The baby boomers, those people born immediately after the war have finally grown up and joined the ranks of the over 60’s.. Generally speaking, older adults in the UK today are healthier, have experience, knowledge, and more disposable income than previous generations. Personally I feel comfortable with my maturity and I’ve finally come to accepting myself – warts and all. I regard this time of life as primetime, a bonus. Not all would agree. Within the 60+ group there appears a division, the majority plan positively for the future, but a minority still feel extremely negative about it.
Category Archives: Diana Moran
Reflections On My Maturity
When I picked up my Bus Pass after celebrating my 60th birthday, I remember reflecting over the previous 60 years, my youth and my middle age, mostly with gratitude, but also with a few regrets. I also remembered looking forward, with hope and optimism to the millennium and to my future as an older woman, in what I hoped would be my primetime. The year was 2000 and I hoped the years to follow would have the potential of being an exciting and challenging time for mature women like me in the UK. I considered myself fortunate to be living at a time in history when finally women’s talents and strengths were receiving recognition and reward and that my generation of women had the opportunity to change the perception of growing older for generations of younger women to follow.
Discovering I Had Breast Cancer
I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 47. I was terrified. I was the BBC’s Green Goddess, the nation’s gym mistress. I felt desperately alone. John and I had separated a year before. I was on the crest of a wave with my campaign on BBC Breakfast: ‘Get Britain Fit’. Cancer happens to other people, we all know that. My thought at that moment was, ‘I don’t want my life to stop. I’ve got so much more I want to do. And the biggest thing at that moment was, ‘I want to see my boys with partners and I want to see some grandchildren.’
Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT)
Today more and more people are on the move. But the huge increase in world travel, particularly long distance air travel, carries with it the potential health risk of a deep vein thrombosis commonly known as DVT. DVT was not previously recognised as a serious travel risk. However, it has now been proven to affect thousands of air travellers each year and can occur often in conjunction with an established illness or condition, where the natural tendency of the blood to clot is increased.
BETRAYAL – When I Realised I’d Married A Cheat.
I knew I had married the wrong man in 1993 but I should have realised a lot sooner that he was not the perfect husband I thought him to be. For as I lay convalesing in our Dorset seaside home after breast surgery my 4 and a half year marriage to my second husband was to end abruptly with the publication in a national daily newspaper of details and photographs of him with his mistress.