reading

Brian Schofield’s travel writing and journalism have appeared in The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, GQ, The New Statesman and Condé Nast Traveller. In 2003 he won the Visit USA award for best British travel writer covering North America. His first book, Selling Your Father’s Bones, was published in Britain, France and the USA, and was shortlisted for the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature by a United Kingdom or Commonwealth author under thirty-five. He teaches History and English at Hurstpierpoint College, Sussex, and lives with his wife, Harriet, and their two sons, Theo and Thomas.

Praise for Brian Schofield’s writing:

‘His research has a modern, passionate eye for personal stories,’ Bronwen Maddox, THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘He listens carefully to Native voices and emphasises their resilience then and now,’ THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘A quiet fury burns through his careful prose,’ Giles Whitell, THE TIMES

‘A compelling historical travelogue that’s told in fine, expressive prose,’ Piers Moore Ede, TRAVELLER MAGAZINE

‘A beautifully written account,’ Chris Hannan, SCOTTISH HERALD

‘Schofield’s book, which is admirably ambitious in scope, could well turn out to be a future classic,’ GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE

Published by Bookbaby 2013

13909 NE Airport Way

Portland, OR 97230

877-961-6878

ISBN: 9781483503783

Jacket photograph (Afghanistan) by Brian Schofield 2009

Brian Schofield asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

For Harriet

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Mark Twain

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE – FLORIDA

CHAPTER TWO – CALABRIA

CHAPTER THREE – KENYA

CHAPTER FOUR – TANZANIA

CHAPTER FIVE – TOBAGO

CHAPTER SIX – THE COOK ISLANDS

CHAPTER SEVEN – AFGHANISTAN

CHAPTER EIGHT – TOKYO, AND HOME

INTRODUCTION

Consider the old, who have gone before us along a road which we must all travel in our turn, and it is good that we should ask them of the nature of that road.

Socrates

I began this book because I missed my grandfather. He has now passed, but when this journey began, he had, sadly, merely gone. Gone to a small collection of vivid and endlessly repeating memories, to a few sharp, lucid moments of anger and frustration at missing words and nameless faces, then to long stretches of waking sleep. I missed him desperately, and I keenly felt the loss of his influence over my life. I had been richly privileged to know him, was lucky enough even to have reached young adulthood with both he and my grandmother still in good health, but now that privilege was being slowly, irrevocably lost.

Born in 1918, Theo Legate Schofield was one of the last of the ‘general surgeons’, as comfortable whipping out a gallbladder as tinkering with a hip. He’d served in the British Royal Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic, and been posted to a hospital ship off the coast of Normandy during D-Day – never once speaking of what he saw that bloody morning. He was retired by the time of my first memories, not a spoiling or indulgent grandfather, more an instructive, improving one, endeavouring to teach me to think before I opened my mouth, and how to carve a roast, to appreciate his wine, to put any truly important message into a letter, and above all to treat life with the seriousness of purpose it merited. He and my father shared many passions – for the sport of rugby, for dinner-table discussion, for over-eating – and I was inculcated with them over weekend visits and summer holidays. All three of us were drawn to live and work in America during our lives – by the sincerity, the scholarship, the adventure and certainly the food – and all three, I think, felt so much at home in the States we could easily have taken permanent citizenship, but for family considerations.

As I reached adulthood and my grandfather grew more frail and forgetful, he, perhaps counter-intuitively, made steadily more of a contribution to my identity – I sent him a postcard from every stop on my nascent travel-writing career, we exchanged letters regularly, and I tried to visit as often as possible to hear the stories and memories that shone a light on what, as the end of life approached, still resonated and remained. I dedicated my first book to him – he lived to receive his copy, and though by that stage he was too tired to read, he understood the dedication and let me know how proud he was. I was the more proud, however – I am indebted to him for great tranches of my personality, outlook and identity.

