In praise of aimless learning
I dreaded retiring from work in 1992. I felt there would be no structure to my week. Fine for a holiday, but I worried about waking on a Monday morning every day of the year wondering, “what can I do this week?” Being retired can be a burden. There is too often a feeling of [...]
The relentless stress and the joy of being a carer, by the wife of a diplomat
Donna Thomson is the wife of the Canadian High Commissioner in London and the mother of a son profoundly disabled with cerebral palsy. The Four Walls of my Freedom, the book she has written about the experience of being his carer, is both an account of looking after a child in pain and a meditation [...]
Rock’n'roll to age by
When I was young, one night a week my father would tuck himself away in our recently built, paper-thin extension, and listen to an hour of big band music to recapture his youth. I was told not to interrupt his reverie. That was the music he liked as he got old, music that made him [...]
Agebomb to hold an event with Nesta in early October
Excellent news: the splendid Marc Freedman will be visiting London from San Francisco for two days in early October and has agreed to be the keynote speaker at an Agebomb event on the new old age, to be held in conjunction with Nesta on the morning of Tuesday October 5. We will be looking at [...]
The precious gift economy of caring vs. box-ticking technocrats
The funding of care in England and Wales is a Byzantine structure of mysterious entitlements and clawbacks. The new government has wasted little time (rather like its predecessor in 1997) in announcing an investigation into this morass – and, with its Commission on the Funding of Care and Support due to report next summer, it’s [...]
Playing for grownups
The first seniors’ playground in London opened three months ago to quite a lot of hoopla and, yesterday, I went along to Hyde Park see how it’s going. The nearby tennis courts were full, a mother and adolescent son were playing mini golf through the rose bushes, there were queues for the table tennis at [...]
The small society
I met the redoubtable Dorothy Runnicles at a conference a couple of months ago and have just read the report she published in February this year on voluntary groups run by and for older people. Her findings are encouraging – suggesting that there is far more community involvement than anyone officially knows anything about – [...]
Me and my grey hair
I have dyed my hair since I was in my thirties and no longer have the faintest idea what colour it is. If I thought there were any chance it might be sexy, smooth and stylish, the sort of white hair you see occasionally on very elegant women, I’d leave it alone; but not being [...]