I came to The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old expecting the sort of gentle chuckle one lets out when a pensioner mistakes TikTok for a foot ointment. What I found instead was a revelation – less a book, more a quietly defiant act of civil disobedience, written in biro. If Alan Bennett’s Miss Shepherd had had a Zimmer frame gang and a subscription to subversive thought, this would’ve been her manifesto.
The conceit is simple: an elderly man in a care home keeps a diary. But that’s like saying Hamlet is about a bloke who can’t make his mind up. Hendrik Groen – who, like Banksy, may or may not be a pseudonym for a middle-aged mischief-maker – is a narrator of rare candour and drollery. His prose is as crisp as a Jacob’s cracker, salted with black humour and spread generously with existential butter.
There’s something undeniably thrilling about watching someone sneak philosophical rebellion past the stifling sentinels of routine and regulated incontinence. Hendrik, bless him, becomes the Socrates of the slippers-and-mesh-pants demographic. He knows that just because you’ve started to physically resemble a melted candle doesn’t mean you’ve lost the right to wonder what the flame was for in the first place.
What most struck me, though, was the diary’s anthropological precision. Retirement homes, in Groen’s world, are not just waiting rooms for death – they’re ecosystems, ruled by rival tribes of nosey parkers, overzealous activity co-ordinators, and the occasional rogue who still believes in laughter, wine, and free will. In truth, it’s Lord of the Flies with tartan blankets.
At its heart, the book is a study in dignity – and the insidious ways society undermines it. There is a peculiar infantilisation that occurs when one reaches a certain age. The world starts addressing you in a tone usually reserved for badly-behaved labradors or unstable toddlers. “Are we ready for our tablets, Mr Groen?” No, Sandra, we are not. We are preparing for a metaphysical reckoning with the abyss. Kindly take your clipboard elsewhere.
And here lies the sly genius of Groen’s diary: it’s a reclaiming of narrative. While everyone else speaks to the elderly, Groen speaks from them. And he does so with the weary wisdom of someone who has seen several utopias come and go, only to realise they were mostly sponsored by toothpaste companies and buried under NHS paperwork.
The humour, too, is not of the gaudy slapstick kind. It is drier than the cracker selection at a Methodist wake. There’s a passage in which Groen comments on the care home menu with the sort of resigned sarcasm usually reserved for Ryanair seat allocations. It reminded me, oddly enough, of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Or in this case, “Minced mystery meat again? Let us prepare for death.”
I couldn’t help but draw parallels with other literary diarists – Adrian Mole, of course, though Hendrik is more searing and less spotty; Bridget Jones, but swap Chardonnay for prune juice. Even Kafka peeks through the cracks, especially in the way institutional life slowly crushes the human spirit under the gentle weight of bureaucracy and beige wallpaper.
Thematically, the book flirts with mortality, friendship, autonomy, and the delicate art of finding meaning in late life. It’s a gentle nod to Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, only the boulder is a blood pressure monitor and Sisyphus is wearing orthopaedic slippers. But Hendrik rolls it uphill anyway, with a chuckle and a shrug.
It is, ultimately, a book about resistance. Not the dramatic kind – no torchlit parades or crumbling barricades – but the quiet, daily rebellion of maintaining one’s humanity in the face of slow erosion. It is the act of saying, “Yes, I am old. Yes, my body is a ruin. But I am still here – watching, laughing, kicking against the dying of the light, even if I have to do it sitting down.”
So if, like me, you occasionally fear that your best days are behind you, that your thoughts are too heavy or your knees too wobbly – read Hendrik Groen. He will remind you that dignity is not about how straight you stand, but how stubbornly you speak when the world wants to tuck you in early and change your channel.
And let’s face it – he’s far funnier than any of us will be at 83¼ – perhaps.
Avoid early aging and Buy Me a Coffee
Wording 