Podcast · Health

How To Be 60 with Kaye Adams

by Kaye Adams · English · Health

Turning 60 isn’t about slowing down—it’s about shaking things up. Whether it’s downsizing and embracing a simpler life, starting a new career, moving abroad, or navigating love and relationships in unexpected ways, How To Be 60 proves that this stage of life is anything but predictable.Join Kaye Ada

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 39 min
Latest: 13 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026 · 25 minNew

Midweek Catchup: The Great Cottage Cheese Crisis

On this week's Midweek Catchup, Lildl has stopped selling full-fat cottage cheese, and Karen, who eats it daily for her bones, is touring the supermarkets for the perfect lumpy, not watery, pot. Kaye finally ditches her grim old water bottle and nearly vomits at the £40 price of a new one. And there's chocolate orange mini rolls for Mrs Pre-diabetic, a family holiday to Malaga, a hedge boundary row, and your treasured heirlooms, from 1890 steps to a curling stone. On Friday we're joined by Professor Tanya Byron. Get in touch at [email protected] and follow Kaye on Instagram…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

8 Oct 2026 · 54 min
Louise Doughty: The Suitcase That Rewrote My Parents' Love Story
On this week's episode, we're joined by Louise Doughty, who found a rusted black suitcase at the bottom of her late mum's wardrobe and nearly put it out with the bins. Inside were scores of undated letters charting the secret affair her parents had in 1950s Melton Mowbray, when her dad was a married man and her mum was his boss's secretary. Louise tells us how she pieced them together, why her parents took the story to their graves, and how losing them to Alzheimer's and a sudden heart attack almost hid who they really were. There's also a sister who kept fishing things back out of the bin…
6 Oct 2026 · 27 min
Midweek Catchup: Are You in a Care Home or What?
On this week's Midweek Catchup, Karen is up at the family home in a winged velour chair that Kaye swears belongs in a care home. She's been foraging for chanterelles, the only mushroom she can identify, and with nothing else to carry them in, she used a dog poo bag. Then she took it to the counter of the local gift shop. She's not going back. Kaye is wondering whether her mango habit is making her pre-diabetic, looks back on 37 years of friendship with Shereen Nanjiani after their Sunday on STV Radio, and has been sent a blackmail email about a porn addiction she definitely doesn't have.…
1 Oct 2026 · 55 min
Julia Macklin: The Day I Looked Into My Own Eyes
On this week's episode, we're joined by Julia Macklin, who was 15 in 1983 when her baby daughter was taken from her for adoption. Not 1953. 1983. Julia grew up in a devout Catholic family in Manchester and was told, again and again, that letting her baby go was the kindest thing she could do. She talks about the short letters from the Catholic Rescue Society describing another family bonding with her daughter, the grief she was never allowed to have, and the day, 18 years later, when a nun opened a door and said, she's here. Julia is one of the women in Stolen Babies, the BBC documentary now…
29 Sep 2026 · 24 min
Midweek Catchup: The Friend, the Bare Feet and the Thing Under the Chair
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we find out what Kaye does when a friend is pouring her heart out, barefoot, and the dog has left something under the chair. The short answer is nothing. We also compare first flats. Karen bought hers in Edinburgh for £12,000, sold it for £19,000, and was sure nobody would ever pay more. Kaye's two-up two-down in Birmingham cost £27,500 in 1986 and set her up for life. There's five minutes of staring at Sting across the Loose Women couch, and a curry squash Karen is slightly frightened of. Kaye is back on the radio this Sunday, co-presenting STV Radio from 9…
24 Sep 2026 · 39 min
Francesca Hicks: Cabin Crew at 62, After Every Other CV Got Binned
On this week's episode, we're joined by Francesca Hicks, who saw an easyJet recruitment story on the morning news at 62 and had applied by the time she got home. She'd been sending CVs out for months and getting nowhere. Employers looked at the date of birth, she says, and assumed a grey rinse. Then came the taster day, the five o'clock starts, six exams, slide training and swimming training, and a set of wings her youngest son still tells her he's proud of. Now she can meet 500 new people in a day, has had a passenger of 100 on board, and is planning to keep flying until she's 70 at least.…
22 Sep 2026 · 21 min
Midweek Catchup: Is There an Age You Move from Porn to Vinted?
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we lose a hearing aid at a flat viewing in Edinburgh, get glared at by our own daughter for whistling, and lock ourselves out of the house, all in the one week. Karen, meanwhile, has had a cooking apple rolling about her van for a month and can't find it. Between us there's one hearing aid, sixty remote controls and no idea how to get Colin from Accounts onto the actual television. Then a ferry to Rothesay turns into a sweaty eight-mile crawl behind someone doing 20, with a broken parking meter at the end and a dog who eats at half five on the dot. Stephen has…
17 Sep 2026 · 49 min
