Sex education isn't part of my retirement plans

I’d be quite happy to carry on in the same pattern as my hair goes grey, my bones start to creak and I have to have the TV on full volume, but now I’m worried.

I’m nervous about what later life holds. A study has called for better sex education for the over-50s as rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) within this age group soar.

Older people should be taught safe sex to combat soaring STIs with rates doubling in the last decade, says research presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Barcelona. Rates of disease including gonorrhoea and syphilis have surged by almost a fifth in just four years.

Rising divorce rates, the emergence of Viagra, dating apps and the growth of retirement villages have combined with ‘sexual risk taking now common among older adults’.

Not in my house. The nearest my husband and I get to sexual risk taking is when one of us can’t find our pyjamas and stands half-naked in the bedroom for a few seconds.

I wouldn’t need lessons in safe sex, I’d need lessons in sex full stop. Is it something to do with the birds and the bees?

My husband and I occupy our own sides of the bed and never the twain shall meet. If he so much as dares to cross the permanent marker line I have drawn down the middle I would not be able to account for my actions.

Couples are getting together in retirement villages. Picture: Pixabay

But what of the future? I quite fancied the idea of a retirement village. I get enough leaflets about them and have hung on to a few as you never know what’s around the corner. There’s one near me which I once visited for work purposes and liked the look of.

I always associated such places with morning coffee, gardening, watercolour classes and a spot of pilates in the afternoon. If it means I’ve got to start shopping at Ann Summers you can count me out.

I thought all that palaver was well in the past. My daughters’ generation use dating apps, swiping right, left and goodness knows where else. They see it as a normal way of meeting someone and I accept that, but if I thought I might have to go down that road in my twilight years, I’d be well and truly depressed.

If I do, for whatever reason, find myself single in later life I’m now going to have to check out any potential partner’s bathroom cabinet. Packets of Rennie or Imodium I could handle, but Viagra: I’d be out of the door before I’d got my coat off.

Sexual health campaigns are focused on young people and overlook the needs and experiences of those aged 50 and older, the findings of the research, presented by Professor Justyna Kowalska, of the Medical University of Warsaw in Poland, said.

Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why some of these people might need refresher lessons. If my 63-year-old brain is anything to go by, it left all that behind many years ago. Would I want to learn it all over again? All that stuff about condoms and cucumbers, vaccines and limiting your sexual partners (I would have imagined that was a given in a retirement home but now I’m not so sure)?

Absolutely not. I’d rather have a cup of tea and a Hobnob.