Anyone for (oldies) tennis?

WE’RE thinking of signposting the path from the lower tennis courts to the clubhouse as ‘Orthopaedic Walk’. It’s the walk when the topic of conversation is the aches and pains of our aging bodies. Thanks to the wonders of medical science, there are new knees, new hips and new shoulders in abundance as we make…

Oliver Sacks: a man who was awake to life

ONE OF THE many attributes of eminent neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was his celebration of life – even when he knew he was dying. Sacks (pictured) died last Sunday at age 82. Earlier this year he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and wrote in the New York Times of how “this does not mean that…

Beam me up Scotty

ALL THINGS considered, I would prefer to live longer. Of course, it helps if you are in pretty decent nick: things aren’t dropping off, the body and mind still works even though both are getting slower. New global health research published in The Lancet journal shows that we are living longer although not necessarily in…

Mum knew best after all

THE TROUBLE with the aging process is that you don’t really start thinking about it until you are older. And by then it may be too late to do anything about it. Nobel Laureate Elizabeth H Blackburn was in town recently to talk about her research into telomeres. These are the protective tips of chromosomes…

Daggy fashion suits my manhood

THE health warning recently attached to wearing skinny jeans sent me scurrying to my wardrobe to check for any such hazardous apparel. After all, I am a contemporary of Mick Jagger and he seems to have been wearing skinny jeans for ever. It turns out I do have some trousers I can no longer get…

A very tall story

HAVING grown up in the imperial world, I am quite satisfied with the way in which I now understand metric measurements. With one exception: height. I am happy to drive 70 kilometres from A to B and know that if I drive at an average of 70km an hour, it will take one hour to…