We septuagenarians are the happiest and freest generation

How do you stay connected? In your seventies, you don’t have to do something if you don’t want to. You don’t have to try to impress people, writes Hamish McRae

There are many afflictions of age but for most of us, there are also huge freedoms (Getty/The Independent)

How do septuagenarians communicate? No jokes please. We are a diverse bunch, maybe more diverse than any other age group, in that we vary enormously in our health, whether we are still working or not, and – though this is harder to demonstrate – our attitudes to technology.

So it is an instance of the quip attributed to Mark Twain that “all generalisations are false, including this one”.

One generalisation is that modern communications have not only been a huge blessing to us during the pandemic, but things that we were forced to learn have now stuck. As a result, the seventies age group has become much better at using FaceTime, WhatsApp or whatever, than we were three years ago. In turn, this means, whether it be for work or our private lives, we are a much better-connected group than we were – even if we have to find a teenager to set the stuff up for us.