But once his life-force had all but left him, I also felt myself, in some way, departing a very special, very fortunate psychological enclave – that of a man in his early thirties, who was still able to face life with the advice and example of his grandfather, essentially his friend, to aid him. And I was now entering a less healthy, but much more populated place. I was now much more typical, much more normal – I had no older friends. Outside family, I had no older acquaintances. My grandmother was still alive, but our relationship, while very close, was not founded on wisdom and guidance in the same way. And beyond her I didn’t, in fact, know anybody over the age of 70 by name. Not one person. I had joined the Western cultural mainstream, in which the elders are everywhere, more numerous than they have ever been, and yet, somehow, they are also nowhere. I began to ask myself: isn’t there a different, better way for a society – and for each one of us – to engage with old age?

‘Britain is not a place to enjoy getting old in . . . senior citizens are more discriminated against than any other group in our society,’ was Janet Street-Porter’s complaint in the Independent on Sunday in 2004. John Mortimer’s final column for the Observer in 2008 declared that in England, ‘you feel that the old are merely tolerated’. Richard Ingrams in the Independent warmed to the theme that ‘If anywhere is “no country for old men” it is the UK,’ while Germaine Greer lectured in the Guardian that ‘Gerontophobia is penetrating, instinctive and pretty well universal’. Even Michael Parkinson let his affability slip in the Daily Mail in 2008: ‘As we become more and more obsessed with “yoof”, we brush aside the senior generation, relegating it to the foot locker of priority, hoping it will quietly curl up and go away.’

Do we ‘do’ old age that badly in Britain? The facts do appear to support the complaints. It seems that the connective tissue that binds the oldest generation to those that follow them is atrophying by the year. Most individual families may still exchange tremendous love and care across the ages, but as a collective we’re allowing far too many older people to slip out of sight and mind. As an example, a full quarter of British people over 80 have no meaningful face-to-face relationships with anyone beyond their four walls. In 2008 almost half of Britons over 65 agreed with the statement: ‘These days, the TV is my main form of company.’

And shut away in the shadows, it’s much easier to be abandoned. Over two million pensioners in Britain, around one in five, live below the poverty line. One in three lives in ‘fuel poverty’ – which means, in practical terms, sometimes sitting in a cold house to save money. And this is one of the rare cases where our national neglect of citizens in need leads, unarguably, to their deaths: ‘excess winter mortality’ in the UK runs to around 27,000 souls a year. England’s annual cull of cold old folks is almost twice as large, per capita, as in the Baltic chill of Denmark, Finland or Germany.

And while an old-age nursing home is becoming an ever less likely final port of call in our country – residents’ numbers are steadily falling, relative to the elderly population – the jaw-dropping dreadfulness of far too many of these places (enabled by a hopelessly lax government inspection regime) and the joyless, almost punitive lack of stimulation, interaction and personal identity they offer – two fifths of care home residents are clinically depressed – speak of lack of interest on a national scale.

But while far too many endure the stereotype of invisible misery in old age, the whole picture is much more complicated than that. Away from stuffy care homes and frigid front rooms, the luckier, healthier, wealthier elder Britons are enjoying a later life of greater comfort, opportunity and longevity that at any point in our history. Britons over 55 hold around 80 per cent of all the private wealth in the UK, and if you reached 65 in good health today, congratulations, you can now expect an historically unimaginable decade and a half of continued vitality. We shouldn’t overplay the significance of the ‘lucky old’, however. They remain a vocal, visible minority – the wealthiest 10 per cent of Britons aged over 60 hold more assets than the poorest 80 per cent combined, and in the poorest parts of the country, ‘healthy life expectancy’ is still below 50 years, and may in fact be falling.

