By Rose Rouse
ESSAY
Seven years ago, I was in a hot tub with a group of friends who were sick of being depicted as worn out, unsexy and uninteresting. One of them, Suzanne Noble, a serial entrepreneur and jazz singer, and I, a journalist and poet, decided to create Advantages of Age – a social enterprise which challenges the accepted narratives around ageing.
Since then, Advantages of Age has become a website, a very lively FB group, has made films about death and dying as well as staging dance performances with a group of over-60s and other events from poetry evenings to awards ceremonies celebrating people and organisations doing crucial pro-ageing work.
Early on, we did an interview from the hot tub in Suzanne’s garden for The Sunday Times magazine Style and they called us “the punks of getting older”. We love that description – I actually worked at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976 when The Clash played – because it actually captures our non-conformist attitudes to ageing.
I curate the FB group Advantages of Age – Baby Boomers and Beyond – as well as commissioning articles for the website, often supporting new writers in the group. The idea is to reflect the wild terrain that we live in as active, rebellious oldsters. And give voice to the plethora of activities we’re involved in, from rock climbing (my partner still climbs and abseils at 80) to tennis with lots of dancing, van living and festival going. And, of course, these stories include both sex and death because both are nearby and both are still taboos.
Older people being sexy is still slightly offbeat and unpalatable – although I’m so glad the 70-something actors, Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters put sexiness on the screens in TrueLove, the recent Channel 4 drama about assisted dying, one of our campaigns, by the way – and death is still so often cossetted away far from the real world.
There’s still an old age narrative that threads through fiction and drama which emanates frailty. Too many walking sticks and stooped backs. There are still too many tabloid stories with granny or grandpa in the headlines when these are older people performing fantastic feats and yet they are reduced to a stereotypic cliche based around reproduction. Please release us.
I have edited an anthology of inspirational stories called Sex, Death and Other Inspiring Stories. Writers range from Older Women Rock founder, artist and poet Leah Thorn – who worked with the Profanity Embroidery Group t
