News

The world of older people

“The past is a foreign country,” Jan Morris once wrote, “but so is old age”. This is a land many of us are pitched into without forethought or preparation – it happened to me in the 1990s, when my elderly mother fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease and blindness caused by age-related macular degeneration.

I soon discovered that the health and social systems which purport to care for older people with progressive, incurable diseases were as alien to me as the frighteningly isolated world in which my mother had become trapped by illness was to her. I needed to learn rapidly how the world of eldercare works in order to help her navigate a path through it. But such advice as was available skated over major difficulties.

So I set about trying to offer straight-talking guidance. I travelled the country, visiting hospitals and care homes, social service departments and day centres. I spoke, often confidentially, to many health and social care professionals, and people encountering all manner of obstacles. My handbook
A Survival Guide to Later Life (2004) was the result.

My aim now is to do whatever I can to help those who need guidance either for themselves or for others.

My latest book, Later Life: A Comprehensive Guide (to be published in 2010), is the result of a decade of research. It builds on my Survival Guide and also focuses on such areas as mobility, the needs of family carers, romance in later life, equipment for disability and employment rights for older people.

I am involved in a voluntary capacity with The Alzheimer’s Society and the Relatives and Residents Association, which seeks to help care home residents and their families, and I am part of a pastoral care team at my church which supports older people in the local community.

Rural affairs

After beginning my career at the Council for the Protection of Rural England in the mid-1970s, I left to investigate the impact of modern farming on the countryside. I talked to people in towns and villages up and down England whose lives had been affected by unrestrained landscape change wrought by modern farming, as well as to farmers themselves, landowners and specialists in wildlife, archaeology and agricultural and town and country planning policy. These investigations yielded my first book,
The Theft of the Countryside. This examined the damage already caused and urged radical measures to prevent further destruction. That book was followed by This Land is Our Land (1987), which proposed a new social contract between landowners (public and private) and the wider population. It was published in tandem with a Channel 4 programme, Power in the Land, which I presented. During the 1990s, I held lecturing posts in rural planning at University College, London and Reading University .

Gaia Books reissued This Land is Our Land as a Gaia Classic in 1997. In A Right to Roam (1999), I examined the struggle over rights of access to Britain’s countryside over the past 1,000 years, looked at the ways in which alternative access systems overseas operate and put forward a detailed plan of how a general right of access on foot to the countryside of the UK could take shape on the ground. The Sidney Perry Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust and the Nuffield Foundation have funded my research into landscape change and countryside access over the years. During the 1990s, I held lecturing posts in rural planning at Reading University and University College, London.

In recent years I have become interested in what may be the most distinctive yet maligned landscape of our time: the edgelands – that is, the hotchpotch collection of superstores, sewage works, golf courses and surprisingly wildlife-rich roughlands which sit between town and country. A Right to Roam and an essay entitled ‘Edgelands’ have won awards from the Outdoors Writers and Photographers Guild.

In 2006 I was voted one of the top 100 most influential environmental activists by The Guardian.