en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:16:42 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Minette Marrin Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-02-06T11:08:02Z How many friends does a person need? That was the question that startled me out of my February gloom last Thursday when listening to the BBC’s Today programme. The answer was startling. Apparently the outer limit for friends is about 150, according to Robin Dunbar, Oxford professor of evolutionary anthropology and author of a book on the subject. To lay down an outer limit is not really to answer the question; it is to suggest how many friends one doesn’t need or cannot handle. But either way it is all odd, as if there were some kind of felicific calculus for friendship and one that applies to us all equally, however different our natures. Minette Marrin Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-01-31T05:18:09Z It is bad enough getting old. What makes it worse is the constant pressure, these days, to deny it or disguise it. There is endless media wittering about 40 being the new 30 and 70 being the new 60, with the implication that we all should look and feel at least 10 years younger than we are. Now Emma Soames, Saga magazine’s editor-at-large, has come up with an irritating new celebration of being 50: women in their fifties are, supposedly, newly fantastic and having a new, fantastically improved youthful time of late-onset confidence and vigour. She calls them — in one of those neologisms that make one’s granny glasses fug up with annoyance — the Quintastics. Minette Marrin Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-01-09T10:38:38Z If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the same is true of public safety. The failed airline bomber at Christmas has reminded everyone of that. But vigilance is not the same as constant state surveillance: that would make freedom itself the price of public safety. It is surely obvious that vigilance must be carefully directed and focused — in other words, targeted. Only by careful targeting of the few can we avoid indiscriminate, mass intrusion into the freedom and the privacy of the many. Minette Marrin Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-01-02T10:35:19Z In among all the gloomy predictions for the next decade is one that is astonishingly cheering. In the near future neurologists will be able to halt the process of Alzheimer’s disease. At present they can treat only the symptoms but soon, having detected the disease in its early stages with biomarkers, they will be able to stop it getting any worse with drugs that are neuro-protector agents. Minette Marrin Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:02:47 GMT 2009-12-26T09:10:22Z "Don’t just do something! Stand there!” That was one of Ronald Reagan’s favourite instructions, supposedly, although it has been attributed to other people too. Whoever said it, to me it makes excellent good sense. How I wish this sage commandment could be writ large in every government office in the land.