Yet something in the high-profile conduct of our fortunate old (and particularly the reaction of their resentful juniors) still speaks of a culture ill at ease with its elders. We talk so often of our disaffected youth, but retirements dedicated to online fury, gated living or permanent departure to the Algarve surely suggest alienation and disaffection to spare – mirrored by the constant complaints from below, that the elders aren’t fighting fair in the ‘war between the generations’. This conflict is most obviously played out in the political sphere, where policies and pronouncements fervently target the ‘grey vote’, as if a pensioner is incapable of caring about primary schools.

That something is culturally, holistically wrong with how we respond to later life in the UK is supported by the psychological health of today’s elders. Around a quarter of Britons over 65 show enough symptoms of depression to merit some treatment, while between 10 and 15 per cent have full-blown clinical depression. (And those figures don’t include care home or hospital residents.) The most remarkable fact about such levels of distress is not how high they are, but that they are roughly in line with the general populace. Since the Second World War, mental distress has been rising throughout almost all advanced countries, but as one of the largest surveys of all the data concluded: ‘It is striking that the rise in psychosocial disorders over the last 50 years is a phenomenon that applies to adolescents and young adults and not to older people [my italics].’ That was written in 1995. Then, psychologists speculated that the elders born in the first third of the century possessed the skills to resist depression – sociability, a sense of duty, faith in human nature, sensible expectations – that the children of the 50s, 60s and 70s apparently lacked. Now, though, it seems the final emotionally resilient generation is passing on (by 2010, any living veteran of World War II, for example, had exceeded life expectancy) and is being replaced by elders born late enough to possess the traits that have brought on the post-war ‘depression epidemic’ (unsociability, individualism, diminished faith in human nature, unreasonable expectations). Or, alternatively, being old in Britain is quite rapidly becoming less and less psychologically tolerable. Probably both are accurate.

Finally, of course, our uneasy relationship with old age is revealed in our discussions of the elderly to come: a terrifying burden, an ‘agequake’, a ‘grey tsunami’ or a ‘demographic time bomb’, primed to derail Britain in the imminent future. It’s as if the personal dread of old age that we express in cosmetic surgery and vicious TV shows such as 10 Years Younger has been expanded into a national phobia of an ageing future. In simple numbers, by 2030 almost a quarter of us will be over 65. By then, unless retirement laws are radically re-written, there will be just two working-age Britons for every retired one, with seemingly unmanageable implications for the NHS, social care, pensions and tax revenue.

But this is not an invasion. Not the colonisation of a youthful country by grey aliens. It’s me. Set fair, hopefully, to be 65 in 2040, I (and not my retired father) am the agequake made flesh: the proportion of over 65s in the UK is predicted to peak around that year. The ‘oldest’ moment in British history will be my old age – and if we haven’t resolved our relationship with the elders by the time I get there, that future does indeed look grim. Illuminating and improving the experience of old age in Britain isn’t just an important challenge, it’s an urgent one.

The good news, though, is that we have the capacity to change – now, more than ever. My parents’ generation, moving towards old age now, re-wrote the definition of youth in the 1960s and seem determined to redefine later life in the decades to come. My own generation are in the process of challenging the previous conventions of middle age, refusing to abandon our muddy music festivals or T-shirts and jeans, at the age our parents were wearing a tie to Sunday lunch. The ‘rules’ of life’s stages have grown fluid and diffuse; the chance to plot our own course is greater than ever.

And what an opportunity this represents: for later life is not, by definition, a bummer. Quite the opposite. In many developed nations – Germany and Holland, to name two – surveys have suggested that happiness and satisfaction with life actually peak at the age of around 75. And a survey of elder Americans by Pew Research found that the majority enjoy later life significantly more than they expected to, citing reduced stress, more time for friends and family, and (for around two thirds of seniors) fewer money worries. And if we could bridge that vital disconnect – between the fear of old age and the much more benign reality – the benefits could be enormous. A survey of young and middle-aged Americans in 1968, who were then contacted again in 1998, found that the people with a positive, optimistic attitude towards ageing had, by the time they’d ‘crossed the border’, experienced fewer strokes and heart attacks – in fact they lived, on average, seven and a half years longer than those who’d believed, in their youth, that old age would be a time of feeble helplessness. Their prophecies came true. And I can’t help feeling that this self-fulfilling dread applies to the national challenge of ageing, too – the more people expect the greying of their country to be a source of nothing but conflict and imbalance, the more it will be.

