The grey matter

In his lively and interesting account of the discussion on ageing between the Royal Society and the British Academy (THES, May 23), Jon Turney gets one or two things wrong. He perpetuates the error of referring to the people he has in mind as apart from the rest of us, making an issue of their dotage, whereas it is his dotage, and that of his age mates and juniors, that is more in question. Not a very complimentary phrase is it, dotage?

It is just a further example of the offhand and patronising way of referring to older people still almost universal. For dotage read senile dementia, which is quite simply not the fate of the great majority of people.

Turney gets his figures wrong, too, exaggerating them as is usual in articles about such matters. It is one-third of all adults, those over 25, who will be over 60 by the 2030s or 2040s, not a third of the population. And he surely cannot mean to imply that it is not yet known how we will fill the extra time our prolonged lives are yielding. As was emphasised during the discussion, it is the development of the new society of the Third Age which is beginning to meet the situation.

Has he not heard of the Universities of the Third Age, founded in this country to give intellectual and cultural leadership to this new society, and to help to create institutions of other kinds?

Does he not realise that there are already 350 or so such institutions with a membership of between 50,000 and 60,000, with sister organisations in Australia and New Zealand? They make up the fastest growing educational and higher educational movement in all the countries.

Peter Laslett, Ageing unit, Cambridge group for the history of population and social structure, Trinity College, Cambridge