Ageing

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways. I am a devotee of these charming holidays, as invented by Wallace Arnold, even though when one first catches sight of one’s fellow travellers it’s a frightening vision of what’s up ahead: the sticks, walking-frames, mobility scooters,

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most

A few years back, a friend from Newcastle was down in London and I was giving him a tour of the town. At various points I stopped and pointed out where various friends had lived. ‘That’s where my late friend X used to live.’ ‘That’s where my much-missed friend Y had his shop.’ Eventually my delightfully straight-talking friend stopped me and said: ‘Are any of your friends fucking alive?’ I’m happy to report that the answer was ‘yes’, but it did make me think about something I’ve unwittingly done all my life – which is to have a disproportionate number of friends who are much older than me. One of

I would be the first to admit that the NHS has done a lot for my mother this year. It gave her the emergency blood transfusion that undoubtedly saved her life, followed by several iron infusions and umpteen scans and tests. It has treated a series of infected leg ulcers and provided consultations with senior medical figures and countless more outpatient appointments. It has supplied her with swanky new hearing aids and nursed her through Covid. During her four months in hospital, in two separate stays of nine and seven weeks, it came up with three meals a day, not all of them involving ravioli, mash and gravy, and a

My 91-year-old father-in-law has always had a terror of hospitals. This dates from his time as a Royal Marine when, just after the second world war, he was infected with polio by a contaminated needle. The first he knew of it was when a visiting dignitary came on board ship and he was unable to lift his arm in salute. Ever since, he made it very clear that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital under any circumstances, ever. But last week he was admitted to A&E with a high temperature and I didn’t fret for one moment that he’d be alarmed. Why? He’s got late-stage dementia. He’s forgotten

In her cover story last week, Camilla Cavendish argued that we could keep mentally fit in old age through ‘physical exercises, social contact and new challenges’. The ancients reached a similar conclusion 2,500 years ago. When the Roman poet Juvenal (2nd century ad) reflected on what a man should pray for, his first suggestion was a healthy mind in a healthy body. That had already been standard doctrine for 600 years. The historian Herodotus (5th century bc) noted how many different peoples saw a connection between diet, drink, exercise and lifespan; and it was Greek doctors who argued that mental health also came into the equation. Others then joined in.

‘We are all going to live longer, so why not invest in it?’­ seems to be the premise of Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi’s new book, Juvenescence – Investing in the Age of Longevity. Mellon and Chalabi forecast that within the next 20 years, the average life expectancy in the developed world will rise to between 110 and 120. As Mellon explains: ‘The increase in life expectancy is due to environmental factors, the rise of universal medical treatment, antibiotics, improved diet. The next step [in science] is going to change the fundamental biology of the human being, by genetic editing, stem cells, pharmaceutical intervention, as well as tissue regeneration.’ Hooray,