So here’s the essential problem. There’s too much fear and anxiety about growing old, both as individuals and as a nation, and it threatens to be self-fulfilling. A time of great potential and possibilities – again, personal and national – is being talked down, and looked down upon. Meanwhile, though, it’s true that there are also too many elders whose lives could be happier and more fulfilled.

And as I contemplated my own life, without my grandfather’s influence, I came to believe that there might be an essential solution to this crisis facing the entire developed world. We all need to find a way to place the elders back at the heart of our lives. On a personal level, we all need the role models that can teach us how best to age, how to look forward to this time and ensure we make the most of it. And at a national level, we need to find and celebrate the roles that the growing ranks of older people can fulfil, and learn how best to fulfil our responsibilities to them in return. And, when we ourselves are older, we need those private and public roles to make our time as satisfying as possible. As the famous psychotherapist Erik Erikson wrote of the modern American elders: ‘Their overall role remains quite unclear. The fabric of society, the centre, does not hold the aged.’

He set the following challenge to resolve this problem: ‘Perhaps what we need today is clear insight into how the elders in our present society can become more integral co-workers in community life.’

And I resolved to take up that challenge. There are so many different ways of ageing, and I decided to use my skills to investigate them.

But how could I do this? What could I contribute? I spent a few weeks buried in my local university library, investigating how the experience, and purpose, of later life has varied across the spread of time. Perhaps the best examples to follow to re-organise and re-think old age, to bring the elders back into the heart of modern Western society, lay in the past?

And indeed, the past is littered with examples of the almost unimaginable power elders once held in pre-modern communities: the Kamilaroi aborigines of New South Wales counted lying to an elder as a capital offence; the Toda of southern India instructed the young men to lie on the floor during village meetings, so the old men could rest their feet on the juveniles’ heads; and the Iroquois Native Americans gave old women the power to stop a war. Other such genuflections to longevity abound.

But I soon felt that simply revisiting old anthropological manuscripts and oral histories wasn’t enough. Surely, to redefine and become inspired by our ‘grey’ future we have to learn from societies and people facing the challenges of the present? We have to discover how others deal with the world as it is today. And despite the increasing homogenisation of our planet, the loss of languages and tribal identities, there are still many different ways to be a human being on this earth – and, it soon emerged, many different ways to be an older person. I discovered that later life still came with wildly varied roles, responsibilities, privileges, troubles and even fears. Leader, teacher, judge, clown, village policeman, family tyrant, social whirlwind, surrogate parent, healer, soothsayer, even witch – to be an elder can mean so many things, in different corners of the world.

A plan began to form – to travel the world (or as much of the world as I could afford) in search of different cultural models of old age, to discover what the modern West can learn from how other peoples treat and interact with their elders (and also what we should perhaps be more proud of). Along the way, I also planned to gather from individual elders a sort of route map to a good old age; advice and guidance on what, from the perspective of longevity, truly matters in life, and what both empowers and encumbers a happy last act. I was going meet dozens of grandfathers – and grandmothers – and seek the wisdom I now craved.

My mission would hopefully reflect the journey we have to take as a culture: both personally, and nationally, the experience of old age will never improve until we begin to honestly anticipate it, to set aside denial and resentment and prepare ourselves, and our country, for the fact that, if we are lucky, we will be old one day. Some of my observations may perhaps seem naïve or ignorant to those experiencing later life first hand, but hopefully that’s a forgivable sin – we surely can’t bridge the generation gap without attempting to peer across it.

