Eve Branson: 'I never think about how long I have left That determination to improve must be in my genes. My son has it, and my own mother made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest person in the world to get a hole-in-one at golf. She was in her nineties. And I think she also created some sort of record for being the oldest person to jump off the top diving board. My memory for such details isn't great, but then it never has been. It isn't, as far as I know, a symptom of ageing. There are, however, adjustments you have to make with the passage of time. Some have surprised me. I find now that, when it comes to where I live, I prefer smallness to grandeur. Of course, there are moments when age can get you down. I've been very lucky that so many of my close girlfriends are still around. They are mostly the same age as me. I pray we all live as long as each other, for each other. When my husband Ted died last year, after more than 60 years of marriage, there was a moment when I felt sorry for myself. But I knew I had to fight against that - by being busy, by finding people who needed my help. It's hard getting used to being on your own. When I'm with my girlfriends, I say that if I wanted another man he'd have to be quite a bit younger than me, with his own hair. I realise, of course, that I am fortunate not to have to worry about money, like so many of the people in our country who are now living to their eighties, nineties and beyond. I had a very sensible father who always taught me to put half of my pocket money to one side. I used to go to the Post Office and put it in an account. And that habit has remained with me. I never think about how long I have left, or what age I would like to get to. Most of the time I am too busy even to wonder what it would be like to be 100 or more. If I had a stroke, I think I'd want to pack up. I wouldn't want to go into a home. I've never really thought about dementia, but I suppose that would come down to the same thing. I just do not want to have to rely on someone else. Another thing that keeps me active is my writing. As a hobby, I write articles and children's books, and my latest challenge has been to pen my autobiography, Mum's the Word, which will be published next year. And then there's Virgin Galactic. One day, Richard rang to ask if I'd mind him calling the spaceship he was planning "Eve." I said no, so if I'm still around when Virgin Galactic takes off with its first paying passengers, I plan to go up in the mother ship to wave them off. But I have no ambitions to go into space - I'll be happy in my nineties to stay in the mother ship as it zooms back down to earth. Sometimes the world of science and medicine throws up something that can only be described as unalloyed good news. We are used to stories about pollution scares and increases in the rates of cancer, but bubbling beneath is the stark reality that we live at a time when humans are healthier and live longer than at any time in our history. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, released this week, make heartening if surprising reading. They show that most men are surviving until the age of 85 while women are living four years longer. Furthermore, we can expect these figures to increase as the century progresses. What's driving this extraordinary increase in human longevity? In fact, gerontologists and statisticians who calculate the age of death (for life insurance, mortgage quotes and pension funds) know that in Britain life expectancy has been increasing by about five hours a day for the past few years. What is surprising about the figures is that they appear to show that even these impressive increases in life expectancy (currently 79 years for a boy born today, 83 for a girl) are, if anything, very pessimistic. The increase has been driven by a number of advances. Firstly, the huge reduction in neonatal and infant deaths. These days, nearly all babies born in a prosperous advanced nation can expect to survive into adulthood. This alone explains the bulk of the increase in life expectancy. But not all of it. Sanitation, vaccination and better diets have increased lifespans once we survive infancy, but they cannot wholly explain why people are living into their eighties and beyond. A cut in physical stress and a huge reduction in exposure to toxic and carcinogenic substances in the environment may explain much of the increase. In the 1950s, thousands died or became very ill during the London smogs. That threat, along with numerous other environmental containments, has gone. We have also begun to stop smoking and we are drinking less, too. Finally, life is much safer than it used to be. As Steven Pinker shows in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the history of all societies has shown an amazing decline in violence over the past century. You are 10 times less likely to be murdered today than you were 200 years ago, and three times less likely to be killed on the roads than you were in the 1960s. So, can this continue? According to gerontologists, there is no clear answer. Currently the maximum human lifespan is 122 years, attained by the French woman Jeanne Calment who died in 1997. Signicantly, no one has yet to come within six years of her astonishing record. Instead, more and more of us are dodging the bullets of middle age and living to our personal genetic potential. The evolutionary theory of ageing says that any animal will age at a rate commensurate with its likely survival prospects in the wild. In short, our bodies give up on us after an age when we could have expected to die through starvation, disease or being eaten. So how long is the natural human lifespan? The answer seems to be that in a world where infectious diseases are kept at bay and where we are safe from predators and starvation, and provided we keep our lifestyles in check, reaching 80 or 90 should be possible for most people. What the figures show more than anything is that we need a rapid and radical rethink of how we treat the elderly among us, as they will soon be the majority. Michael Hanlon