Keith Brymer Jones: Clay, Tears and a Welsh Chapel
On this week's episode, we're joined by Keith Brymer Jones, who is marrying his partner Marge next year and having the wedding rings made out of clay. He's also planning the whole wedding himself. Marge knows nothing and has said she'll just walk in. Keith is the Great Pottery Throwdown judge known for crying over pots, although he says sad news rarely sets him off. He tells us about the art room that was his refuge from school bullies, the careers teacher who had him down for the gas board, and the day his mother died, a story he tells with the dark humour grief sometimes leaves behind. At…
15 Sep 2026 · 25 min
Midweek Catchup: What on Earth Is Aura Farming?
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we find out what "aura farming" means, after four days in Spain with a crowd of twenty-year-olds who don't wash dishes. At all. Karen, meanwhile, is nursing another stinker of a cold, came home from Sunday with three kilos of brambles, and has turned them into a jam nobody asked her to describe. There's a reformer Pilates class where one of us looks like an insect flipped on its back, and a small row about whether Karen has ever made orange curd. We also open a new front in the household debates. After the pre-loved gusset and the pillow protector, it's the…
10 Sep 2026 · 49 min
Janet Street-Porter: 80, Off the Leash and Saying It For You
On this week's episode, we're joined by Janet Street-Porter, who turns 80 in December, owns four wedding rings with no plans for a fifth, and once sat Daniel Craig at the end of a village hall table for her 60th birthday party. The self-described nation's favourite pissed off pensioner talks to Kaye and Karen about a childhood spent writing herself a parallel world, a Fleet Street career built on strategy rather than charm, five marriages, one biological age test that came back at 56, and why she'll tell a stranger on a train to keep his voice down. Women come to her shows and tell her she's…
8 Sep 2026 · 18 min
Midweek Catchup: The 10 Pence Tip That Still Haunts Karen
On this week's Midweek Catchup, Karen tries to leave a 10% tip and accidentally leaves 10 pence, a moment of card machine confusion she may never recover from. We also hear why she picks her brambles in a cemetery (great soil, no relatives required), the blood sugar results she's hiding from Steven, and why Kaye is considering wearing a security tabard to the National Television Awards, since nobody shouts her name on the red carpet anyway. Plus a carpet cleaner that beat a £3,000 cleaning quote, and two cringe stories so bad neither of us will tell them yet. They're booked in for the 30th…
3 Sep 2026 · 59 min
Jay Rayner: Turning 60 With His Appetite Intact
On this week's episode, we're joined by Jay Rayner, who turns 60 ten days after this goes out and will spend the day itself on stage in York. Before that, he answers the question he sets himself in his new book: am I a total bastard? The restaurant critic, now cook, talks about growing up as Claire Rayner's son, opening some of her thousand letters a week as a pocket money job, a family that did its talking loudly over a full table, and why, sixteen years after her death, the nepotism jibe still rankles. There's also a porcelain hip, a jazz sextet, and a marriage he describes as one unending…
1 Sep 2026 · 26 min
Midweek Catchup: Kaye Has Dead Butt Syndrome
On this week’s Midweek Catchup, we compare ailments. Kaye has diagnosed herself with dead butt syndrome, which explains the hips, the 18-year-old mattress and the trip to the chiropractor. Her treatment plan involves a tulip-shaped device she once bought Karen for the Fringe. External use only. Karen is on day seven of warm water and lemon and has been invited for a jab whose leaflet opens with the over-75s. Also this week: the £3,000 cleaning quote, Ian up the scaffolding, and Karen’s first Christmas present of the year, bought in August. This week’s guest is Jay Rayner. Get in touch with…
27 Aug 2026 · 44 min
AC Scott: The Broadcaster Who Disappeared and Came Back Singing
On this week's episode, we're joined by AC Scott, better known to Scottish audiences as broadcaster Alison Craig, who vanished from our screens in 2012 after a rare lung condition collapsed both her lungs and a consultant told her she had ten years to live. What happened next is the strange part. A songwriting weekend on the west coast of Scotland, a phone call from an Emmy-winning American producer telling her she was a songwriter, and the A&R veteran who discovered Jeff Buckley and signed Moby and Beth Orton taking her on. Alison talks about the breakdown she couldn't name at the time, the…
25 Aug 2026 · 24 min
Midweek Catchup: The Phone Call Kaye Wouldn't Pick Up
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we find out why Kaye's head is glued back on. After more than a year of putting it off, she's had half her thyroid removed, and when the hospital rang five days later with the results, she let it ring out. Twice. Karen, meanwhile, has talked her way out of a prescription for antidepressants and into a pharmacist's alternative plan, and is dispatching garden slugs with the cheapest lager Lidl sells. Also on the agenda: a worldwide mango shortage that may only exist in Kaye's kitchen, a squash the size of a small football that Karen is too frightened to cut…