Many of the cultures I would visit would seem older and simpler than the modern West. But before the past, I had to visit the future. I had to visit Florida.

PROLOGUE

The King of the High Valley sat cross-legged on a faded russet carpet in his formal guest room, rocking with laughter.

‘You have to excuse me, I don’t mean to insult a guest in my country, but you must understand – to we Afghans, you Westerners . . . Well, we think you’re a little like animals. You’re not completely civilised. And in part that’s because we’ve heard about how you treat your old ones. You move all around the world, you leave your parents alone at home, you disobey and neglect them, you do not show them half the love that we show.’

I’d needed a pretty substantial support team to get this deep into the mountains – a jeep driver, two translators (no one spoke both English and the local dialect) and a camp cook, plus one of the King’s sons was crouched in attendance, so the room was crowded with nodding, chuckling men. The King warmed to his theme of pale-faced eccentricity:

‘You know, right now there are two groups of young Americans living in little tents on the upper pasture. One of the groups is counting the deer. That’s all they do – the nomads are starving to death up there, and the Americans are counting the deer. And the other lot – they take photographs of the grass. They want to take a photograph of every type of grass on the pasture. Why are they doing this?’

‘Well,’ I answered through the laughter, politely trying to conceal my waning patience, ‘we Westerners may not have enough love for our old ones, but we do really care about our deer and our grasses.’

The translators laughed so hard they could barely pass the message on through their tears, and when the joke finally reached him the King buckled with a roar of delight. It took ten minutes for the room to calm down. It was as if the feeble humour had been supercharged by satisfaction – that after years of bedraggled but righteous outsiders getting babysat up the valley to tell these tribespeople how they were going to electrify their homes, purify their water, liberate their daughters and enumerate their fauna, one of the visitors had finally cracked, and admitted that ours was in fact the inferior culture, the less human and caring way of ordering the world.

And I was here, many days from home, shivering and breathing hard on the roof of the world, to learn if they were right.

CHAPTER ONE

Florida

Younger Next Year. Grow Young. Stop Ageing Now! Stay Young, Start Now. Feel Thirty for the Next Fifty Years. Future Youth: How to Reverse the Ageing Process. Live Now, Age Later. Ten Weeks to a Younger You.

The Self-Help section of Haslam’s bookshop, St Petersburg, Florida

In the end, the discovery that one is old is inescapable, but most Americans are not prepared to make it.

David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America

Thanks to the dark miracle of the internet, and the almost incontinent public openness of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, anybody can listen to Russell and Laura Dorner’s final moments, their private apocalypse just left, thoughtlessly, on perpetual online display.

The emergency call begins with a slight pause, then Russell Dorner’s wavering voice speaks slowly and methodically, as if reading from a piece of paper.

‘911, I’m just letting you know that me and my wife are going to commit suicide right now. We’ve had all we can take . . .’

The dispatcher breaks in, urgently: ‘What’s going on?’

The interruption throws Dorner. He begins to sob, struggling to form words between shuddering breaths. ‘Well, she’s bed-ridden and can’t do nothing . . . My back went out today. I can’t pick her up. I can’t even bend over. And we want to go alone, together.’

Panicking a little, the dispatcher says, ‘Let’s get someone to come out there and help you out . . . Do you have any family . . . ?’

The call ends with the muffled crack of two gunshots.

The dispatcher sent two deputies round to the Dorners’ home, in their low-rent Florida retirement community, where they found the 79-year-old Laura in bed and her 80-year-old husband on the floor beside her, lying next to the gun and the phone. Neighbours said that Laura had been incapacitated by a neurological illness, while Russell had just got old. The couple hadn’t received regular family visitors, the neighbours said – they had no kids together, and Russell had a daughter from a previous relationship, but they never spoke.

The couple had carefully laid out their cremation instructions, financial papers and address book, in neat piles, for the police to find. They didn’t want to cause any unnecessary trouble.

