Terry Prone: Being an Age Friendly ambassador might just be useful — and fun

The demeaning photographs used to characterise older people during the pandemic drove me nuts

Paul Carroll, Director of Services for Housing and Community. Terry Prone, and Chief Executive of Fingal County Council, AnnMarie Farrelly.

Not many situations are worse than being stuck in a US airport at 9 o’clock at night. Any decent shops are closed, although the fast-food outlets still peddle their heart-clogging wares. Half-darkened corridors are mostly populated by cleaners and security folk. You wander those corridors because if you sit down, you might go to sleep and miss your flight.

So there was I, a few months back, wandering a Departure Gate corridor, when I came upon a group of late teens horsing around and laughing. As one of them stepped backward into my path, another of them issued a warning. “Careful of granny, behind you.” I swear to god, if my carry-on didn’t weigh two tonnes because of the books purchased in a previous airport, I’d have swung it in a powerful arc and felled him, so I would. And then gone on to swing it at the girl he was addressing, who registered me, smiled at me and nodded at him in one instinctive acknowledgement of my granniness. Didn’t matter how much plastic surgery I’d coughed up for, didn’t matter that I was mobile and on my own, waiting for an international flight, to them, I was still old and to be protected. A definite granny. I smiled at them through transplanted teeth and moved on.