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This comment was made by a participant in a focus group of older people discussing their ideas about healthy ageing. The focus groups were made up of older people who attended a local authority-run day centre, and they had a variety of health and functional problems that limited their activities. In the focus group they talked about their experiences of growing older, and the way in which the process of ageing was accompanied by a sense of an increasing lack of fit between them and the rest of the world. The things that they had done, and in many cases still wanted to do, were becoming difficult and required greater determination and effort in an environment full of physical obstacles and social barriers. The quote given above came from a woman who had talked about the difficulties of everyday life and her resolve to overcome them where possible. It seems a good point to start this chapter, which is about ideas of ageing. The message this woman is giving is that growing older is a particular experience that evokes a particular response in others. While we discuss ageism in more detail in Chapter Two and the physical aspects of growing older in more detail in Chapter Three, what we want to do here is set the scene for these discussions by examining some of the ideas in gerontological debates about what it is we define as older people, and what sort of challenges these definitions give rise to. The discussions in this book’s introduction concerned the types of knowledge we might use or develop when working with older people.
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