By 10 o’clock on Friday morning I had spoken to two single girlfriends who both asked if I had read the story of Olive Archer, who died aged 83 on December 20. I had, as it happens, and felt all choked as I tried to drink my cup of tea.

Nicknamed Eleanor Rigby by the tabloids (“died in the church and was buried along with her name, nobody came”), Archer will be mourned on January 14 by a minister and a funeral director. The former has appealed for any relatives or friends to make themselves known so that they can come and pay their respects.

“When you look at the photo of this young woman,” said the Rev Akasha Lonsdale, referring to an old photograph of a beautiful, smiling Archer in her youth, “you can’t help but wonder what her hopes and dreams were. It just seems dreadful that at the end of her long life, no one will be at her funeral to remember and celebrate her.”

Before her death Archer had spent five years in a care home where she did not receive a single visitor. Both my friends’ comments – basically “That’ll be me in 40 years’ time” (they were not joking) – and my own reaction, which was a mixture of shock, shame, pity and fear, illustrate the fact that loneliness is a modern epidemic and that the prospect of a lonely old age terrifies even vigorous, successful, friend-laden young(ish) people.

Archer, who never married or had children, is thought to have spent her life looking after her invalid mother and may have had a sister with whom she lost touch. She must have had friends and, looking the way she did in the photograph, boyfriends.

“I want to do what I can so someone will come for her,” said Lonsdale last week. “She is Swindon born and bred and lived here most of her life, so someone must know her.”

Happily, by yesterday morning, more than a dozen people had responded to the minister’s appeal, including an old schoolfriend. People who had never met Archer also got in touch because they had been so moved by her story.

This is very cheering but I have the feeling that Lonsdale is unusually and commendably proactive and that numbers of Olive Archers are buried every week, unremarked upon and completely alone. This is not only incredibly depressing but also frightening. How is it possible for a human being from a large town in the “civilised” West to end her days, and then die, in quite such a solitary fashion? It wouldn’t happen if she were a tribeswoman in some remote bit of jungle, or an Afghan peasant, or an Eskimo, and yet in Britain today the fact that many old people are tragically lonely and die unmourned by anyone dear to them is barely remarked upon.

We just take it to be one of those things: really sad, of course, but there you go. When I was a regular visitor at a couple of nursing homes (for family reasons rather than charitable ones), I used to notice that some residents were not visited by anyone from week to week, or indeed from month to month. They just sat there waiting for death – as you would, in the circs – until, inevitably, death came. It must have been a blessed relief: if it were me, I would be begging every passing attendant to give me an “accidental” overdose.

I’m not about to go into a rant about the importance of family – it’s hard to make your family important if you don’t have one, or if they somehow fall away – but surely it’s time we looked at this subject properly and tried to find a way of not making old age such a traumatic prospect.

Short of us all adopting the Mediterranean/Asian model and having our elderly parents live with us, the answer, I think, lies online: we need an older person’s version of OLPC, the One Laptop per Child charity project that aims to give children in the developing world a special kind of $100 laptop each.

As news of Archer’s death was published, so it was revealed that a social networking site set up by Saga had been a giant hit since its launch last October. Saga Zone is specifically designed for people over 50. Its oldest registered user is 93 and the average user is in his or her late sixties. A Saga spokesman said: “Our members have found that age, disability or illness can make them less socially mobile than they would have been. The site is expanding the social horizons enormously for many.”

The internet has been a godsend for many older people, allowing them to keep in touch with their families and friends, especially when such families have moved abroad or too far away for regular visits.

Babies can be held up in front of webcams and introduced to their grandparents or great-grandparents there and then, rather than on the annual trip home. Friends from all over the globe can be contacted in seconds. News, gossip, e-mails and photographs can all be exchanged without the faff of going to the post office or feeling anxious about the phone bill.

Above all, social networking websites such as Saga’s create communities and the feeling that by participating – even if it’s only to share a recipe for marmalade – the elderly person sitting alone in her flat is not alone and is part of a group that is thousands-strong. I imagine it’s an absolute life-saver as well as a sanity-saver.

But not enough old people have computers. The next time you’re wondering what to buy your elderly parent or grandparent, steer yourself away from the lavender bath salts and head to the computer store, or pass on the laptop that you don’t consider sexy enough any more. My three-year-old daughter can use a basic toddlers’ laptop with a mouse, and there is no reason why an elderly person should not be taught to use an adult version (computers have been adapted for the blind and hard of hearing).

It may not be the same as a hug, a chat and a cup of tea, but there’s nothing wrong with simulated human interaction when the alternative is sitting alone in the darkness waiting for meals on wheels. I can’t help thinking that if some enterprising soul had given Archer access to the internet a decade or so ago, there would be people making the trip to Swindon to say goodbye to her, even though they had never met her in the flesh.

It’s too late for her but not necessarily for the thousands of lonely, forgotten old people like her – especially if some enterprising charity for the elderly were to take up this suggestion. Are you listening, Age Concern?

If you knew Olive Archer, please call 01249 813 188

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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