"Just Pop Your Card In There, Dear"

This morning, I went into town with the Chair of my congregation, who is 70, but looks younger, to see the borough council about organising waste collections for our new building.

It has also been in my mind that we need to set up a Twitter account for Northampton Unitarians (watch this space) so as I don't know much about Twitter, I decided to buy a simple book about it. The one I found is called Social Networking for the Older Generation.

We went to the till to pay for it, and I became, for the first time, the victim of age dsicrimination. The woman on the till could not have been much younger than me, but I don't think she actually looked at me once. She saw the title of the book, and the whole tone of the transaction was set by it. She adopted a sing-song, cooing tone of voice, and said to me: "Just pop your card in there, dear."

I was so taken aback that instead of challenging her, I meekly did what I was told, completed the transaction, and then lingered to see whether her tone to the person next in the queue (a young man) would be the same.

Needless to say, it wasn't. She was much brisker and normal with him.

It left me thinking about how I treat elderly people. I *hope* that I am not as patronising as that woman - I certainly don't adopt a "special" tone of voice when talking to older people. But it was a real lesson in What Not To Do.