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Trampolining is becoming increasingly popular among pensioners, with many seeing it as an excellent form of exercise or an enjoyable activity they can share with their grandchildren.
A sizable minority also use portable trampolines for a variety of everyday purposes, including reaching items on the top shelves of supermarkets, delivering mobile phones and spice to friends and family in prison, surprising squirrels in the act of building a dray, accessing the front seats of open-top buses, tattooing the bald heads of very tall people, checking for Legionnaire’s Disease in rooftop cooling installations, placing black-out curtains over annoying street lamps and mounting a giraffe.
After a relatively short period of practice, most pensioners should be sufficiently proficient to execute the basics of going up (bouncing) and coming down (gravity), while somersaults, with or without tucks, twists or pikes, usually take a little longer to perfect and may involve the fracturing or breaking of ankles, wrists and other assorted bones.
The UK leads the world in competitive trampolining for the over-65s and the 2017 national championships attracted almost 1,800 competitors up to the age of 94. The event saw its first posthumous winner, when 78-year-old Bertha Sheepwash suffered a fatal coronary performing the last element of an exceptional routine that included Birani-Kaboom-Kerfuffle-Leghorn-Pullover-Somerset-Rudolph-Valentino-McGrew-Fliffus-Triffus and Kite.