Ageing and Attitude

A professor from the University of California, Dilip Jeste, claims that people who think they are ageing well are not necessarily the healthiest individuals. His study of 500 people aged 60 to 98 and living in the community, led him to observe that optimism and effective coping strategies were more important to ageing successfully than ‘traditional measures of health and wellness’. Attitude is more important than physical health, he concludes. A good example, perhaps, of academics discovering what everybody else already knows!

Last year a report was published in this country called ‘Securing Good Care for Older People’, and I have been glancing at its formidable analysis and recommendations on the internet. The author, Sir Derek Wanless, accepts that he is peering into the unknown, that the care of the elderly is a political hot potato (as we said in the last posting), that to help people stay in their own homes is better than residential accommodation and that those who care for the elderly (and there are over five million of them) need better training and resources. He advocates a system of partnership between the individual and the State, which will make it less likely that people will have to sell up their homes to pay for care and argues that the ‘policy-makers’ (his word for government) will have to use existing resources more creatively than at present. Funding comes from different agencies often without consultation and involving multiple applications. One agency should do the lot. Accepting that more thought has to be given to his proposals, he concludes that resources should be equivalent to those of the National Health Service.

No one doubts that people are living longer, though the social consequences of that still need to be recognised. I have been reading an article in The Guardian by Joanna Lyall. She writes about Jeanne Calment, the oldest known person who died at the age of 122 last year. She could be seen riding her bicycle around Arles when she was a 100, lived independently until she was 110, and had a hip operation at 114. A young photographer took a her picture of her when she was 120, and said as he left that he hoped he would see her again the following year. ‘I don’t see why not, she said, ‘you look in pretty good health to me’.

Rather than physical fitness, a positive attitude to life contributes to a sense of wellbeing as we get older. It would seem that a sense of humour helps too!

B.R.

'Who's going to look after Grandma?'

There’s been a lot of talk in the British press and media recently about caring for the elderly. It seems that with a limited social care budget for the young and the old, it’s the young that are winning, though I would question that. (School playing fields have been sold off. Investment in youth leaders and clubs, and the provision of sporting facilities have all declined in the last couple of decades. The increase in criminal behaviour amongst young people must surely be related to that.)

However, with people living longer and pensions under threat, more and more older people are likely to be totally dependent on their own resources. We are told that the State is likely to be unable – or unwilling – to provide accommodation or domiciliary care for the aged and the very old, which for those of us who are travelling that road, is worrying indeed.

Apparently centenarians are the fastest growing section of the U.K. population and are likely to live with less health problems than people who die in their 70’s and 80’s. Thomas Kirkwood, director of Ageing and Health at Newcastle University, is leading a study of 800 85 year-olds to find out what enables people to stay healthy in advanced old age. We aren’t all going to reach the 100’s, and I certainly don’t have the ambition to do so. Health rather than longevity matters most to me. But there is no doubt that people are living longer and will continue to do so. It may feel like a burden to people who are still working – all those taxes to look after us - but it is also a responsibility, and a warning. One day they will be old.

This then becomes a political matter which has hardly begun to be widely considered in the U.K. It’s no good medical science and sensible living prolonging life, if, as we get to the end of it, we are full of anxiety about where we can live, how we can afford to pay our bills and who – if it becomes necessary – will look after us. The ‘grey’ vote is powerful in Britain. We must be the most reliable voting group of any, and with so many younger people being cynical about politicians, we continue to be the ones who are committed to the political process. So, rise up Wrinklies! We must take to the streets, or at least write to our M.P.’s, and join the debate. There are no simple answers, but its time that the questions were faced.

A major social issue is being ignored.

B.R.

When you are over seventy...

…someone said to me , ‘you don’t stay up until midnight to see the new year in’. However asleep by eleven, but then woken up by the fireworks, he reluctantly found himself awake to greet the New Year anyway. Is it just a question of stamina? Or is it that younger people have more investment in the future than older ones, and not only are wide awake to greet a new year but go on doing so, some of them (one of whom I know very well), until breakfast! Optimism versus pessimism? Is that what distinguishes the young from the old?

One of the cult series on the BBC over the last few years has been programmes in which ‘Grumpy’ men and women moan about all sorts of things which annoy them. Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian political columnist, was saying this week that he doesn’t want to be one of ‘this glum, slouching chorus.’ He feels however the tug of it is getting stronger all the time – especially because he will soon be one of them, he claims. He is 40 next month (which of course isn’t old at all, hardly even mature, as many of us know, and as one day he will discover).

Freedland agrees that there is plenty to be glum about as we enter 2007, and he identifies many of the crises in the world which threaten to grow worse, such as global warming, the mass killings and raping in Darfur, the carnage in Iraq, the civil strife in Palestine. These don’t stop as we merely exchange one calendar for another and as he says, they can’t be swept aside as if they don’t matter.

But then he goes on to identify some of the signs of hope that like green shoots are emerging from the blackened earth, such as the political changes in the U.S.A., the anticipated resignation of Tony Blair and a new administration probably with Gordon Brown, both leaders of the Opposition in the U.K. talking about important issues. And then there is the leftward trend in Central and South America and the possibility of new leadership in Europe. He concludes ‘there are reasons to be cheerful after all’.

I am reading a book about the importance of dialogue at the moment. We need a conversation between the young and the old – the hopeful and the grumpy. The grumpy ones – if that’s what being old involves – recognise the dangers of a superficial optimism that ignores what’s really going on in the world. And the young ones can tell us to stop dwelling on the past and to face a future which indeed just because it is tomorrow and not yesterday, can give all of us ‘reasons to be cheerful’ .

B.R.