed in such a book at all.

The second objectionable feature of the passage was its condescension. Surely any self-respecting woman who has reached the age of grandmotherhood and who wants to masturbate knows how to. Underneath the author's infinitely sympathetic manner, in fact, ageism was alive and well. "You poor dears," the subtext ran, "what sad inhibitions you must have grown up with. But it's not too late. Just let your enlightened juniors take you by the hand and lead you to the land of fulfillment."