20 Aug 2026 · 51 min
Milly Johnson: The Arthritic Knee That Saved Her Life
On this week's episode, we're joined by bestselling author Milly Johnson, who planned a year-long celebration of turning 60 and credits an arthritic knee with saving her life. Before the Yorkshire Pudding Club and three million book sales, there were decades of proper jobs, years of rejection, and a marriage so bad she filed for divorce while five months pregnant. Milly spent thirty years looking after everyone else — first her boys, then her parents — and decided this decade would be hers. Venice by train, northern soul dancing, and a diamond ring her partner didn't know he was buying yet.…
18 Aug 2026 · 23 min
Midweek Catchup: Back to Earth with a Bump
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we come back down to earth after the Fringe — to a filthy house, a poorly husband and the guilty remains of a packet of chocolate-covered pecans. Kaye's been in London doing ITV, where she talked a very nice photographer into taking her passport photo while she still had her telly makeup on. That's her sorted until she's 72. Karen, meanwhile, has been collecting firewood. In August. Mostly though, this one belongs to the emails from people who came to the Edinburgh shows. There's one that nearly finishes Karen off, and a sorry tale from Katie, whose train from…
13 Aug 2026 · 43 min
Jan Birley: From IT Project Manager to Producing Her Own Feature Film
On this week's episode, we're joined by Jan Birley, who decided at 58 that she was going to produce a feature film, and had one finished by 60. She'd spent thirty years as an IT project manager, and by her own count she has been in the film industry for two. She raised a budget of around £800,000, put her own money in, and when an experienced line producer told her she wasn't ready, she told him she'd crew it up herself and do it. He came back a couple of days later and said he was in. The film is Hot Flash, shot in Yorkshire, with Gaynor Faye as a woman starting again in her forties with no…
11 Aug 2026 · 13 min
Midweek Catchup: Everybody Bloody Loves Karen
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we're coming to you from the dungeon of Teviot House, an hour before our final Fringe show, because Karen wants to catch the free bus home. Three sell-out shows, nerves that leave the coffee sitting somewhere between chest and throat, and a suspiciously big round of applause for Karen that Kaye is trying not to take personally. Plus a dash to the laundrette with the sheets from Bonnie's student flat, a surprise family delegation in the audience, and a boiler that gave up the moment Karen left the house. A huge thank you to everyone who came along to the shows,…
6 Aug 2026 · 47 min
Barbara Scully: Stand-Up at 60 and the Superpower of Being Underestimated
On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Barbara Scully, who did her first stand-up gig at 60, mostly because two women wouldn’t let her out of their flat until she agreed. Now she’s about to tour her second one-woman show. She tells us about hitting rock bottom at 50 in the dole office car park, being mistaken for the children’s chaperone minutes before her own show, and why she has no interest in getting her oestrogen back. As for menopausal brain fog, she’s renamed it an information retrieval slowdown, and her husband has it just as badly. Because no one tells you that being underestimated…
4 Aug 2026 · 23 min
Midweek Catchup: Big News and a Passport Computer That Says No
On this week's Midweek Catchup, one of us has news. Proper news. You'll have to listen. What we can say: Kaye's been to Manchester for her roots, finally claimed her third off the train fare, and rode an electric bike home through Glasgow like a witch on a broomstick. Then there's the passport photo. Rejected. Eyes shut, said the computer. They were open. That's hooded eyes for you. All this two days before our first Fringe show, with Friday and Saturday sold out and a few Sunday tickets going. Barbara Scully, the Irish Joan Rivers, joins us on Friday's episode. Get in touch with your…
30 Jul 2026 · 44 min
Marisa Peer: Ageing Is a Decision
Episode description On this week's episode, we're joined by Marisa Peer, who was once asked to do therapy in a jacuzzi in a bikini. She said no, and says it probably cost her work. Marisa is a therapist and bestselling author who started out as a fitness trainer at Jane Fonda's fitness centre in LA, got married for the first time at 51, and reckons she did the whole thing the wrong way round. She tells Kaye and Karen about the male friend she handed a television job to, who went straight to the network and suggested they drop her for someone younger. About the three ages we all have, only…
28 Jul 2026 · 22 min
Midweek Catchup: A £36 Wash and the Railcard I Swore I'd Never Get
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we find out what one load of washing costs at the laundrette when your house is in bits. Thirty-six pounds. Kaye has no kitchen, no washing machine, and a dishwashing arrangement involving a baby bath, so she's on an economy drive: not buying food, not washing anything. Then there's the railcard she resisted for years, right up until it saved her forty quid to Manchester. That's a wash, as she points out. Karen has Stephen, a quarter of toffees, and eight wrappers, one under the bed. Kaye marks eight years since her mum died with yellow roses at the cemetery.…
