Friend of CABS wins campaigning award

I delighted to be able to post on the CABS blog that Stephanie Warren (Chairperson of Senior Voice - who are supported by Age UK Milton Keynes) has won the Sheila McKechnie Foundation 'Take Action' award.

The Take Action award is for people aged 60 and over who campaign on issues important to them. Stephanie has been campaigning to have the cheque supported by a cheque guarantee card reinstated by the banks. You can read more about the award and watch Stephanie talking about her campaigning work here.

Stephanie has worked with members of CABS on the lifelong learning project OPT-in and given presentations about her involvement at a number of seminars and conferences. Most recently she joined me at the AEA conference in Stoke-on Trent where we gave a joint presentation about our work.

The ups and downs of later life

This week I attended the annual conference of the Association for Education & Ageing (AEA) that was run in conjunction with the Beth Johnson Foundation. AEA are particularly interested in research, practice and policy related to life long learning.

 The morning keynote was given by Paul Kingstone (Staffordshire University) who spoke about education and mental health in later life. In his keynote Paul challenged the traditional images and explanations of the lifecourse and instead introduced us to the Socioemotive Selectivity Theory (SST). In introducing this theory he argued that in later life as people experience losses and declines in later life (the downs), the sense of that remaining life is finite motivates people to seek gains in emotional and social interactions and and relationship with others (the ups), that 'off set' the losses and declines experienced. In the context of the AEA conference this was of great interest as it helped us all think more carefully about why funding and support for lifelong learning can make an important contribution to quality of later life.

 Paul also challenged us to think about how we construct curriculums of education for people working in health and social care. He questioned the value of curriculums based on traditional theories of biology, psychology and sociology and argued instead that if workers are to know and value ageing, curriculums should draw on philosophy, spiritiuality, the arts, history and intergenerational learning. As a nurse and a university academic I found Paul's keynote very thought provoking as it highlighted how traditional ways of thinking about later life and ageing lead to being more focused on what is lost, not was is gained.

I was joined at the conference by Stephanie Warren from Senior Voice (who are supported by Age UK MIlton Keynes). We gave a joint presentation about our work on The Lifelong Learning Project OPT-in. The presentation was very well received.

 The highlight of the afternoon was the AGM of AEA where I am pleased to be able to report our own Dr Jonathan Hughes was elected as Chairperson.

 As we reflected on the ups and downs of ageing that had been shared through the day, one on the conference attendees, an older woman, said that we should not always think of the ups as good and the downs as bad. She commented that when she goes walking she looks forward to the point of the walk when the leader says 'Its down hill all the way now', and in life she was enjoying going down the hill.

 A very enjoyable and thought provoking conference which I hope some of you may attend next year.

The Paralympic Games

I’m really pleased to see the blog about Jill Reynolds and the link to the heartfelt obituary in The Guardian.

I’m writing this blog a couple of week after the end of the Olympic Games in London and on the day that the Paralympic Games open.

The focus of the Olympics is very much on ‘youth’. Although the Opening ceremony looked back over British history, it culminated with the lighting of the very spectacular cauldron and with the torches, which had been bought in by ageing stars, being passed to the next (younger) generation. Indeed, the whole of the Olympic focuses on the youth of the world coming together to be ‘citius, altius , fortius’ (faster, higher, stronger). Added to this is the very idea of the Olympic ‘legacy’ strongly suggests something valuable being passed on to a younger generation.

Tied in with this overt focus on youth, is a sub-text of elite individualism in which gifted (young) individuals train for years on end to be the best.

However, the focus on elite youth overlooks the importance of social structures in which older people play important roles as coaches, officials and ‘gamesmakers’. The tendency to focus on the athletes who ‘medal’, while creating moments of undeniable drama, does mean that there is a real danger of overlooking and misreading what the ‘legacy’ of the London Olympics could be.

Politicians have been quick to jump on the feel good bandwagon of medal victories as a straw to grasp as the economy bumps along a very murky bottom.

But I think this misses the point. What surely more significant is the value of exercise in promoting and maintaining well-being throughout life. A study published in The Lancet to coincide with the build-up to the Olympics suggested that lack of exercise is now causing as many deaths as smoking across the world. The report, , estimates that about a third of adults are not doing enough physical activity, causing 5.3m deaths a year. That equates to about one in 10 deaths from diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and breast and colon cancer.

In 1978, Susan Sontag suggested that we are all ‘dual citizens’ of the land of the well and the land of the sick, ‘Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ Jill’s last illness, which she set out so candidly in her blogs, showed her becoming a citizen of the land of the sick.

However, wouldn’t it be great to have a legacy we could all share in? Such a legacy might be possible if there was wider recognition that it is only by creating social structures which enable more people to remain in the land of the well for as long as possible.

More of us (of all ages) would benefit from this than from the fetishisation of youth in which chronological age becomes a proxy for fitness and health. Well-being and the opportunity to engage in physical exercise should not be age-rationed but promoted as something that involves people at all stages of life. It might even mean that we would not have to comment on a 54 year old rider winning a gold medal.

It will be interesting to see how age plays out in the Paralympic Games.

Dr. Jonathan Hughes

On Friday 17th August, friends of Jill Reynolds gathered with her family for a memorial service at St Mary the Virgin church in Chipping Camden, Oxfordshire. Jill had died peacefully at her other home in France, with her husband Dave holding her hand, on July 26th. Jill's obituary in the Guardian is here.

As anyone who followed her blogs here and in other places will know, Jill was a very calm and thoughtful person who was unflinching in writing about her illness and impending death, but she was a pains to make it easier for those around her to talk about it, or not talk about it, as they needed to. As Jill described in one of her blogs below, she had managed to eat, drink and sing with people from all aspects of her life before her death, and she was very grateful for being able to do that. I felt that because of how she handled the time between diagnosis just a few months ago, and her death, we at the memorial service were able to think about a life well-lived and a woman well-loved with sadness about her passing but without regrets about things unsaid or undone. A good death. Goodbye Jill, and thanks for being among us.