The best books about getting older with style and panache

I actually believe the Alexander technique should be taught in schools from the start, to become a lifelong habit to improve lifelong health, but it’s never too late to start. While there’s no denying it is best taught hands-on, there aren’t enough teachers out there. There are many books but this one has a lovely holistic approach. Even better, if you’re lucky enough to have a practitioner within reach, the book adds to your understanding and to the benefit of your sessions. Win, win.  

We live in expensive times, our lives could last longer than expected after our earning years have ended:  hands up anyone who has had the 3 am heebie-jeebies about a future in which one is very old and impoverished. We’ll never be able to retire . . . the huge charm of this book, for me, is the emphasis is less on storing away pennies than on embracing the future, and while I’ll grant he says that perhaps a little too often, sometimes you do have to catch people’s attention. There are no miraculous solutions, but there’s good advice and a very wholesome shift in attitude to take on board.  

There are some offbeat reasons I picked this book, and one is that if you’re around the Indian Summer age you might have got into a reading rut, and it’s an intriguing rut-breaker, nicely translated but evoking a different world and way of thinking. The main reason, though, is, indirectly, baggage, the releasing of. The premise of the novel allows patrons of the café to go back in time to a previous meeting, and say what they wish they’d said at the time. It won’t change events, and they can stay only until their coffee in real time gets cold. As a perspective twister, it’s unique.  

It’s a little book of quotes, the sort of book you could keep in the guest loo (if you don’t mind losing your guests for half an hour), but it is stuffed full of oomph and I’ve carted it with me through three migrations because it has been giving me quotes, when I needed something pithy and to the point, for thirty years. I really hope it is still in print because nobody’s getting their hands on my copy. Relevance to my theme? Picked at random – “the first forty years of life gives us the text, the next thirty years supply the commentary” (Arthur Schopenhauer). “If I had my life to live again, I’d make the same mistakes – only sooner”. (Tallulah Bankhead)   

We’ve outgrown vaulting over five-barred gates, running up mountains, drinking all night, and springing bright-eyed from our beds, and so what? For anyone in denial, or clinging stubbornly to youth, Dave is the Baby Boomer to point out the stark realities. He’s funny but he’s ruthless. Fifty’s not the new thirty. It’s fifty. The reason I recommend it is that it can be hard to let go and you’ll waste precious autumn if you don’t accept the inevitable, and move on with a spring in your step into what I have found to be the best period of all. Laughing helps. Laughing always helps.