Beyond the Stairlift of Broken Dreams : or how to pull Aging up to a more sunlit space.
To age is to droop - or be drooped? Picture this. You are joining a friend for lunch. The restaurant is on the 30th floor and offers spectacular views of the city you love. In the hope of persuading the maitresse d’ to give you a table by the window, you get there early. For reasons which need not detain us here, it is important to you that your friend has a specially pleasant time. A good table is secured. You check that the menu indeed contains a happy mix of vegetarian dishes. This is pivotal to the progress of the day. The friend arrives. The lunch begins. It is too early for a calming apéritif. And so your inner comms-coach keeps rat-tat-tatting down your invisible ear-piece. Whatever happens: •…
Face It / Debbie Harry : the Rinkli Funstaz Book of the Year
Watching TV that day in 1978 when Debbie Harry first appeared on TOTP singing Denis, I was so electrified that my drink abruptly put itself down. I tried immediately to memorise the French bit. How she drenched the tune in her insouciant beauty. And I knew, from that day forward and even though we were never going to meet, that Ms. Harry and I would be firm friends. Easily I can still bring to mind the individual moment I first heard the later tracks French Kissin’ In The USA and I Want That Man. When in a much later 21st century year she appeared one evening on the Chris Evans TV show to give us Maria, well, I slammed my drink hard down again and, as ambient friends can affirm,…
The Skids Under The State (Pension) : why the CSJ Report needs to be binned (but not recycled).
It was in August 2019 that the UK’s Centre for Social Justice produced its study Ageing Confidently : supporting an ageing workforce. The innocuous title gave no hint of the foolishness within. But the CSJ conclusions nevertheless attracted loud applause across media and one can be confident that, throughout the emphatically un-roaring Twenties with which we are all to be engaged, more reports of this colour and purpose will arrive. The effect will be to pin under continuous fire all those lobbying for generous benefits for the grey in our midst. The CSJ recommendation that the state pension threshold should rise to 75 within ca 15 years may sound outrageous to those lobbies now; very soon it will be banalised as it echoes round think tank town and policy wonkerville…
The brain is a lonely hunter
Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon : the new science and stories of the brain Dr Rahul Jandial (more…)
No More Loose Change : time for a ruthless revolution of financial acquisitiveness among the gray, the bald, the lonely – and the female.
The Third Age is being very poorly led. (more…)
How to grow old badly : a non-beginner’s guide (or The Tale of Dr. Fernoux).
Some decades ago, the UK Government issued a special 50p coin in celebration of the national membership of the European Community. On the tails-side the imprint was of hands joined in a circle, symbolising continental togetherness. You could buy a gift edition with the coin mounted, as I recall, on a velvet bed in a wee red box. The object might seem very superannuated if viewed now. Back in that day, I gave the gift version to a French friend of mine. As he was privately wealthy, I had been worried that he would take it as a trinket. However, a long time after I had, officially and forever, left that town in Burgundy, I called at his home one day, dangerously unannounced. His wife showed me into his study…
Prospero’s Punchline : or the necessary rise of silver-speak in pursuit of perfectible ageing
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…
Extra Time : 10 Lessons for An Ageing World / Camilla Cavendish
The parade of celebrity dust-cover reviewers clearly saw something in Extra Time which I missed. For by page 132 the book was being slammed shut while cool was recovered. The author had been meeting one Professor Leonard P. Guarente of MIT. And then the poor reader gets this: “Does he look 64? It’s hard to tell. Balding, but spry (sic), in a check shirt and faded jeans, kind eyes twinkling owlishly (sic) behind rimless spectacles, he could be younger or older (sic)”. Nobody should be asked to pay for journalese so inert and so pointless. Extra Time is jammed with the kind of observational banality so popular in American non-fiction that it should be the object of serious import restrictions. Even more tellingly, the book does not really have a…
Those Grey Track-Suit Bottoms : time to whip them off – and get the over-65s committed to sport.
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…