Version 1.

Talking about my generation

The age profile of the UK is changing before our eyes – and the rate of change is set to accelerate. The next two decades will see the twilight of the ‘Baby Boomers’. Born in the aftermath of the second world war when the UK birthrate increased dramatically (rising, at it’s 1947 peak, to a rate that was 50% higher than the average for the 1930s and the early 1940s) my generation is growing old together.

On average, we live longer than any of our forebears. Having reached early adulthood in the late 1960s and having lived through decades of (however fragile and inequitable) economic prosperity, we have travelled the world in unprecedented numbers, profited from the privatization of national assets and (in many cases) cashed in on the property bubble. Many of us will enter twilight with scarcely diminished expectations of the quality of life we have come to expect. Significant numbers of us continue to ‘think young’ and intend to prolong, for as long as possible, activities that maintain fitness levels and promote quality of life.

The inclusive cycling movement and the expansion of off road cycling routes deserves all of our support. It has been a profound success so far as adults and children with learning and physical disabilities are concerned. The up-cycling of discarded bikes has helped to ensure that cycling is brought within the reach of disadvantaged individuals. The movement’s next great challenge is to maximise its contribution to the fitness and quality of life of Baby Boomers.

Cycling, fell out of fashion in my generation. It has started to be rediscovered by us. Cycling is no longer the exclusive preserve of the ‘bike body’ lycra-clad. I recently took part in a ‘vintage bike ride’. Vintage was as applicable to some of the cyclists as it was to many of the bikes and the costumes worn. The boom in ‘electric bikes’ can only grow as hills that were once challenges turn into insurmountable Alps. New forms of ‘companionable’ adapted bikes will hopefully be developed to respond to the needs of the increasing number of older people whose physical and/or mental frailty means that they can only enjoy cycling’s many life enhancing pleasures ‘with a little help from a friend’. Singely and collectively we should make the most of these opportunities while still we can.

As Dylan (Time Out of Mind) reminded us “shadows are falling…time is running away”. Sadly, but inescapably, many of us will not live fully, actively and happily during the years that remain to us. My own prolific 1947 vintage reaches 75 in 2022. By then more than seven out of ten of us will suffer from one (or more) significant long term health condition (LTC) - a quarter of us will have two and a fifth 3 LTCs. By 2032 (when the number of 85 year olds will have increased by more than 100% compared with 2010) almost everyone of us will have at least one (and on average, three) serious health conditions that will significantly impair our quality of life, our independent mobility and (in many cases) our intellectual functioning. Dementia haunts my generation – a spectre of premature oblivion.

As, increasingly, we turn to the NHS, to Local Authority social care provision and to charities for the help and support we and our families will need, we will

encounter a system that is already close to collapse under the co-incident strain of austerity driven resource constraint and of escalating demand – even before we join (in our many thousands) an ever lengthening queue for help.

As the House of Lords Committee on Demography and Public Services acknowledged in 2013, “England has an inappropriate model of health and social care to cope with the changed pattern of ill health of an ageing population” (Ready For Ageing?, 2013). Successive government have failed to invest wisely in public services. As a result, our model of primary care is reactive and outmoded, our (admirable) hospice services are insufficient and scandalously underfunded, local authority adult social care is under siege, charities are forced to compete for ever smaller pots of public money and and an army of carers are invisible, isolated, unvalued and unsupported. Hospitals – that should treat the acutely ill - have become the default ‘place of safety’ for old people for whom there is no alternative end of life care provision. Even before Boomer demand kicks in, more than 50% of older people die in a hospital bed. This is an ethical scandal and a financial catastrophe. It is neither where, nor how, Baby Boomers expected to end their days.

Born in 1947, 21 during the summer of love, I have enjoyed - with the benefit of a final salary NHS pension - an archetypically privileged boomer lifestyle. I heed Dylan Thomas, as much as Bob Dylan and will “not go gently into that good night”. If, at some point in the future, you should have the misfortune of caring for me - in a crumbling, understaffed hospital - and I start to whinge about the service and the squalor be sure to remind me that my generation are Thatcher’s younger siblings. We sold off the national silver to fuel the ostentatious grotesquerie of 80’s and 90’s excess and supported government’s that cut public services to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. We bred and have helped to elect a generation of stridently selfish, cold hearted and smug ‘Boomer Brat’ politicians. As ye reap….