Fauja Singh, a Sikh born in India in 1911 who migrated to Britain in 1961 became the first centenarian to compete a marathon, in Canada in 2011. It includes some of the richest (including Queen Elizabeth II) and the poorest, the extremely frail and marathon runners in their 80 s and 90 s. It is an age group much stereotyped and generalized about, but it is the largest and most diverse of all conventionally defined age groups, assumed-still- to run from around age 60 to past 100. More people are living longer and more are healthy later in life, but the big inequality gap alerts us to diversity among older people, past and present. Footnote 2 Inner city Glasgow has some of the lowest life and health expectancy figures in the UK. The ONS reported in 2014-2016 the gap in healthy life expectancy at birth differed by 18.4 years for females and 15.6 years for males across richer and poorer areas of the UK and the disparity has grown in recent decades. Richer people live longer and also remain healthy longer. There are similar gaps in life expectancy at age 65. Baby girls could expect to live longest in Chiltern, 86.7 years, shortest in poorer Middlesborough, 79.8 years. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), in England and Wales in 2012-14 boys born in rich Kensington and Chelsea could expect to live to 83.3 years, boys born in poorer Blackpool only to 74.7. In the UK, and most other countries, there is a significant socio-economic gap in life expectancy. Statistics of life expectancy need to be handled with care because they are based upon averages which hide wide inequalities. The gap is narrowing in UK, but it remains. In most times and places women outlive men for reasons that are uncertain, especially because women tend to be poorer. Japan has the highest proportion of older people of any country, partly due to its very low birth rate. This number has more than doubled since 2007. Footnote 1 Some other countries have aged even more rapidly, notably Japan with over 65,000 centenarians in 2016, 87% female. There are now five female to every male centenarians. In 2016 there were 14,910 people aged over 100 in the UK, double the number in 2002 (7750) there were 3642 in 1986. They now form about 18%, up from 15% 30 years ago and 11% 50 years ago. In 1881 4.6% of the UK population was aged over 65, in 1931 7.4%. In the UK, as in many other societies, over the past 100 years, most rapidly since the mid- twentieth century, more people have lived longer than ever before (Table 1). This is realistic because, perhaps surprisingly, even in ancient Greece and Rome 60 was often seen as the lower boundary of old age as, widely, it still is: in Greece it was the age at which men were no longer called for military service (Finlay, 1984). We can best illustrate this by taking age 60 as the lower boundary of old age. The mechanics are interesting and sophisticated, but the physical components are very simple.As Gilliard suggests this drive has existed over many centuries because in all known societies a certain proportion of people have lived to what their culture defined as ‘old age’, arousing, for as far in the past as we have records, interest in and concern about change in the ageing body and whether it could be halted, slowed or reversed (Gilleard, 2017). Players must last 9 rounds as the alien hordes bombard their base in increasingly difficult waves. It combines deck-building and resource management with a table top version of the base defense game genre made popular on mobile devices. XenoShyft is a very beloved game of ours that has been out of print for a while now, but still has a very solid and dedicated fanbase. Staying home, gamers? That’s no reason to be bored! We know these are tough times, so how about trying something new?
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