‘Welcome to Shell Point, folks,’ declared the minibus driver over his shoulder. ‘This place is a lot like Disneyland – if you’re not happy here, they’ll make you happy.’

After a short drive through quiet, airy streets, we stepped off into the shady town square. The village church stood open behind us, facing a public pavilion where a ragtime band were entertaining the long queue for the hot-dog stall. A giant buffet restaurant, plus a smaller café and a gleaming, brassy bar were all open for business, as was a community centre where voluntary groups were taking donations and signatures for causes large and small. Lush greenery was everywhere, reducing our view of the surrounding structures to glimpses of whitewash and windows, but street signs pointed to the bank, the hospital, the apartment blocks, the health centre and the wide streets of sprawling mansion bungalows. Water was everywhere, in ponds, canals and inlets. This was a man-made island, a dredged-up addition to Florida’s Gulf Coast, now converted into a bustling, gregarious small town – but one that you had to be over sixty years old to move into.

I wandered into the shade of the church, where a dashing blond man was walking between the aisles, delivering the sales pitch we were all there to hear:

‘. . . And I’m not just talking to you today as an employee of this community, but as a customer – my parents are residents here, so’s my father-in-law. I believe in Shell Point so much, I can sell it to my parents.

‘We are the largest continuing care retirement community in Florida, we have over 2,200 residents in total right now, and 850 staff. What we offer here is “Lifecare” – how many of you have heard that term before?

‘Well, you’re probably here because you’re thinking about your future, and asking those “What if?” questions: “What if something happens to me, or to my spouse? I don’t want my children to worry, my nephews and nieces.” Well, Lifecare answers those questions.’

At quite a price, it emerged. The Powerpoint slides flicked past the roomful of silent fifty- and sixty-somethings, explaining that getting into Shell Point required an entrance fee ranging from $103,000 for life in a tiny studio apartment to $552,000 for a rambling waterfront bungalow. That was just for occupancy, though: the company still owned the property, the entrance fee was merely upfront rent. The rest of your rent was paid monthly: from around $1,300 for the studio up to $4,500 for the pad.

In return, you got a ‘resort retirement’. Shell Point had four restaurants, two gyms, a championship golf course, three libraries, four pools, a residents’ orchid house, a theatre, a television studio, 75 boat ramps, two hotels, plus a current count of 69 community clubs and associations that included a ‘university’ and a globe-hopping travel club. Then, when all that had driven you to exhaustion, the real selling point kicked in – apparently complete liberation from the worrisome ordeal of securing old-age care in modern America.

‘What the Lifecare contract says, essentially, is that if you pay your entrance fee and monthly fee, when you need it, we will provide you with unlimited assisted living and nursing home care, for as long as you are here. Unlimited. We have five physicians on staff, up to 10 specialist clinics a week, our own home healthcare agency, our own pharmacy, an entire hospital floor dedicated to memory care, a hospice, an Alzheimer’s garden . . .’

It was an enticing pitch – a ‘young old’ age of constant activity, fine weather and reliable company, followed by an ‘old old’ experience that was under your complete control, with no chance of your children spending their weekends looking for a care home to drop you in, no agonised negotiations over home visits and lifts to the hospital. It was no surprise to learn that Shell Point, despite a cataclysm in America’s property market, only had space for about twenty new arrivals, and that its expansion plans roamed over the surrounding swampland.

‘The average age of people coming into Shell Point is around 72, but our youngest residents are about 55 to 56 [many people, it turns out, try to sneak into age-restricted communities early]. And our oldest is 104 – that’s nearly a 50-year spread. We have people here whose parents and grandparents stayed here, and even parents and children here, right now, staying at the same time!’ My fellow listeners, notably, asked the detailed questions of the successfully sold-to, rather than the broad sweeps of the unconvinced.

