Ian Warden | Is 75 the new age of entitlement?

Then at last finding my study I sat down at my desktop to read an online story arguing people of 75 and beyond (I am 77) are probably cognitively doddery.

"What nonsense!" I quavered, but then moments later exclaimed an embarrassed "Oops!" at the discovery my trousers, donned in the dark, were back to front. Hastily I rearranged them correctly around my aged loins, watched only by my dog, knowing my septuagenarian's secret was safe with him.

The New York Magazine piece I was reading reported Nikki Haley, announcing she is going to run for the presidency of the United States, went on to say "in the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire".

"We'll have term limits for Congress. And mandatory mental-competency tests for politicians over 75 years old," Haley said.

"This attack was probably aimed," New York continued, "at her 76-year-old former boss [Donald Trump] along with 80-year old president Joe Biden and every other officeholder in their generation."

Trump, likely to fight Haley for the Republican nomination, was quick to respond to Haley. He posted, gibbering, that anyone aspiring to be president should pass a rigorous physical and mental test since the presidency required the kind of superhuman stamina of brain and body he had shown in office and would show again when re-elected.

"Trump will cite the cognitive-impairment test he took in 2018," New York Magazine fancied.

"Though he kept proclaiming himself a 'very stable genius' and bragging about how he 'aced the test' when he was still in office, the exam he took was actually a simple 10-minute screening for dementia that required him to complete tasks like identifying a camel and drawing a clock."

"Ensuring members of our gerontocracy are still mentally fit to serve is certainly an important concern," New York grumbles, "but it won't be solved by Haley and Trump issuing vague, unserious calls to make our leaders prove they can still identify zoo animals."

For persons of this columnist's vintage (and of the vintage of thou dear old things still reading newspapers and their columns) discussions of ageing and of mental competency, like the one just cited, take on a special piquancy.

But what if even in one's (now forgotten) pre-pubescence one occasionally in one's boyish haste put one's (short) trousers on back to front, so that to do it at 77 has nothing to do with ageing?

And what if an occasional failure to find the right door to the right room in one's home is not a sign of dodderiness but is an unremarkable thing in a city, Canberra, just this week reported to have the largest homes of any capital city anywhere in the world?

In a typically roomy Canberra home like my own, with its miscellany of superabundant doors, won't even the most robust of minds make the occasional door mistake? I want to believe.

Cities, bless their little cotton socks, make city sounds, city noises. A silent city is as unimaginable (and for metro-devotees like this columnist as undesirable, too) as a magpie that, unnaturally tight-beaked, never warbles; as a leafy tree that somehow does no swishing and rustling when breezes come to play with it.

And yet all of the reporting of last weekend's three-day Multicultural Festival is mentioning, often with alarm, 12 complaints that locals have made about the noise (surely only city sounds?) the festival made.

"Is the Multicultural Festival simply too loud for Civic?" the ABC has agonised.

"Twelve noise complaints were made over the weekend. While that number is small, those who argue for less restrictive noise laws in Civic say even a small number of complaints can put venues and festivals at risk."

The ABC reported Music ACT director Daniel Ballantyne worrying the people who complained would have been within their rights, because Canberra's noise laws are so restrictive events like the Multicultural Festival can easily be in breach.

Some of this angst is surely justified because in the ACT there are precedents galore for complainants, especially energetic, tirelessly indignation-fuelled NIMBYs, getting their disproportionate share of the appeasing attention of the powers that be.

If only (the columnist dreamed, wistfully, and of course in vain) on contentious issues there were ways of measuring, so that authorities could take it into account, the points of view of those too contented to be bothered to express a point of view.

Six-thousand people live in Civic and for all one knows 5988 of them think three days a year of sounds made by people's joyful revels are an acceptable, perhaps even a metro-joyfully welcome consequence of living in the throbbing heart of a city.

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In the same way each year's Summernats moves the few dozens aggrieved by the three days of difference it makes to the normally sepulchral soundscapes of nearby suburbs to pipe up, their dentures noisily gnashing, to call for Summernats' banning.

Meanwhile those thousands who welcome the way in which the thrilling music of Summernats' sounds gives three days welcome relief from the other 362 days of Canberra suburbia's sonic monotony keep their rapture to themselves.

Oh for a device, a kind of contentmentometer or approvalometer, that enabled governments and social scientists to accurately poll and to measure reasonable folks' quiet appreciations of life's beautiful varieties and bowls of cherries.