I want to grow old without dignity

The super-hippies have shown us how to make the most of our days and how to screw them up

Watching the singer James Taylor at a recent concert, I was alarmed to experience a surge of affection for the generation to which he and I belong. Taylor is frankly old enough to be excused touring duty and to stay at home, living off his royalties, but there he was on stage, the bald supremo of easy listening, enacting a creaky, middle-aged version of the Chuck Berry duck-walk, singing away and generally having a great, undignified time.

Down the years, the super-hippies – stars of the first, golden age of youthful rebellion, 1965 to 1975 – have become reliable indicators for the rest of us as to how to behave or misbehave, how to make the most of your days and how to screw them up. Thirty years ago, they showed us that life was too short not to have fun, that the divisions between play and seriousness, innocence and wisdom, had been dreamt up by the middle-aged and fearful. Even those who checked out early, taking that last one-way trip, provided the world with a sort of sad little lesson in their parting.

Those who once showed us how to be young are now offering more sombre models of behaviour as they approach the end of middle age and, as ever, their timing is excellent. Only last week, a discussion document proposing that the state retirement age should be raised to 70 was published. Suddenly the idea that old age provides a well-earned respite from life's tougher decisions and priorities, concerning work, rest, love, family and self, has begun to seem out of date.

By all accounts, one super-hippy, John Entwistle, the bass guitarist of the Who, took the traditional Sixties attitude towards age. He died before he got old, and in true rock-star fashion – in bed with a stripper in Las Vegas, on tour. His death was covered with predictable scorn in some parts of the press. He was 57, a grandfather, we were reminded. Puzzled by an indentation around his waist, those conducting the autopsy concluded that it had been left by the thick belt which he wore to hold in his sagging stomach.

The stripper, having been named at the inquest, has since provided piquant details of Entwistle's last gig. He was excited to be back on the road, according to Alison Rowse, who works under the professional name of Sianna at the Deja Vu erotic dance club, but then in her experience (which turns out to be considerable), ageing rock stars love to get away from home and go back on tour – it makes them feel young again.

There was no chatting up, what-are-you-doing-for-dinner stuff when Alison renewed her acquaintance with John, but a quick, business-like adjournment to his hotel room. There, she recalls, he took off his trousers, folded them carefully over the back of a chair, then removed his hearing aids and put them beside the bed. He was charming and kind, she says. "He was a real gentleman. He admired a tattoo of a bird on my bottom." He died of a coke-induced heart-attack during the night.

I suppose that there will be those, young and disapproving or middle-aged and defeated, who will find something undignified, rather than proudly appropriate, in the idea of a grandfather dying in these apparently undignified circumstances. For them, another 1960s icon has been offering an alternative approach to the prospect of getting old.

Diana Rigg, once the sex-bomb in The Avengers, now a revered and bedamed actress, has announced that she has given up the idea of romance and is also retiring from screen and stage. Having had the now traditional sneer at English men ("they don't really like or trust women"), Dame Diana has a familiar complaint about life as a woman in her sixties. "I have completely disappeared. I am totally invisible," she said in an interview last week. "I never really liked my sexy label. But on the other hand, to so totally disappear is quite startling."

So now she is through with all that foolishness and has also decided, for reasons that are not entirely clear, to give up acting. Her daughter is the most important person in her life, her most pressing project to do up her new house in Provence.

Perhaps it is unwise to read too much into the way these two public figures faced up to age. For all I know, Entwistle was forced back on to the road by maintenance payments and longed to be back home watching Who Wants to be a Celebrity Millionaire? in his 53-room house in Gloucestershire. Diana Rigg might well, like many Britons, tire of living the life of a French peasant, and then find a nice English lover and return for a triumphant season at the National Theatre.

But right now, it seems likely that different, milder versions of those alternative approaches to age – fighting it or allowing oneself to be eased into marginality – will soon be facing many less public people, whatever their official age of retirement.

terblacker@aol.com