Introduction

A shift now to something different: turn 60 and your free bus pass awaits. Turn 60 and it’s time to slow down, shift back a gear, retire, or at least get ready to retire.

No longer expected to look after children, to earn money, to have to pay off loans: for some, these are the easy years. Most of the generation above you in years have died. There are fewer people all round to look after, other than your partner, if you still have one. But even if, by the start of these later years, there is not much looking after to be done, there probably soon will be. For many others the looking after has already begun, or they still have to work just to get by and to heat their home, while their contemporaries who had different lives now frequently holiday abroad in the warmth when they fancy it.

These are the years when the social divisions can be seen as most stark between those who have been able to amass their wealth and those from whom (at home if not abroad) they have amassed it: those who still must struggle. Most bleakly, these are the years in which these differences are mostly played out in early death and widowhood for the many, and, at the other extreme, a relatively healthy old age for the few. ‘Old age’ and the ‘older aged’ are terms that slip out too easily to encapsulate these years. You can still be young in old age, or you may feel all the weight of your age in your bones, but these are the last years before we are truly elderly. Here we are considering the oldest ages that most now at these ages expected to live to (when they were young).

Left we show the geographies for those aged 60-74. As above at earlier life stages, this is the basic distribution to remember as you consider the various characteristics of people at these ages.