El PLANETA DE LA EDAD

Two community groups for parents with babies and elderly people have joined forces to help fight loneliness. The Monday Club and Wivenhoe Bumps and Babies in Essex are holding "generation mix-up" music and play sessions. It means those without grandparents or grandchildren living nearby can spend time playing and getting to know each other. Organisers are planning to do more collaborations between the groups in future.

It’s a lovely awakening’: Elderly people and children sing and dance together in UK's first intergenerational care home. ‘ The children trot in and they love it. They dance and they prance. And we love it too. For that hour or so you forget that you’re away from your own family,’ beams 93-year-old Anna Platman. A chorus of nursery rhymes isn’t what you expect to hear on walking into an elderly people’s home, but a retirement facility in south London has its residents doing just that – and children are there to lead the way.

Technology is a mystery to my mum – if we’re so clever, let’s invent things to make the lives of the elderly easier While modernity gallops on  making life simpler, more exciting, more immediate for the young, the needs of the old are being completely ignored. I’m back home with mother. This is a temporary arrangement both of us are very relieved to report. She has just had a cataract done and out of her three children, I’m the kindest. Oh, and the only one with a flexible freelance job. My brother is a criminal defence barrister and my sister is an adjudicator (no me neither) and apparently both of these jobs, you know going to court and helping make decisions which affect people’s future lives, are more important than showing off for a living. Anyway, I’m in novel writing mode at the moment and have a laptop so I can travel.