I, meanwhile, did a few hasty calculations. The average Shell Point resident paid around $250,000 to get in, then $2,500 a month (which increased by over 3 per cent a year). A healthy 70-year-old American has a life expectancy of 14 years, meaning they would drop over three quarters of a million dollars on Shell Point, before potentially dropping dead on the golf course without ever needing a moment’s nursing. It was a pretty tasty business model – and there was a further twist. A gentleman in a white Navy Veteran’s cap got to his feet:

‘I’m sorry, I just want to check something. Did you say there was a physical exam to get into Shell Point?’

‘Yes, there is. If you apply to Shell Point, we do ask you to take a physical, and four lab tests.’ The tests were justified, the salesman argued, by public safety. ‘One of the things we’re really looking for is this – if there was a fire alarm, would you understand it, and would you be able to get yourself out? So a lot of people who don’t get in to Shell Point, it’s because of dementia.’

It made, of course, perfect business sense – the real margins lay with the ‘young old’, not the sickly. But it would soon emerge that this was also the perfect image of my time in Florida, and in many ways the epitome of modern American senior living. For this was a place in which later life had the potential to be more liberated, energetic and entertaining than anywhere else in the world. As long as you had plenty of money – and provided you didn’t actually grow old.

I hopped onto a golf cart for a tour of the rest of the community. A few golfers were out in the midday sun, in their crisp white shorts and polo shirts, but Shell Point’s spotless streets were largely deserted. Every balcony was empty, the silence was absolute. But things were noisier at The Woodlands, a cluster of four Las Vegas-style tower blocks, gathered around yet another epic restaurant complex where my party of potential purchasers were greeted by Shell Point staff eager to tour apartments and talk contracts. I wandered off to talk to a couple of the residents.

Betty and Colleen were sitting chatting in the lobby of The Woodlands. Betty was in her eighties, Colleen her late sixties – though estimates were tricky as they had identical hair colour, a radiant battery copper.

Betty beamed a welcoming smile, and enthusiastically told a courageous, inspirational story: ‘Well, my husband and I retired to Florida, then when he passed away, I thought: “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do with my life? I have to make a change.” So I moved in here. And you have to give yourself time in a place like this, time to leap in. After a while I felt ready, and I took a breath and said, “Right, I’m going to look at this list of daily activities, and I’m going to do everything that interests me. And I filled up every single day, and just made so many friends. Mostly, I volunteer – that’s what really attracted me to Shell Point, the volunteering opportunities, and that’s where my time goes now.’

Colleen, wide-eyed with eagerness, leapt in: ‘I mean, we are all just so busy here. My diary is full from seven a.m. to five thirty p.m., every day – I’m exhausted! There’s just no spare time to sit in front of the TV and get old.’

Was that the big attraction of life here, the social whirl?

‘No,’ said Colleen, with Betty in vigorous agreement, “it’s the independence. That’s what we all talk about, being independent. None of us want our children, our daughters, to have to look after us, to worry about us later on. It’s basically a deal: you sell your house, you move in here and you say to your kids, “Hey, I just spent your inheritance – but in return, you don’t ever have to worry about me again, I took care of everything.”’

But what about living in a town of over 2,000 people, and no kids?

‘Oh, you see a few kids,’ said Betty, who had no grandchildren of her own. ‘They visit your friends, so they’re about.’ None were visible today.

‘And people worry when they move here that they’ll lose touch with their family, but you can never escape your family,’ insisted Colleen, rolling her eyes. ‘I have grandchildren over in Washington State, and they just love coming to have their holidays here. I get to see them every other year, and that’s great!’

Cypress Cove, Jamaica Bay, Renaissance Preserve, Park Club, Hidden Oaks – the giant curved stone signs sped by as I made a short drive north up the Gulf Coast, each one announcing the gated and guarded entrance to another ‘active senior living village’ or an ‘age-qualified community’. Exit signs declared I was nearing Punta Gorda – the most senior city in America, with an average age approaching 64 – but the land either side of the dead straight highway was so dominated by private corporate enclaves that civic boundaries seemed quaintly meaningless. My next appointment was announced by a giant American flag and yet another grandiose marker: the gold lettering set within a waterfall fountain read: ‘Del Tura Golf and Country Club’.

