It has been accepted by many that at a certain age your body will slow down, your brain will begin to shut down you will take retirement and in a certain time scale collapse and die.

Does this sound familiar to you?

The gritty time appears for most to be about the 50s and 60s as we begin to feel that old age is just around the corner. This is after the more robust 40s when it is still believed one has time to change the world. Ten years or more later people start to question again where they are, what they have done and what they are looking forward to. Nobody is very keen on this particular age in life. Most consider us beyond work, beyond fun and certainly beyond sex. It is not so much a general question as to where one has arrived to, it is a more frightening area of is there anything there, any purpose with no job and status, much less money around, few friends and the jolly prospect of 30 years of television and the dreaded nursing home.

For some the answer seems to be to accept fate and hobble on to death. For some it becomes dyed hair and trendy clothes. For others changing a partner for a different, hopefully younger model that seems to be the obvious way forward. Golf comes high to the fore for many as does the seniors meals at the local carvery. Some fly off to the expats colonies in Spain and Portugal and hit the local bars where the sun shines more often and the joints hurt less.

And why not. All of us round about this age may have getting on for 30 more years to play with. We may not have as much we may have more, but to many none of it looks very inviting. There are many of us, so many, all with pensions that are not quite as good as we would like, health not as robust as all that and a smaller selection of friends and family that may or may not want to know us. Is this IT or is there another way to look at it all.