Category: Topicality

  Imagine this. If you are aged between 55 and 65 there is a reasonably strong chance that one of the major cancers is coming your way. Perhaps, after having done quite well in life, you have already retired away from that old daily grind which used to devour so much of your focus and energy. Gardening is your greatest pleasure these days along with mindless novels about the grizzled but brilliant Norwegian detective, the one with a drink problem and a teenage daughter who still blames him for her mother’s suicide. Suddenly one day, you get a letter summonsing you to the hospital. Soon you are sitting in a consulting room so functional that it would have been a disgrace even in Soviet Russia, as the tired and emotionless…

  Let’s get down on it. If the UK has a sport-and-exercise problem, then it is a problem not so much of youthful indolence but of ageing unsuccessfully in these, our not-modern-enough times. Sport England tells us that formal inactivity - we are talking here about those NOT doing 150 minutes of moderate intensity sport per week - defines much of the Third Age. Some 30% of those in the bracket 65-74 are inactive; some 48% in the 75-84 group; and 71% among the over-85. As Dr. Sharon Moalem says in his book The DNA Restart: “If you stop moving intensely (sic), what you’re telling your body is that it’s time to stop being a burden on others – it’s time to die”. Whatever this older generation needs, it is…

  Smaller Economy = Weaker Public Provision  A spectre is haunting the ageing process in the UK and beyond. The spectre goes by the name of No-Growth-Economics. And the spectre needs a spanking. (more…)

When does an incident become a trend? At what point do a couple of pebbles rolling down the mountain start an avalanche? How do we know when the atmospherics of the day suddenly suit seismic shifts? When the two pebbles plop purposelessly into the pond below just so often  -   are we right to conclude that they signal nothing save a barely troubled equilibrium? Or, when and how do today’s news headlines really matter to the forecaster? This is a story here about the shifting dimensions of ageing. We toss out the following pebbly-titbits: In late 2018, the US lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret is subjected to a bruising assault by an alternative and self-consciously feminist underwear brand called ThirdLove. Other commentators join the virtual demo. The core complaint is that…

Prodded By Science We reference here, first of all, what we will call a new scholarship of empowerment. The by-now-long-since embedded realisation that millions of us, at the moment of once conventional retirement, have another twenty years+ of healthy living to fill has stimulated a new wave of self-help literature. (more…)

In the Summer of 2017, the Office for National Statistics in the UK produced fresh and compelling data on the finances of retired households. In brief: From the late 1970s, just as Mrs. Thatcher was about to ride into Downing Street to the opening of the tenure of Mrs. May in 2016, the disposable income of those retired households grew at an annual average real-terms rate of 2.8%. The mean gross income of this segment (including benefits) had thus swollen by a factor of 3 across this generation of time. Whereas just less than 50% of retired households enjoyed the benefit of a private pension in 1997 this had risen to 80% by 2016. Average disposable income for those with one of those private pension plans is now (2017) ca…