It is over 40 years since the end of the Sixties, the postwar cohort is ageing and, by many calculations, old. This chapter presents participants’ descriptions, understandings, and thoughts about ageing body, time, and identity. In this chapter, interviewees provide a window onto their lives as they delve into past memories, current experiences and thoughts. Through the quotes, we begin to understand how time, body, and identity are intertwined. The Sixties is explored as an ongoing influence in their lives, especially as it relates to ageing and to who they have become and are becoming as older people. The section of this chapter titled ‘The present’ looks at how the influences of the Sixties era are reflected in the cohort's embodied ageing selves. Of course, memories, the past, and the present are perceived through the lens of relative time.

Mind and body, our embodied selves, the whole of who we are, is a seamless enmeshment. As embodied selves, we live in time in all its manifestations, from rhythmic body time to timescape. We can never pull our embodied selves out of time. The temporal dimension and embodiment are never separate, never really discrete. Our individual bodies are embedded in time and time is embodied within us. This embodiment is so profoundly intimate that we rarely think about it because it is just part of us. As we saw in the last chapter, enveloped within mind and written on our bodies is the stuff of our identities. It can be described as our neurobiology or the sense we feel of our meness or an irreducible interplay of both. Of course, body interweaves with the ongoing development of our identity in the form of gender, age, size, experience and memory, and so on. Where are the boundaries of embodiment, temporality, and identity? Where does one begin and the other end? It is difficult, if not impossible, to know. In this chapter, research participants discuss their lives – in the past and through the present.

The past

Living the Sixties

In Chapter Two we saw that research participants had their own interpretation of involvement in the Sixties that did not necessarily match media stereotypes of that period. Their experience of that time was varied – it was ‘their’ Sixties. Few participants would define themselves as part of Swinging London.