If only we had the sense or luck to quit while we were ahead

You might think that a crusty, opera-loving reactionary like me would recognise Whitney Houston only as a misspelt entry in a particularly unlikely town twinning contest. But you would be wrong.

I was a great admirer of the lady and her work. However, I am sadly ill equipped to fill a column with tales of “the Whitney I knew”. My closest non-encounter was being almost thrown out of a London pub in the 1980s for staring rather too longingly at someone who bore a striking resemblance to her.

So let us move on instead to some more general reflections on the lessons we may learn from her sad passing.

Despite its occasional tragedies, I view this existence essentially as a comedy. Not least because both share the same fundamental secret: it is all about timing.

Whether in the arts, business, sport or life in general, the hardest reputational trick to pull off is quitting while you are ahead.

In our current obsession with “sustainability”, which is now displacing “corporate social responsibility” as the most fashionable buzzword in business, we risk losing sight of the fact that ultimately nothing is sustainable. In the long run, all will be dust and ashes.

This is supposed to represent "sustainability". I look forward to the "After" shot with a fully grown tree.

People, industries, economies, nations and empires rise; and then they decline. It is an immutable law. We must remember this so that we can respond with appropriate speed and brutality the next time some halfwit claims to have abolished boom and bust.

No one stays at the top forever. And, as the friend who climbed most of Everest last year kept reminding me, getting to the summit is actually the easier bit; 80% of fatalities occur on the descent.

"Green boots": one of the less gruesome shots of the 200 bodies littering Mount Everest

The art is knowing when to step off the Paternoster lift of your career before you end up mangled in the mechanism, as poor Whitney did.

One who managed this brilliantly was Sir Terry Leahy, who retired last year aged just 55 after 13 years as Chief Executive of Tesco, masterminding its transformation into the UK’s largest and most successful retailer.

He left with general adulation ringing in his ears. Yet within months “The Big Price Drop” turned out to be not just the name of Tesco’s latest marketing campaign, but the City’s unamused reaction to its post-Christmas profit warning.

At the opposite extreme, the former Sir Fred Goodwin (shortly to be compelled by the Forfeiture Committee to change his surname to Badloss) demonstrates what happens if you are left holding the ticking parcel when it goes off.

He's got the gun, but apparently it has proved impossible in Scotland to find the traditional bottle of whisky

I am not questioning his culpability for the almost unbelievable mess that RBS became. But I feel sure that there are many others who played key roles in the ruination of British banking, yet managed to sneak quietly away to enjoy their bonus-fuelled riches untroubled by public demands for retribution.

For those whose career choices are going to be inevitably short-lived – there being limited demand for, say, 70-year-old Page 3 girls – there is always the faint possibility of personal reinvention. Brian Cox has successfully turned himself from minor pop star into popular science guru, and Sebastian Coe from successful athlete into Tory politician, now transcending party as the driving force behind the London Olympics. But for most of us, just one fleeting taste of minor success is more than we can reasonably hope for.

Tony Blair famously tried to manage his reluctant departure from office with the aid of Philip Gould’s cringe-making memo recommending him to “leave with the crowds wanting more”. Great advice: terrible timing. But at least he was in good company in failing to grasp that the moment had come when he had delighted the public long enough.

All of us sharing that particular boat with him, and my fellow fans of Whitney Houston, can only muse on those two sad words that often come to mind on Valentine’s Day: if only …

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pensions: the ideal excuse for an evening in the boozer

My father left school at the first opportunity and saved for a pension all his working life. He retired at 67, invested all his savings in an annuity, and dropped dead at 73.

Which was sad for his family, but good news for the pension system. Because it helped to boost the profits and share price of his insurance company, which in turn increased the worth of its major investors: pension funds.

This may sound too good to be true, like an entire community supporting itself by taking in the neighbours’ washing, but it all worked pretty well so long as people considerately died not too long after they stopped working.

The essential problem today is that too many of us are living too long. Not only that, but our careers are being shortened by spending longer in education, taking gap years and expecting paid leave to be a parent. How can we possibly aspire to retire early, too?

Frankly it’s just not on. Unless you are a successful entrepreneur or have clawed your way to the very top of the greasy pole in business, you have no hope of saving enough to fund decades of comfortable retirement during less than 40 years at work.

While if you’re employed in the public sector, sadly the rest of us just can’t afford to maintain your current pension arrangements, either. Terribly sorry and all that, but you’re going to have to soldier on for longer and boost your own pension contributions, too.

Unless, perhaps, you are willing to enliven your retirement with dangerous sports or other risky pursuits that stand a chance of reversing the relentless upward trend in UK life expectancy, which is currently increasing by three years every decade.

A truly astonishing statistic, given that one cannot open a newspaper without reading how global warming, superbugs, obesity and drink are going to do for as all any minute.

Talking of risk and drink, a 65-year-old non-retired friend of mine recently climbed 23,000-odd feet up Everest, helped along by a supply of fine wines and vintage Cognac. I have not dared to ask how he feels about the recent advice that people of his age should drink no more than 1.5 units of alcohol a day.

www.justgiving.com/icelandeverest

 

That is about half a pint of beer, or less than a standard pub measure of wine. Surely all part of the health professionals’ relentless drive to prove that the only safe limit for booze, as for cigarettes, is a big, fat, round zero.

This is quite a laugh considering that some of the biggest drunks I know are doctors, while nurses are fiercely locked in combat with ballet dancers for the title of most dedicated smokers.

The arguments for reducing our intake of booze are always presented as being for our own good. Cut down on it, and we could all live longer lives. Well, possibly. Then again, they might just SEEM longer. And haven’t we already established that living ever longer is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

Ah, but we would also be healthier and thereby help to achieve that sacred goal of saving the NHS money. Except surely not, in the long run. Because until someone invents a foolproof way of ensuring that we all go to bed in perfect health one evening, then pass away peacefully in our sleep, sooner or later we’re all going to die of something unpleasant and probably lingering, in which the NHS (or its Cameron-Lansley privatised successor) will almost certainly feel obliged to get involved.

It’s a conundrum. My own advice is that we should all discuss it further in the course of a long an evening in the pub. Which will help a threatened local amenity, cheer us up, and might just help to pull the whole pension system back from the brink.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.