The Men’s Shed Association is excellent. My brother (85yrs) regularly attends the branch in Milton Keynes as a relief from being the full time carer for his wife who has advanced dementia, and he has become an informal wood-turning teacher / demonstrator.. The Association provides all sorts of equipment to help develop skill in handicrafts, but then people can just go along for a chat over tea and cake if that is what they prefer. The Association also acts as a conduit for contact with other forms of assistance that an individual member might need.
Altogether an excellent Association well worthy of support.
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Of course it wasn’t, older people particularly suffer from loneliness and did so long before social media was even dreamt of( yes, I’m aware SF is included in this category).
But it allows us to disengage from face to face discourse.
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I agree. But these young men are addicted to the social media. As all addictions it is hard to get away from.
Keir Starmer has the right idea. He wants to ban social media for children under 16.
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I remember the Beatles singing “all the lonely people, where do they all come from”? This song was from the 70s. I still do not know the answer. Maybe because we have lost communities along the way?
My observation is that loneliness is an internal characteristic, and although circumstances can conspire to enable feelings of loneliness, it is very possible to be lonely in a crowded room. I often hated works Christmas parties because they felt horribly lonely.
Eleanor Rigby was released in 1966.
When I first heard it, it was in the 70s.
I’m not sure I entirely agree, yes you can be lonely in a crowded room and that would be an internal characteristic, but I don’t think I would put older people, who live on their own, who are not able to make new contacts after their friends have died into this category. It is a physical thing for them that impacts on their mental health.
Every week for the last 4 years I have phoned, a now 93 year old woman, in the UK at least once a week, she was my moms friend. She can’t walk far and relies on deliveries for her groceries. She rarely sees anyone and has infrequent visits from her children. She is lonely because of her circumstances.
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It’s really good of you to keep in touch like that.
I have some practical experience of older people, and some can take great delight in a chance meeting or an opportunity to spend time with others, while some can be visited 4 days per week and write letters about how lonely they feel and how no-one ever sees them. I’ve not had extensive experience, but we’ve been through the ageing/dying parents thing and had plenty of contact with others in the various situations too to see these things aren’t unusual.
But I would agree that kindness and company can make a huge difference to many people, and should be valued.
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My sisters and I inherited some of mum’s younger friends (younger means in their 80’s when she died at 96). They are now slowly going themselves, but we have found maintaining contact with them a very positive thing. The oldest one has known me since I was born, and there aren’t many people in that category outside direct family.
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My moms friend and I share a lot in common because I knew her all the time I was growing up, so when I phone her we have lots to say.
There is a charity in the UK that puts you in touch with older people who have no one to talk to. And you phone them each week for a chat. I do know people who volunteer for this service who say that the people they phone really look forward to their chats. But that it takes a long time to build rapport.
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Is that charity called SilverLine?
You see how advertising has got into you? Same way social media gets into young minds. Relatives offspring are convinced they will get cancer if they go out in the sun, they are pasty ghost like and go out after sun down. Wow what a difference to my friends children, one a trainee paramedic ambulance driver and his sister a psychiatric nurse trainee, helping youngsters “cope” in this modern world of social media.
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I am naturally olive skinned, not at all pasty. But it is vanity that drives me to the sun cream. I do not want my skin to resemble an elephants bum. Even though I use factor 30 I can still see a line where my shorts have been.
And my O.H did have skin cancer 5 years ago and he is no sun worshipper, just has a northern European skin type. I think he would choose pasty over the scars he has any day of the week.
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I could have been one of the statistics. I’m fair-skinned unlike the rest of the family and my parents never put sun cream on us when we were children and happily let us burn. Years later I had to have a mole removed and if I hadn’t it would have turned nasty.
One of the doctors told me they had loads of people in their 50s and upwards who went to southern Europe as children, didn’t use sun cream and were coming in with skin lesions years later.
Picking one place with extreme sun is not really a gauge for other places is it? There is no simple answer, it requires different solutions for different geographical positions. Just to remind you its a french forum not Death Valley or Oz. There are still questions to be answered as stats do not show the trigger, humans have been around a lot longer than sun creams, we would have died out as a species if it were any other way, the triggers for all types of cancers are still not completely understood but the increase in numbers over the last few years is very concerning.
Me too, got so bored being covered in greasy creams, dust and grit sticking in the creams yuk. Amazingly that altered with a change of diet, cutting out ultra processed foods and sugar, getting back to a cleaner diet and it just changed, I now tan (with care obviously) dont use sun cream at all and after 60 years of burning so bloody easily it was tedious and boring so stayed out of the sun I can now enjoy sunshine (current situation with 41c obviously not) but still no sun cream.
It’s likely many of the European peoples skin cancers come from childhood burns where they spent many hours unprotected, burning deeply.
I do use sun sprays, but usually factor 15 or lower, building up resistance rather than totally blocking. But I also don’t sunbathe.
20,000 people were treated in the UK for melanoma last year, 90% caused by sun exposure and then there’s SCC and Basal skin cancer to add on. And its increasing.
So we should all be ’ slip, slap, slopping’.
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