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The woman in the mobile-phone shop greets me in a voice you might use to a backward child. "Would you like to look at the cheaper models?" she says, unbidden. I follow her to the very back, to the ?30 pay-as-you-go section. "So what do you need your mobile phone for?" Again that tone: kindness pleached with condescension, a top note of impatience. "You know, phoning," I say. "And maybe a bit of texting." I point out a basic model and, as I pay, she asks: "Would you like me to put it together for you?" I grunt no. "I have a grandson," I say, and shuffle out. All the while I can feel my iphone 4s hard case vibrating in my bag. I had not expected this to work. I suppose, in my vanity, I'd believed my relative youth would shine through the layers of latex wrinkles applied to my skin, the talc greying my hair, the beige M&S granny gear, the three-wheeled Zimmer-shopper I borrowed from my old mum. The make-up artist hadn't time to age my hands. If the assistant spotted them, surely she'd see this was a stunt. I needn't have worried. How carefully does anyone look at the old? And I know this young woman was trying to be helpful. Maybe she'd been on a training course for serving elderly, baffled-by-new-technology customers, or just knew by experience they don't want all the latest bells and whistles. (It took a year for my sons to teach their granny to use the simplest phone.) But I'm surprised how depressed the encounter makes me: patronised, pitied, excluded from everything whizzy and new. In the midst of Shoreditch, East London, the streets crowded with brisk, purposeful young people, with schedules, the latest looks and gadgets, I stand alone, a boulder dumped by the last Ice Age. But this is the future. Your future and mine. Not that we ever think about it, being short-sighted, in-denial fools. More of us will survive to extreme old age than any generation who ever lived - yet no generation has planned for it so inadequately. It's too grim to contemplate, so we don't. We bust our credit limits rather than accrue pensions, believe if we dress like teenagers, invest in wrinkle potions or vitamins or plastic surgery, we can defeat time. Meanwhile, the statistics rack up. At the beginning of the 20th century, 5 per cent of the population was over 65 years old - now it is 15 per cent and rising all the time. The average life expectancy for a man is 78, a woman 82. A fifth of us will reach 100. That isn't twinkly, silver-fox Bill Nighy fellas holding hands with Helen Mirren types on sunset cruises. That is proper old. That is suffering the geriatric unholy trinity of confused, immobile and incontinent. It is living all alone, as half of those aged over 75 already do. That is 1.7 million more people needing social care, a doubling of folk with dementia. That is old old. So what is it like? Is it possible to find out before your time has come? That was the object of the bizarre exercise to which I submitted rather reluctantly, because I worried it would irritate the elderly: "If you want to know what it's like, why not ask us?" But I was intrigued; 2011 was a year in which Britain, finding itself significantly poorer than it assumed, sought a scapegoat in the old. A Labour think-tank suggested the elderly sell their big houses to provide homes for families. The young question why they struggle to fund pensions they will never enjoy themselves. They - we - will have to toil until almost 70, unlike the current old-timers enjoying golden decades of state-sponsored leisure. Now the nation, like a peevish Goneril, guilt-trips and nags its Lears. Meanwhile, this past year, my own life has been dominated by the consequences of ageing. I remember when my parents turned 80, thinking, "Blimey, they really are old now." Yet nothing changed. They kept taking annual coach trips to Lake Garda or Austria, driving their little car, growing vegetables, baking, coming down from Yorkshire on the train dragging great suitcases of cakes and Christmas presents. And however delicately I tried to discuss the future, my father would tell me all the paperwork was organised in a tin box in his wardrobe and my mother would say, "Hush! When the time comes..." Well, now the time has come. The novelist Jean Rhys wrote that, "Old age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks." And so it has been, or rather a series of steep downward plunges, each taking my parents to a lower level, each with its own urgent problems, which I have barely figured out before another lurch tumbles them lower. As I write, my father, 89, lies in a hospital geriatric ward awaiting a nursing-home bed. If he lives that long. Although, happily, his chosen place, I learn, does have several "fast-track" residents (I love this grim social-worker euphemism). Until this year of respite homes and acute orthopaedic surgical wards, I hadn't looked at old people closely. I share our societal disgust at death-head faces that gape open in sleep; doughy white limbs with scary outcrops of veins; gnarled yellow feet protruding from sheets; adult nappies visible through the flies of stained pyjamas. It isn't loveable, it isn't sweet. It is far beyond dear old grandpa in his favourite armchair, this living decomposition that presages death. When I spy other visiting adult children, their faces, like mine, are stricken with horror. They too are feeling a terrible disconnect between the parent they love and this feeble grotesque. And the old, if they are cogent, know it. My father, a day after the operation to repair his fractured hip, requests that a nurse shave him, demands I comb his hair and cut his nails, asks me every single time I see him if his breath smells. Pride and vanity endure. For more information visit our website http://grizzlygadgets.com/hard-iphone-4-cases
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