How to live to one hundred

“EASY TO FIND and hard to leave.” That is how Sidmouth’s tourism website describes the small seaside town in East Devon, where the red cliffs turn the ocean water pink. The tagline could apply to lives as well as holidays. Almost a third of residents are over 75; locals refer to Sidmouth as “God’s Waiting Room”. “We get a lot of people well into their 90s, 100s,” says a woman in a funeral parlour as an undertaker in a top hat tiptoes past. A card shop has sold “three or four” 100th-birthday cards since it opened in November.Life expectancy in Britain has been stagnating for a decade but the country still produces a lot of very old folk. Britain ranks 29th in the world for life expectancy (at 81 years) but seventh for centenarians per 100,000 people. That puts it ahead of Italy and Greece, both of which are known for their “”, a term used to describe areas where people claim to live exceptionally long lives.