Immortality has its limits. While indispensable to Greek goddesses, it might seem less attractive to British pensioners with double cataracts and leaking roofs. None the less, we are heading towards extravagantly long existence. Soon, reaching 100 will be normal. Some scientists predict lifespans of 1,000 years or more.
This brush with the eternal does seem wasted on the British. Anyone doubting that ageism is our biggest prejudice need look no further than Francesca Annis. Ms Annis has separated from Ralph Fiennes, her partner of 11 years. In the normal run of celebrity gossip, Mr Fiennes, who had an affair with a singer, would have been branded a 'love cheat'. This time, though, the media threw in a mitigating factor: her age.
Ms Annis is 61, her former partner is 43. So obviously, some newspapers hinted, the rift was all her fault for being so antiquated. One report quoted an unnamed friend as saying she felt she was 'hurtling towards old age'. Presumably no such gloom assailed J Howard Marshall when, at 89, he married Anna Nicole Smith, a topless dancer of 26, whose fight for her late husband's multibillion oil fortune reaches the US Supreme Court this month.
While few perceived Mr Marshall as Romeo on crutches, many older men live with young partners without being parodied as Viagra-popping Methuselahs scavenging for lost youth. Older women, conversely, get pity from a media that think anyone over 45 must be as seductive as the Turin shroud
The worst intolerance is reserved for couples in which both partners are elderly. Earlier this month, Richard and Beryl Driscoll, both 89, were finally reunited after a seven-month separation because Gloucestershire social services refused to pay for Mrs Driscoll, who is blind, to join her husband of 65 years in a care home.
Love, as WH Auden said, is founded on mutual need. For two people bound by the triple lock of affection, dependency and fear to be prised apart by the state seems an eccentric cruelty, especially in a country that hails enduring relationships as the glue of civilisation. But Help the Aged says the Driscolls' case is not rare.
Dozens of councils operate such a policy. Not long ago, a Portsmouth couple was put in homes five miles apart, refused the taxi they had been promised for daily visits and denied even the luxury of saying goodbye. They had not seen one another for four days when the wife died alone. Welcome to the departure lounge of prosperous Britain. This is how we treat the old. Except that no one mentioned so far will soon qualify as elderly. Ms Annis will look positively juvenile and the Driscolls merely middle aged. Last week, the government's actuary department reported that, by 2074, 1.2 million Britons will live to be 100 and that many thousands of thirtysomethings will reach 110.
Obviously, bird flu or another plague could intervene, but demographers usually play safe. Life expectancy has now risen by two years in every decade of the last half century: today's average span, around 75 for a man and 80 for a woman, may soon seem a fruit-fly existence, especially if you believe more extravagant predictions. Aubrey de Grey, the biogerontologist interviewed in a new Demos pamphlet, 'Better Humans?', predicts lifespans of 1,000 years. No need to wait too long, either, for miracles of nanotechnology or molecular science. De Grey thinks the first millenarian could just be turning 60.
Politicians must hope he is wrong. Despite warnings from Age Concern, long life has ambushed the government. One in five pensioners lives in poverty, over-60s already well outnumber children and pensions policy is a shambles. Forget Lord Turner's modest proposal that retirement age should rise to 69 within 40 years. People may soon be working to 80. The crisis can only be averted, some think, by baby-boomers, a cohort powerful enough to decide the next election. If they take time off from bungee-jumping to campaign for social justice, then government may have to cater for extended life. Whether society can do so is another matter.
Take de Grey's 1,000-year estimate. This seems an obscene amount of life, compared, say, with the average Zimbabwean, who can expect to live to 39. It also looks like a cold victory for science. God and the afterlife are being traded in for an engineered hereafter, in which you can spend a near-eternity in incontinence pants, forgetting your own name and going on grim bus tours of the Cotswolds
Even modestly stretched lives are changing the social topography. In an age of brevity - fast food, short careers, disposable partners - only life itself grows ever more durable. Relationships were never designed for such a marathon. The early Victorian marriage lasted an average of 15 years before one partner died, and divorce among the over-50s has increased by 50 per cent in two decades. Up to half of all baby-boomers are expected to be living alone by the time they are 75.
That is not a cause for gloom, simply another warning that the state will have to do more. It does, though, raise the question of the point of so much surplus life. The elderly people I talk to, even the fit and wealthy ones, do not all crave extra time.
Many would like to die, quickly, painlessly and, if they get very ill, at a day of their choosing. But in our muddled state, that is often impossible. Society worries that befuddled grandmas may outstay their welcome. But death, and euthanasia in particular, are steps too far in an age that sees dying as a failure, of science or the human spirit. Where are the elderly to find a refuge, when life and death are seen as equally intolerable?
One answer is to value old age better. Bring on smart houses and podcasting for pensioners, stop moving supermarkets to inaccessible sites and never think that beautiful women, like Francesca Annis, turn into whiskery-chinned dowagers on their 60th birthday.
Even such modest adjustments are not easy for a nip-tuck generation that thinks wrinkles worse than global warming and believes decrepitude begins at 30. We have to provide a better, fairer Britain in which to grow old. We need to learn, too, that the liberty of longer life must also mean being more free to die.
If the social and financial problems of expanded lifespans have not been addressed, then neither have the ethical ones. Wanting to die is not just the reflex of the sick or desperate; it is also the natural reaction of affluent, happy people who feel that they have lived as long and as well as they found possible. Making people more death-proof is easy. The hard thing is going to be working out what all that extra life is really for.
