“So what’s the big surprise in finding older people can turn on computers – and their partners? Attitude, not age, is what counts, says Joan Smith.

One day last week I passed an older (by which I mean about 40) couple embracing outside a wine bar. A younger person (by which I mean about 20) noticed them at the same time and I saw his mouth turn down in automatic distaste.

Middle-aged people! Kissing in the street! Clearly, what these decrepit citizens should have been doing was staying indoors and drinking Ovaltine instead of upsetting healthy young people with an inappropriate display of passion. Alternatively, they could go and do stand-up in Edinburgh, telling the world how grim it is to be middle aged, let alone really old.

Last week, two new pieces of research challenged the prevailing consensus that getting older is about nothing but loss and narrowing horizons, although even they were accompanied by a rash of infuriatingly outdated assumptions.

First, it turns out that the people who spend most time online (42 hours a month) aren’t teenagers but the over-65s. Far from being technologically illiterate and repeatedly asking their grandchildren to explain the meaning of phrases such as “the internet”, people in this age group are perfectly capable of understanding the function of a modem and a wireless router. It’s true that there are more 18 to 24-year-olds using the net but its popularity among older people is growing fast. They certainly don’t deserve to be patronised with excruciating names such as “silver surfers “, which is how much of the media responded to the survey.

The other new study is about older people and sex, and you had to burrow your way through a thicket of ageist assumptions to get to the good news that a high proportion of men and women go on having active sex lives well into old age. The research was carried out by the University of Chicago and funded mainly by the National Institute on Ageing, whose representative – his age wasn’t mentioned in the reports I read, although I can make a good guess – seemed astonished to find so many Americans having “a previously uncharacterised vitality and interest in sexuality that carries well into advanced age”.

I mean, why is anyone surprised that three-quarters of respondents aged 57 to 64 have had sex in the past year? So have more than half of the 65-to-74 age group, and a quarter of those aged between 75 and 85. The deciding factor wasn’t age at all, according to the study, but health.

This really does fall into the category of the absolutely bleedin’ obvious, and it wouldn’t cause a ripple if we hadn’t embraced the myth that only the young have a sex life – and then only if they look like Justin Timberlake or Kate Moss.”

Read the full article Belfast Telegraph, Wednesday, August 29, 2007