In the months before I started my second year at Durham University, I decided that I wanted to know more about the place where I was living and studying. Already, I’d spent the best part of a year as a Durham City resident and even though I was born here, I hadn’t really explored the town at all – at least not sober or in daylight teehee.

However, I didn’t just want to go on more drives or go into town more often – although I have done both of those things – I wanted to meet more of the people, and feel like a proper part of the community. Plus, I’m acutely aware of the fact that I attend a very rich university with lots of very privileged students – some are even part of that 1% we hear about so much. But that institutional and familial wealth isn’t reflective of the North-East; like a lot of the north of England, County Durham is no stranger to poverty. So, for all of these reasons, in October I started to volunteer at a foodbank every Friday morning in Chester le Street.

But there’s this really funny thing about volunteer work: publicly announcing that you do it, can make you seem like a self-righteous tosser. And I didn’t really fancy having that description in my bio, so I haven’t really been telling people about this part of my weekly routine. Even though it has made me look forward to Friday morning every week.

At the foodbank, I volunteer with three other people; two older gentlemen, and one older woman. We wait for people to walk in, ask them if they have a food voucher, pack food parcels to last them three to four days, give them the parcels, and then we sit down to wait for the next ‘customer’ – I always found this a strange turn of phrase for the context of a foodbank, but we won’t analyse vocabulary just now…

Obviously, handing these food parcels out is very rewarding, but I’d have to say that it’s been the moments when the other volunteers and I have just been sitting and chatting that have been the most interesting for me so far.

I was always raised to give older people the same respect that I wanted to receive. I was encouraged to treat everyone – no matter their age – like a person, and to try to refrain from assuming an individual’s personality just because they look or sound a certain way. But no matter how much this was drilled into me as I grew up, I was influenced by the media and politics, and became very aware of the fact that in this country, people from different generations are encouraged to alienate themselves from one another and sometimes, to hate each other.

So it’s no surprise that the second I walked through the door and the other volunteers saw my age, that they assumed I was just another student looking to have something righteous to add to their CV. I was going to come for a couple of weeks, stand about on my phone, not contributing, and then eventually I’d just stop coming. Not only did I see these assumptions on my colleagues’ faces, last week they literally told me that that’s what they had thought. Thankfully, I’ve proven to them that not all students are lazy or entitled. Although, they do take the mick out of me for coming in hungover, so I don’t think I’ve broken the ‘students drink too much and too often’ stereotype. But hey, I still show up every Friday at 10:30am and get involved.

Then on my part, it’s become so much clearer to me that British society completely writes off older people. After people get to a certain age, we deem them irrelevant and stuck in their own ways: they’re almost dead, so why should they be listened to? But this is such a damaging narrative and it’s only helping to alienate people from each other more. Yes, the older generation grew up in a different time, and there are so many ways our society has progressed positively which may be against what the baby boomers have always known. However, just because we assume this, doesn’t mean that we should assume we already know what every person in this generation thinks.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to the other volunteers about a whole host of subjects. We’ve discussed ageism, sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, ableism, politics, the coronavirus – to name only a few. And in many ways, we’ve been able to have these conversations with total honesty because we’re not related, so there’s absolutely no pressure for us to agree on everything just to ‘keep the peace’. There were disagreements at times, but more than anything, hearing the perspective of someone at the opposite end of their life has been really beneficial for us all to be able to understand each other more. Youth has always been the time when people seek and fight for change, and when they criticise the shortcomings of everything that has happened before them, but people age, and life is complicated, and it’s important to understand and listen to every perspective – not just that of your peers.

Volunteering at this foodbank is one of the best decisions I’ve made at university so far, and it’s made me realise that we really need to stop hating everyone before we take the time to get to know each other. Old people aren’t just interesting because they’re old, they’re interesting because they’re people with thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Obviously they deserve respect, but once again that’s not because of age, it’s because it’d be nicer for everyone if we just started relationships with respect for each other.

Age is just a number, after all.