People are set to live increasingly long lives, and reaching 100 will soon be “commonplace”, say experts. According to Jim Oeppen, from Cambridge University in the UK, and Dr James Vaupel, from the Max Plank Institute for Demography in Rostock, Germany, centenarians will become unexceptional within the lifetimes of people alive today.
Writing in the journal “Science”, they said there was no sign there was a natural limit to ageing, as some experts had predicted. Their claims are based on patterns seen since 1840. Since then, the highest average life expectancy has improved by a quarter of a year every year.
Average lifespan around the world is around double what it was 200 years ago – around 65 for men and 70 for women. If that trend continues, people in the country with the highest life expectancy would live to an average age of 100 in about six decades.
Japanese women are currently the likeliest to live long lives, on average reaching 84.6 years of age. Japanese men are the second longest male survivors, reaching an average age of 77.6 years old.
The British rank well down the list. Men come in at 14th in the world table, living to an average age of 75 while women are in 18th place, living on average to 79.9.
In France, there is a big difference between men and women’s life expectancy. Men came 16th in the world table, with an average lifespan of 74.9, with French women in fourth place with a life expectancy of 82.4 years.
Archive for February, 2007
Designer labels, including Jaeger, John Rocha, Weardowney and Lowie are employing women in their sixties, seventies and eighties to churn out traditional hand-knitted items of clothing and accessories.
As fashion takes a retro step, designers are snapping up women ’of a certain age’ who retain what is an increasingly rare skill to produce sought after fashion items. So sought-after are these fashion ladies that in some cases their identities are being kept secret to prevent them being poached by rival labels.
A big thumbs down to the Germans for building new playgrounds for the over-60s.
The play areas will not feature roundabouts and bouncy castles but they will include large chess boards, a corner to play cards, a place to play boules, padded surfaces for badminton and possibly – wait for it – seesaws.
Horst Forther, Nuremberg’s Sports Commissioner, said: ‘It will be a place where the senior generation can find a refuge from younger people.’
Andrea Weber, a social worker, said: ‘Retired people need a space to be themselves without someone coming along and spilling ice cream on their trousers or breakdancing.’
We say ‘Stuff it in your lederhosen!’ This is just the kind of mindless segregation, age discrimination and stereotyping that perpetuates myths about the older generation. We want to be the ones spilling ice cream and breakdancing, not shoved away in a corner to ‘indulge’ in wild games of bridge or boules.
Limits and restrictions are not words in our dictionary. In our book, living life to the max means anything, any time, anywhere!
Recent Comments