23 Jul 2026 · 49 min
Mimi Anderson: Minus 35, Frostbite, and No Intention of Stopping
On this week's episode, we're joined by Mimi Anderson, who set off into the Canadian Arctic on a fat bike in minus 35 and turned back with frostbite. She didn't start running until she was 36, and only then because somebody told her it would make her legs thinner. It went from there to the Sahara and a world record between Land's End and John o'Groats. She tells us about the day a consultant showed her the hole in her knee, forty days into a run from Los Angeles to New York and on track to break the record. It took her over an hour to decide to stop. Her second book is called Limitless. She…
21 Jul 2026 · 25 min
Midweek Catchup: Home from Holiday to a House of Horrors
On this week's Midweek Catchup, Kaye gets home from holiday to no power, no kitchen, no running water, and a chest freezer of the dog's raw meat that had been switched off for ten days. Six inches of blood at the bottom. She's calling it the abattoir. Karen, meanwhile, has spent the fortnight losing to a squash plant that's trying to take over the garden, washing up in a baby bath, and keeping an eye on her husband's brand-new pre-diabetic diet — which is going about as well as you'd expect when there's homemade ice cream in the freezer and half of it's already gone. They're also both…
16 Jul 2026 · 51 min
Russ Kane: Why Me Is the Wrong Question
On this week's episode, we're joined by Russ Kane, who spent 20 years reporting traffic from a light aircraft and now conducts funerals for a living. He was Chris Tarrant's wingman on Capital Radio Breakfast, the flying eye on a show pulling four million listeners a week. He walked away from it after his wife Sally died at 43, leaving him with five-year-old twin boys. He'd already lost his dad. His mum's dementia came next, and lasted years longer than any doctor told him to expect. Russ talks about grieving privately while raising two small kids in public, why he stopped looking for a…
14 Jul 2026 · 25 min
Kaye’s Mr Bean Moment, Ian’s Midlife Crisis & The Man from Monaco
Kaye joins Karen from Puglia for a very relaxed midweek catch-up involving questionable Italian, a holiday glass-door incident, and Ian’s mysterious new lease of life. There’s talk of pasta-making fatigue, pillow protectors, Karen’s ongoing domestic standards, and whether Ian’s new phone screensaver, Vespa adventure and tennis match with “the man from Monaco” point to a full-blown midlife crisis. Plus, Kaye and Karen give a quick Edinburgh Fringe update ahead of their live shows on 7, 8 and 9 August with special guest Siobhan Daniels, the Retirement Rebel . Get tickets here:…
9 Jul 2026 · 45 min
Jacquie Beltrao: Seven Years On From Stage Four, "I've Got Today"
On this week's episode, we're joined by Sky Sports legend Jacquie Beltrao, who was told seven years ago that her breast cancer had returned and spread. Her scans are clear now, but as she says, she doesn't know what the future holds, only that she has today. Jacquie talks candidly about the doom spiral of a stage four diagnosis, the antidepressants that pulled her out of it, and why she thinks her mind has been harder to conquer than her body. She also opens up about turning 60 as a cancer patient, why getting older feels like something to celebrate rather than dread, and the anxiety dream…
8 Jul 2026 · 23 min
Midweek Catchup: The Amalfi Verdict, a Digital Detox, and Six Pillow Protectors
On this week's Midweek Catchup, we get Kaye's verdict live from the Amalfi Coast: stunningly beautiful, wildly overpriced, and Positano is basically Disneyland with a coastline. She's also two days into a self-imposed digital detox, phone banished to the bedside drawer, after Bonnie stopped her mid-scroll in the pool and asked if they could just take a moment to appreciate where they are. The child has a point. Karen, meanwhile, is not detoxing from anything. She's deep in a Vinted spiral, six pillow protectors down (new with tags, she'd like that noted), and fresh from a hygienist…
2 Jul 2026 · 43 min
Bibi Lynch: Nearly Destroyed at 50, Buoyant at 60
On this week's episode, we're joined by Bibi Lynch, who moved house 30 times in ten years, nineteen of them in a single stretch of 24 months, all while writing for the national press and turning up on live radio as if nothing were wrong. Bibi was hidden homeless for a decade after losing the flat she'd bought on her own, and she was carrying it alongside the death of her dad, the collapse of what freelance journalism paid, and the slow realisation that she wasn't going to have the children she'd always assumed would arrive. She calls that last one social infertility, and she is still angry…

About How To Be 60 with Kaye Adams

How To Be 60 with Kaye Adams is a English health podcast from Kaye Adams. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Kaye Adams
Language: English
Category: Health
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 39 min
Latest episode: 13 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1617597356
Rights: Kaye Adams

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