Bruce met me in the guest parking lot just outside the guard house. A rotund late sixty-something, he’d been living in over-55s’ communities since before he was 55 (people really want to get into these places) and now had a cushy deal as a resident and sales guide for Del Tura. I’d chosen it as a very typical ‘young old’ community – with 1,300 bungalow homes, it didn’t have Shell Point’s facilities for the frailties of later ageing, but was awash with incentives to stay young.

We hopped into the inevitable golf cart and headed up a wide, tree-lined boulevard to the clubhouse, where Bruce showed me the theatre, banqueting suite, bar, restaurant, library, craft rooms, on and on: ‘If you’re inactive here,’ he declared bullishly, ‘it’s your fault.’ Most impressive of all, once again, was the volunteering noticeboard – it stretched the length of a 10-metre corridor, papered with calls to arms for fundraising events for charities both local and international, and pledges of time to local children’s projects, help for housebound elders, park clean-up days and much more. As we left, four ladies in rustling casual wear were also heading outside:

‘We’re the greeting club. Every time someone moves in, we take them a basket of cookies and a guide to all the activities, to make them feel welcome.’ You might expect that role to go to long-term residents of Del Tura, but this party looked only a touch north of 55. Perhaps because their hair was, as before, a uniform shade – a darker copper here, but again a perfectly matching one.

Bruce led me out for the full tour. The sense of natural space and calm was immediate – the town was built around verdant parkland that housed 27 holes of golf, a nature preserve and no fewer than 18 lakes. In sharp contrast was the blur of human activity – power walkers toured the lakes, every tennis court was in use, every swimming pool (there were five) was being gracefully ploughed. Everywhere you looked, wiry, sporty bodies were being strained, a picture of youthfulness minus the youth. (I saw one child – a visiting grandson alone in a shallow end, looking like a kid in a swimming pool with no one to play with.)

But this was certainly not a lifeless place. ‘You see people getting re-energised when they come here,’ said Bruce, ‘it’s like a shot of youth. They’ve worked hard all their lives, and this is what they’ve wished for – they retire as soon as they can, break free and come here. It’s a world unto itself. A completely different world.’

It was an unfamiliar planet, indeed – a strict dress code appeared to be in place, of crinkly sports casual clothing, baseball caps, sun visors and, for the women, any hair colour but grey. The residential streets, with no one visible along their length, were obviously tightly monitored, with no bins visible, no laundry drying outside, no overgrown or underfed lawns, and of course no toys or bikes lying about. ‘It’s a nice, clean, safe community,’ said Bruce as we slid down a deserted street. He knew his audience – the majority of new arrivals in these citadels of seniority cite security as their chief motivation for buying in.

It was almost a relief to enter the gloom of the ‘Village Pub’ and find a few athletic refuseniks enjoying an eleven a.m. beer. They had nothing bad to say about their home town, though: ‘It’s just a friendly, old-fashioned blue-collar community,’ one said. ‘You have to say hello to so many people, you almost get tired of it. There’s something called the “Del Tura Wave” you have to learn, to live here.’ I’d seen it already – a big palm raised once and held aloft: “Can’t stop – hello and goodbye.”

The blue-collar comment was pertinent, though – Bruce showed me a couple of new homes, heftily spacious two-bedroom bungalows selling for just over $100,000 (after which you owned the house, if not, bizarrely, the land beneath it) plus a monthly fee of $680 for amenities and utilities. I realised, with a start, that I was beginning to calculate if I could afford my own move here. Time to raise the big issue – why on earth live in a town without young people?

‘You’re right, you don’t have young neighbours. You don’t have their boom-boxes, their noise, their troubles . . .