Ageing is not what it once was. That was the premise of our first book, Cultures of Ageing (2000) and it continues to guide the present one. From Thomson's time when the above was published to the first decade of the twenty-first century, profound changes have taken place in our understanding and interpretation of ageing and old age. During this period, old age as a distinct social category has collapsed while ageing itself has lost much of its former coherence. Age as ‘old age’ has been replaced by the feared social imaginary of a ‘fourth age’ (Gilleard and Higgs 2010) while the ageing ‘process’ has become caught up in the puzzling, cultural complexity that is the ‘third age’ (Gilleard and Higgs 2011a).