When my father turned 90, he bought himself a manual lawnmower. He had decided that his reliable Flymo was not giving him enough of a workout, and that he needed a bit more resistance.
At the time, we thought that it would be just another contraption that would soon be on its way to the tip but, that summer, he gave that machine a run for its money. Afterwards, he would sit on the patio, enjoying a cold beer, admiring his handiwork.
The Christmas before he died, at the age of 94, we had a wine glass engraved with his personal maxim, “Wine, women & exercise”. This was his standard response to questioning about how he remained in such fine fettle for his advanced years.
I have found myself frequently thinking about these three words in the dying light of a year in which the pursuit of longevity has reached new extremes. Tech moguls have been pouring money into increasingly bizarre treatments, with entrepreneur Bryan Johnson at the extreme end of the scale, receiving blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son in an attempt to turn back his biological clock.
But it strikes me that Dad’s straightforward, commonsense approach might be just as effective — not to mention a whole lot more enjoyable. In fact, it’s dawned on me that he was way ahead of his time.
The NHS now recommends 150 minutes of moderate activity per week. Dad had this nailed decades ago. He was what we would have in those days called an “exercise freak” — something that, most probably, stemmed from the gruelling time he spent as a captain in the British army in Burma between 1943 and 1945.
When as teenagers, my brother and I would sit slumped over a cup of tea in the kitchen before school, Dad would hop on his exercise bike in his pyjamas, balancing what we considered to be a deathly boring tome of non-fiction on a special book stand attached to the front. He would sit pedalling away for half an hour, glued to his reading matter, ratcheting up the resistance every now and then. He did this twice a day up until his early nineties.
When it came to the women bit, I like to think he was simply referring to enjoying the company of women, in particular my mother, who was 20 years younger than him. It was thanks to her — and their two young children, my brother and me, who arrived when he was in his fifties — that he felt the need to keep in shape, and keep up. The proverbial pipe and slippers were indefinitely on hold, and so was retirement. When he finally did give up lecturing at 75, he began learning the piano and playing online chess with his older son.
Having a daily sense of purpose — ikigai in Japanese — may be one of the most powerful secrets to living longer, be it whittling musical instruments by hand, as in the case of the Japanese centenarian in the Netflix show Live to 100, or, in my dad’s case, being able to make fast work of a cryptic crossword.
Even when we had flown the coop, Dad didn’t settle down. Up until his early nineties, he had a more active social life than most middle-agers — lunching regularly with his few remaining pals, and with three groups of men from different arenas of his life. He was an Arsenal season ticket holder and definitely one of the oldest, if not the oldest fan in the stands, attending matches with my brother, rain or shine, until the age of 90.
When it came to wine, he had strict rules: two glasses of red per day (he knew all about polyphenols and antioxidants.) When he went for a check-up in his late eighties, the GP told him on no account to stop — it would be more of a shock for his body to go without at this stage. He took this to heart.
Whether he knew about the microbiome or not (I suspect he did: he was an early adopter of the Japanese probiotic drink Yakult), he must have been hopping with good bacteria thanks to a daily spoonful of sauerkraut and the odd piece of mouldy bread (he was colour blind). He was also a wholegrain bore: we were definitely the only family I knew who were eating brown spaghetti in the 1980s. When he went away for work, we would buy white bread and sugary cereal, disposing of the evidence before he got back.
Thinking about him today, and missing him, I think of just how heroic Dad was as an older man. But at the time, his antics, as we saw them, were often terrifying. Watching him toddle off to the Tube with his walking stick, or stand on a chair in the kitchen to change a lightbulb, or even mow the lawn, I would be alert to a million hazards. In fact, I now realise, he was just continuing to do what he had always done: live.
And it could have been worse. Had he carried on until the age he would have been today — 100 — he planned to celebrate with a parachute jump.
Rebecca Rose is the editor of FT Globetrotter