now. Allen thinks her good health is largely down to keeping busy, especially since her husband Joe died in 1997. She took up writing poetry when she was 80. “I write poems about everything. I’m a prolific writer. I just can’t stop,” she says, phoning me a few days after the interview to read out a ditty she has written about the joys of exercise. One of the class, 84-year-old former teacher Winnie Robertson, thinks the secret to staying fit is never letting yourself go: “Use it or lose it, that’s what I say.” Allen still plays the piano and gives speeches. She is president of the Women’s Fellowship at the local methodist church and is one of three 90-plus year olds at the scrabble club of the University of the Third Age. She did a computer course when she was 88 and tried to get online, but it didn’t work out. Ageing is no fun, she admits, reading me a few lines from a poem she has written called 'That Beast Called Age'. She happily recalls a doctor who saw her for the first time a few years back, who said she couldn’t possibly be more than 78: “I said, 'Thank you, doctor. You can go now.'” She also has a no-nonsense attitude to weight gain: “I just think people shouldn’t eat too much. Whenever I hear someone saying, 'Oh, I can’t lose weight’, I say:’ Sellotape.'” She mimes taping her mouth shut. “I said this just the other day to a