How did your interest in ageing begin, and why?

I started working on ageing at PSSRU at the University of Kent where the focus was on services and their evaluation in cost effectiveness terms. Since then I have gradually moved away from service delivery to a focus on older people themselves, and on the concrete day to day realities of ageing. My current work is on clothing, dress and older people.

What are your key areas of interest, and why?

At the moment I am working on dress, but this is part of a longer term interest in the body and the cultural constitution of ageing. I am still interested in the front line of care and in the concrete realities of this, the day to day and mundane level of ordinary human life. I would like to see this better understood and represented in academic writing.

Please can you briefly outline your career?

I described the rather wandering nature of my career in a recent issue of Journal of Aging Studies, 2008. I started as a historian, moved over into the sociology of religion and food at LSE through a study of nineteenth and twentieth century vegetarianism, worked briefly in the health service and then moved to Kent and PSSRU to do work evaluating domiciliary services for older people. From there I went to York and SPRU where I did the carer work, and then back to Kent where I now am.

What do you find is your biggest challenge in your current post?

Sorting out the teaching loads, juggling the merits of colleagues and the problems of buy outs. Or so it seems today when I have this task in front of me.

What’s been the biggest change in ageing research since you started?

The rise of Cultural Gerontology.

What is the biggest change that you have contributed to, and in what way?

I think to the recognition of the role of the body in ageing through my work on bathing, and subsequently on the body itself. The work on clothing is a development from that.

What do like best about your work?

The intellectual freedom to pursue anything that I want. I think there can be no more wonderful job than being an academic with the freedom to pursue ideas and causes as one wants.

What do you like least about your work?

Teaching students when they do not really want to learn. I do not care how academically able they are, or are not. But what I really hate is when they have no curiosity or engagement, either at an intellectual or moral level.

How did you become interested in the BSG?

I first came to the BSG annual conference when I was – unhappily and thank goodness briefly – working for the health service as a trainee manager. It was breath of fresh air and made me see how I could develop an academic interest in this field. I still find the annual conference a wonderfully positive experience.

What benefits are useful for you as a BSG member?

Contact with others who share the same interests and values. A chance to meet and talk at the conference and other meetings.

What do you want to achieve in your future career?

Strictly speaking I don’t have a future career as I am now in my sixties. But I do have a future programme of work that I hope to pursue. I don’t feel any less intellectually excited than I did twenty years ago, so I hope just to carry on. Beyond formal work I would like to develop my interests in architecture further. In particular I would like to do something to help support the conservation of nineteenth and twentieth century architecture.

What is your favourite type of restaurant, and why?

What I love best is simple food beautifully cooked. But that of course costs a fortune, so I don’t eat out very often.

What are you listening to on your iPOD at the moment?

I am embarrassed to say that I don’t have one. But I am listening to a marvellous CD of the tenor Mark Padmore called ‘As steals the morn….’ It is Handle arias. He has the most lovely voice. I heard him the other night at a twilight concert in a redundant church in the depths of the Kent countryside. A magical event.

What is your favourite book, and why?

What an impossible question. I can’t think how to answer. I am an avid novel reader, and particularly re-reader – I really prefer a book I have read before. What I am currently re-reading is James’s Portrait of a Lady ( I have just got back from Italy). If I had to nominate a book that had a life time influence on me, it would be Osbert Lancaster’s From Pillar to Post. I read this as a child (or rather looked at the pictures) and was wholly and totally fascinated by it. It is a mixture of pictures and text that recounts historical changes in architectural style from earliest times. I can see now that I was fascinated by both the architecture and the concrete sense of social history. It is also very funny. He is particularly good on the twentieth century. I was brought up in the suburbs, so classic categories like By Pass Varigated, Stockbrokers Tudor and Pseudish (white walls and green ceramic pantiles) were all around me.

Who would you like to be stranded on a desert island with, and why?

I would choose Oscar Wilde as he would keep me amused. But he would be hopeless at survival skills, so I would need another person to cover those. A practical person like an engineer, so maybe Brunel, or Florence Nightingale, though she would just boss me around from her palm leaf couch. I need someone who would really get a grip on things.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

It came from a former social work colleague and was to effect that if you are feeling unhappy about something, then the odds are that everyone else is too. Like all good advice it is obvious, but at the same time not always easy to remember.

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