AofA Hot To Trot Talking Points
Every Friday
Every week, I try to impress on you how wonderfully, crazily eclectic our FB group is in terms of the reach of the discussions. This week, there was a lot about the Awards because there is less than a week to go and we can’t wait. Lists and shortlists. The judging has been done! And very enjoyable it was.
I wrote a piece for welldoing.org, the website where people are matching to therapists, about why it’s so important to have a community of elders as we get older.
‘Advantages of Age was born with the mission to challenge the media narrative around stereotypes and ageing. And although some forward steps have been made over the last nine years, the Granny headlines, the patronising attitudes, the ageist policies in companies when you’re Over 50 and often become unemployable – are still prevalent and hence we need older people to gather together to demand change. And we need a community – that meet not just on FB but also at our events like the Advantages of Age Awards 2025 on November 20th, and writing for our pro-ageing Substack magazine as well as picnics, parties, and creating performances and films.’
You can read it here - https://welldoing.org/article/advantages-age-why-we-need-community
Great for Xmas presents. And we - well
in fact - will be selling our last copies at the Awards. This is an anthology that I edited of fascinating articles that have been written for AofA over the years - by many of you who are great writers from to to Caroline Rosie Dent to Ruth Fox to and to and many more. This is the word track to our ethos of Ageing Differently with so many voices in there...
We love Betty Reid Soskin who started being a park ranger at 85 and retired at a 100. ‘At 104, Betty Reid Soskin has had the most extraordinary life, from protest singing to civil rights activism to meeting the Obamas. She reflects on what it takes to stay strong and keep going
Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US – this was back in 2013; she’d become a ranger at 85 – but she had been furloughed along with 800,000 other federal employees during the government shutdown. News channels flocked to interview her. She was aggrieved not to be working, she told them; she had a job to do.
“In a funny way, I suppose that started lots of things,” Soskin says. Her memoir, Sign My Name to Freedom, was published in 2018, and a documentary about her work, No Time to Waste, was released in 2020. Another film is in the works. Barack Obama called her “profoundly inspiring”. Annie Leibovitz photographed her. Glamour magazine named her woman of the year. Now, Reid Soskin is 104, and “all of whatever I was supposed to do, I’ve done”, she says.’
4. One of our members posted this image with a question about how older people are represented. In this case, an older man who looks like he works out a lot doing chair yoga looks incongruous. We laughed about it. And a few men said they might look at chair yoga as an option!
Judging Day came and went this week. Here we are... the judges. Rachael Oku from PensionBee and Mark Elliott from Start Up for Seniors had voted earlier, Jane Duncan Rogers was on Zoom from Scotland and there were me, Suzanne Noble, Louise Chunn from welldoing.org and Tony Burch from Age UK London around the table. It was a greatly enjoyable collaborative process and we have a list of brilliant finalists which you’ll find out about on the day! Nov 20th at 7pm at Hoxton Hall. Hurry up and get your ticket from advantagesofageawards.com
Zandra Rhodes and Andrew Logan do this brilliant Xmas pop up every year. And it’s in Zandra’s penthouse flat. It’s wonderful to go to. Sure the AofA crew will be going on one of the days.