What do care home residents really want?
In this era of growing numbers of old people and little money, care home providers will always be aiming to supply their services more efficiently and cheaply. For the people on the receiving end, on the other hand, all that matters is quality of life. But in this relationship, they are definitely the vulnerable party – [...]
The past is not another country
Making conversation in a care home is hard work. The commonest opening gambit is probably, ‘What did you have for lunch?’ which is not a question to which the answer is going to be a) very interesting, unless Heston Blumenthal has popped in, or b) readily available to anyone with a cloudy memory, let alone [...]
Older people want to shop shock
It is a paradox that older people make up a large and growing number of consumers – presenting a tremendous opportunity – yet they are almost entirely ignored by marketing executives. Over-50s need and want to buy stuff like anyone else, but some 90% of marketing spend is directed at younger people. A report out [...]
Design for living
People of 80 or 90 plus who are eking out their lives in nursing homes with very poor quality of life are, according to New York geriatrician Mark Lachs, an indictment of society’s priorities. ‘I would argue,’ he writes, ‘that the “life extension” these people have experienced – a good deal of it the result [...]
A good reason to get older
There was a fascinating story in the LA Times recently about an artists’ community which convinced me that I now know how I want to live as I get older. Burbank Senior Artists’ Colony is a five-storey building in Los Angeles, offering one-bedroom apartments for rent to people aged over 55. The building also houses [...]
The comfort of strangers
Gillian had a house; Neil needed somewhere to live. Gillian was worried about being alone and the responsibility of keeping things working; Neil was largely retired, and could fix leaking taps. Gillian is 88, Neil 61, and they found each other through Homeshare, one of several local authority experiments to see whether people with space [...]
Choirs go global
This week I attended an extraordinary international singalong in which two choirs of older people, one in Melbourne, the other in Amsterdam, sang to each other as if they were in the same room. I was in London, and I felt I was there (wherever ‘there’ was) too. The event was made possible by video [...]
The secret of youth: flares and orange carpet
And lo, Liz arose from her wheelchair and walked, and it was all down to the swirly-patterned wallpaper. The BBC’s The Young Ones concluded last night with the housemates undergoing a series of tests which purported to show pretending you are living in 1975 can make you fitter, better at remembering things and generally more [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]