IT’S ABOUT TIME
In her new book, author challenges stereotypes to help seniors see the perks of a long life
Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Aging World
Camilla Cavendish Harpercollins
LONDON When you ask award-winning journalist Camilla Cavendish what prompted her to write Extra Time, a lively book about the perils and pleasures of growing old, she’s ready with the answers.
One example — her own father. Another — Britain’s House of Lords.
Her father, a respected academic, lost his reason for living after retirement and fell into a deep depression.
“Because of him, I started thinking a lot about attitudes to aging,” Cavendish says. Her book deals movingly with her father’s inability to retain a sense of purpose in his life. “He was actually very fit and healthy, but saw himself as old long before he should have done,” she says.
Richard Cavendish’s decline coincided with a period in Cavendish’s own career when her work both inside and outside of government was alerting her to the new challenges that a growing elderly population posed to society. As a senior adviser to former U.K. prime minister David Cameron, she found herself working on “a whole series of issues, including health and social care, and on this roller-coaster coming at us in my own country, and in fact most countries — relating to the tensions arising from early retirement, and welfare and health costs that are going to bankrupt governments if we don’t do something.”
Does this mean that she ended up writing a bleakly cautionary book, drenched in foreboding? Not at all.
“I ended up writing a very optimistic book because of the people I met along the way — those that I would call rebels against fate who are all over the world, people who are deciding they don’t want to be old. They are challenging the stereotypes in all sorts of ways that I find very exciting.”
Extra Time, published in Canada by Harpercollins, is arriving in North America in a year when septuagenarians will be battling for the White House, when 88-yearold John le Carré’s latest novel remains on the bestseller lists and when Clint Eastwood, 89, recently announced he has no intention of retiring from moviemaking.
Cavendish has no time for a society that expects its senior citizens to put on the shawl once they reach a certain age. Instead, she mourns the squandering of unfulfilled potential. The evidence is around her every time she enters the House of Lords where, as Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, she sits as an independent peer.
“The Lords is full of extraordinary people who have been put out to grass too early. The level of experience is absolutely fascinating.”
She doesn’t believe in institutions that set arbitrary age limits — whether the House of Lords or, in Canada, the Senate and Supreme Court. “I think it’s wrong. The more time I spend in the Lords, the more it’s become clear to me that the quality of the person has very little to do with his or her age. Yes, I think you should probably leave when you become incapable of making a contribution, but there are people of 90 there (who) have more to offer than people who are 30.”
Cavendish, 51, has just finished a gym session across the street, and that’s a cue for her to rhapsodize about the virtues of exercise for the old.
“I’ve become evangelical about exercise because the research seems to suggest that even a limited amount really makes a difference,” she says.
She herself is pushing hard against outmoded concepts of old age. “It’s not old age that’s getting longer — it’s middle age,” she writes. As for the threat of dementia — well, statistics suggest its incidence is actually falling. The title of her book, Extra Time, refers to what she sees as the renaissance now enjoyed by many of those once deemed elderly by society.
So, going back to the sad story of her father, she writes: “I feel strongly that older people should not be made to give up work and that we must challenge the concept of ‘golden’ early retirement.” At a time when governments around the world are increasingly confronting the challenge and the cost of an aging society, Cavendish considers it crucial that the system reform itself in order to encourage older citizens to continue living a healthy, fulfilling life.
“What we have to do is empower them to continue as productive members of society. Otherwise, we will have a generational clash where the younger generation is saying ‘we’re not prepared to take on the burden of supporting all these older people.’”
These concerns have resulted in a wide-ranging book full of fascinating examples of the way an older society can be harnessed for the benefit of all. You learn about the vital role of the grandmother in Zimbabwe society, Japan’s success with “silver centres” that ensure the elderly continue feeling useful, striking new ways of delivering elderly care in the Netherlands — and, yes, the importance of balance exercises to reduce the incidence of falls. But Cavendish also stresses the urgent need for government reform on both sides of the Atlantic.
“My politics is centre right on the whole because I don’t like big government and think that people should be allowed to make their own choices. But I’m also a pragmatist and I look at what works. What works very often allows people to do what is right for them but in this country we have failed to provide them with a proper safety net. There are areas where we are still leaving too many people to fend for themselves.”
Cavendish has an abundant faith in the capacity for a rapidly growing senior population to continue living fulfilling and happy lives. And she’s quick to name a glowing example of someone who’s definitely “with it.”
“The Canadian I love most is Margaret Atwood. I interviewed her a year or two ago. She’s a very feisty lady who has just published her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. And she has this huge number of Twitter followers. Where did anybody get the idea that the old can’t understand digital technology? That’s crazy. She’s incredibly able.”