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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 Third Age is being very poorly led. (more…)

  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…