Introduction

A popular email is currently being widely circulated:

What is appealing about this message is its explicit lay challenge to exhortations towards active and healthy ageing: looking after yourself is all fine and good, but what is more important is to indulge and have fun. Of course, few of us live our later lives in terms of this either/or choice. Most of us would like to think that we work at both. Neither is our journey to the grave unaccompanied, but is influenced by those we travel with or meet along the way. Nevertheless, policy echoes both the individualistic focus and the implied dichotomy (Kemp and Denton, 2003), only this time without the fun. The opposite of ‘active’ and ‘healthy’ ageing in later life is seen as a negative dependency.

This chapter develops further our exploration of the notion of active ageing, questioning the limited understanding of this central concept in current policy and research on ageing (ESRC, no date: 2). Elsewhere (Clarke and Warren, 2007), we argue that older people experience active ageing in a diversity of ways, both shared and unique, that are not necessarily captured in existing research, showing how active ageing is important to looking ahead beyond retirement, as well as being understood in terms of people's pasts. This chapter focuses on understanding active ageing as a relational experience. It is based on Clarke's series of biographical interviews with older people, central to which is the belief that to understand ageing we have to examine older people's experiences in the much broader context of their lives (Clarke, 2001). Here we demonstrate that, whether we go for ‘attractive and well preserved’ or ‘worn out and screaming’, choices we make about activity in later life are influenced, and sometimes constrained, by a sense of freedom. But they also place value on participation in wider society.