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.