While I was drafting this chapter, The Guardian published an interview with Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (Moss, 2010). When asked about the postnatal deaths of her three children she commented:

It is not often that people describe themselves as ‘very old’, but when they do it is often, as here, in the course of claiming some kind of temporal distance along with acknowledging the proximity of the end.

The ebb and flow of debate over the definition of old age and the homogenising effect of any such categorisation have generated periodic interest in the idea that there is a category beyond ‘ordinary’ old age. This is rather different to proposals to divide the category of old people into ‘the young old’ and ‘the old old’ and, similarly, different to the more radical re-categorisation of the stages of life that launched the concept of the third age. To quote Mike Hepworth (2003, p 93):

What does he mean by the idea of ‘really being in old age’? In analysing documents for my 1982 study of the uses of the concept of old age, my attention was caught by some of the ways in which the word ‘very’ was used, and how being ‘very old’ was linked to ‘frailty’. For example, the Secretaries of State, in their Foreword to the White Paper Growing Older (Department of Health and Social Security, 1981), claimed that they had in mind the needs of ‘the growing numbers of elderly people – particularly the very old and frail’. Later the White Paper referred to the same group when expressing concern over the quality of life of ‘elderly people, especially the very old and frail’ (para 1.5).