Jane Fonda’s sex life is better than ever. She’s 71, although one of her hips and a knee aren’t even teenagers. Does the idea of an oldie at it like a creaky rabbit make you queasy? Or should we cheer and yell, "get a room, Grannie"?
Given that we’re all going to have to keep clocking in to work until well into our sixties, there has to be some compensation to getting a bit longer in the tooth. In a You Gov survey depressingly dubbed "optimistic", only a third of us reckon we’ll have to work to 65, with a mere one in ten planning on doing the nine-to-five until their steamy 70s.
But anyone who’s been brave enough to look at the facts – fewer and fewer workers to support more and more senior swingers – knows that by the time we get to the pension piggy bank – it’ll be empty, smashed to little bits with only a few coins for comfort.
Perhaps Jane’s making up for lost time having spent so much of the 80s and 90s going for the burn.
Her shrill insistence on working out while showing how it was possible to look fabulous in Lycra and legwarmers didn’t do us any good. In fact, the first generation of fitness obsessives – her fans – may have put achieving leotard loveliness above a lustly love life.
Wouldn’t it be great if we hit our 70s like Jane and growing old gracefully meant more wahey than wallies in the glass? That’d be something to look forward to – the hurly burly of the nursing home.
Meanwhile Valerie Singleton, whose backroom Blue Peter affairs gave sticky-back plastic a new meaning and whose subsequent life of lesbian rumours and cradle-snatched boyfriends must put her up above Jane in the saucy-after-seventy section - she's only a year older than Ms Fonda - is also pandering to the older market.
She launched the Simplicity Computer, designed to get older people online. That’s the over 50s by the way! It only has six buttons and avoids the “confusing boxes and jargon” that menace the user of a regular computer. She set up a website called Digital Age which sells the crumblies computer for a pension-busting £525.99. Does she think the old dears are too befuddled not to realise you can get a laptop for half that price and choose to ignore those pesky boxes and jargon.
The whopping price might not get you very many buttons, but it does get you 17 tutorial videos starring the queen of kids’ TV herself. Her justification is that six million over sixty-fives have never been on the internet. Perhaps the real reason they’re not logging on is because they’re too busy peeling off the thermal nighties for a roll in the hay. Let’s hope so.
Ellen Arnison is a finalist in stv.tv's Write Factor competition. The views expressed are not necessarily those of STV plc. If you would like to read more from this writer, use our comment system below.
Last updated: 12 November 2009, 17:11
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