MY mother, who is 70, has announced that she will retire next March and has spent a year planning how to spend her time.

She has joined a group called Silver Leaves, which meets once a week in a church hall just down the road in her village, plans to take a walk every day and also wants to volunteer for a charity.

The detailed planning is to take away her fear of loneliness. My mother is a widow, and her fear is very real and prevalent among older women, whom society allows to simply fade to grey.

If you need evidence, there is plenty.

The broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, editor-at-large of High50 magazine, last week spoke out about the army of “forgotten women” who are over 50, and revealed: “I shed half my workload the moment 50 appeared on my CV”.

And Age UK has a poster out there at the moment showing a picture of an elderly woman called Ann.

“Ann hasn’t spoken to anyone for a month,” the accompanying text reads.

“Will you send her a text and invite her for lunch?”

Lower down the ad reads: “Almost a million older people say they haven’t spoken to a friend, neighbour or family member for weeks on end” and appeals for people to give money to “pay for a lonely older person to come to a local lunch club, giving them something to look forward to – and the companionship they need”.

A year ago, the broadcaster Esther Rantzen, widowed in 2000 and lonely, launched The Silver Line, the only charity helpline aimed at alleviating loneliness, a lifeline for those who need to hear the sound of another human voice.

It received almost 300,000 calls in its first year, double the number expected.

John Witherow, the editor of The Times newspaper, last week described loneliness in old age as “one of the most pressing social problems facing the UK... half a million elderly people will spend Christmas Day alone”.

Studies show that loneliness is connected with increased health risks – for example, women with fewer social relationships experienced strokes at more than twice the rate of those with more social relationships, taking variations into account (Rutledge et al, 2008).

And research shows that greater social contact is related to reduced morbidity while fewer contacts lead to increased morbidity. In other words, social connection is better for your health.

It’s hard for people to admit they’re lonely and if an elderly person lives alone and finds it difficult to get out physically, who are they going to tell?

The vast majority of elderly people living alone are women – nearly three times as many as men because women tend to outlive men (2012 figures, ONS) – and many, like my mother, are often worse off than men because many worked part-time and were wrongly advised to pay only half stamp (National Insurance) in the 1970s, thus reducing their pensions.

And those poorer elderly women tend to cut back on expenses, including telephone bills, transport costs and social expenses such as a coffee or lunch out with a friend, forced to cut off their own social lifelines.

But these are invisible women, forgotten by society. In Brighton, we tend to give public money to funky minority groups that capture headlines and confirm the city’s place as one of Britain’s coolest cities.

However, as Mariella Frostrup says, the over-50s are the in-crowd and I would urge those people with money to disperse to start a new trend by nurture our invisible yet inestimably valuable older women.