The high price of getting bored too easily

These days I am officially a pensioner, thanks to the extraordinary diligence of an Australian bank.

They went to the trouble of employing a detective agency to track me down in rural Northumberland and ask whether I was the same Keith Hann who, in 1978, started work for a London stockbroking partnership they had since acquired.

My first place of work in the City, happily long since demolished

It seemed needlessly cruel to point out that they could have answered this question much more cheaply by just clicking on my LinkedIn profile.

They kindly sent me a useful lump sum to help celebrate my 60th birthday last month, and started making monthly payments into my bank account; which, though very modest, do at least exceed my income from journalism.

It led me to wonder how much better off I would have been if I had stuck with the broking game and been entitled to retire on a full pension, instead of the small stipend accrued through five years of not particularly well-paid work.

I gave it up in 1983 because it bored me. I thought a change of scene from London to Edinburgh might cure this, which just goes to show how phenomenally stupid I am. I lasted a day and a quarter at my wee desk in the New Town.

Then I somehow got a job at a London financial PR agency that was, with the benefit of hindsight, an earthly paradise.

My second place of work in the City: built nearly 300 years before the first one, but happily still there

You could smoke at your desk, and almost every room contained a cupboard stocked with life-threatening quantities of alcohol.

Lunch started each day at 12.30 sharp and concluded around nightfall. To cap it all, many of my colleagues were beautiful women and, for the first and last time in my life, not all of them wept with laughter when I subtly enquired whether there might be some chance of sleeping with them.

I got bored with that, too, which clearly demonstrates a fatal lack of judgement.

Stockbroking had been an odd choice of career for someone who was practically innumerate until Clive Sinclair invented the pocket calculator in 1972. To be honest, my main reason for choosing it was the Gamages Christmas adverts in the old Meccano magazine.

Each year they used to advertise a range of Hornby Dublo trains and Meccano sets, with the most expensive preceded (in lieu of a drum roll) by the words “And, if Daddy is a stockbroker …”

I always wanted a top of the range Meccano set, so it seemed a logical move. Added to which, I came onto the job market as a terminally bored PhD student just at the time when City firms were beginning to think they should recruit more people who were, on paper, academically bright. A marked contrast with their traditional intake of the dimmest sons of the existing partners, supplemented by retired Army officers from decent regiments.

I had remained at Cambridge to pursue a doctorate because I was too lazy and disorganised to find a proper job when I graduated. Not for me the quiet tap on the shoulder that came the way of one good friend who had tried and failed in the examination for entry to the Foreign Office.

Our tutor invited him for a sherry, commiserated on his disappointment and asked whether he might be “interested in serving his country in another way?”

Not being the sharpest knife in the box, my pal asked what exactly this meant. Half an hour later he was in the college bar buying drinks all round. “Great news, lads! I’m going to be a spy!”

No eyebrows were visibly raised but he heard no more, and very slowly it dawned on him that he might have failed some sort of test.

Reading the Russian archive reports this week on the low opinion they held of their famous Cambridge spies, as an incompetent bunch of hopeless drunks, I can’t help wondering why both the British and Soviet secret services ignored me all those years ago.

I was a mentally unstable borderline alcoholic with zero judgement, at the right university. Why on earth did they not fight to snap me up?

And what sort of pension might I be collecting now if only they had?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The only way to retire in comfort is going to be winning the lottery

The greatest obstacle to every well-intentioned Government health campaign, like Stoptober, has always been the Uncle Fred factor.

However convincingly they may present statistics on the terrible consequences of smoking and drinking, nearly everyone can cite in response the example of an Uncle Fred who defied the odds.

Toping and puffing to wild excess from the age of 14, Uncle Fred only died aged 98 when he was knocked off his bike while fleeing from his girlfriend’s house after her husband came home unexpectedly early.

How the nation’s medical profession must have groaned last week when Dorothy Peel from Hull, interviewed as she celebrated her 110th birthday, revealed that one of the secrets of her longevity was giving up smoking … at the age of 104. While the other was never drinking whisky before 7pm, sticking to sherry earlier in the day.

Cheers, Dorothy! [Picture courtesy of The Sun]

The problem with this sort of story, amusing and spirit-raising though it undoubtedly is, is that it falls into the same category as those regular tales of massive lottery wins. It could be you. But it won’t be.

In practice, buying that ticket every week (and I write as a fellow mug who does it himself) just admits you to that not very select club of idiots who have cheerfully signed up to pay an extra voluntary tax. 

Continuing to smoke and drink heroically, in defiance of all official advice, involves a similar willingness to pay additional taxes. And, unlike having a flutter on the lottery, it will also shorten your life.

One of the main reasons cited for making cigarettes beyond the pale is the huge amounts that the NHS will “save” on the treatment of smoking-related illnesses. This will no doubt be true in the short run, but I wonder whether anyone has ever attempted a proper cost-benefit analysis in the longer term.

Because sadly few of us are destined to pass away peacefully aged 110 or more. The process of dying is more likely to be unpleasant, prolonged and, for the NHS or its privatised successors, expensive.

If we cut out the fags, the effect may be just to defer that cost for, say, 20 years, adding in the meantime to the drain on the nation’s pension funds. The parlous state of which needs no underlining.

The Government’s latest wheeze to deal with that particular crisis kicked off yesterday with the beginning of auto-enrolment in pension schemes. This involves having your pay docked now to build up a fund for your old age which, according to all the examples I have heard, will pay you a pathetically small additional pension and reduce your entitlement to benefits by a similar amount.

A worthwhile win for Government and society as a whole, no doubt, but hardly a great boon to the individual compulsory saver.

This will not make welcome reading for those towards the bottom of the economic heap, but I believe that the underlying reality is that we have simply had it too good for too long.

After Macmillan, no one dared to point out that "You've never had it so good." But he was right ...

The generation that won the equivalent of a double rollover jackpot in the lottery of life was the one just before mine. They were too young to be conscripted for World War II. Those who made it to university not only enjoyed their education entirely free of charge, but received a maintenance grant from the taxpayer. They worked through a period of generally increasing prosperity and benefited from a wholly disproportionate inflation in the value of their property assets.

Then, to cap it all, they retired on the sort of final salary pensions that are now completely unaffordable.

The reality for those of us bobbing along in their wake is that we are likely to go on getting worse off for some considerable time, whoever we vote for at the next election. For us, any sort of retirement, let alone a prosperous one, is probably just a dream.

Rather like emulating the spectacular luck of Uncle Fred or Mrs Peel in smoking and drinking without ill-effects, or picking the right six numbers in the lottery.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Facing up to that overwhelming sense of time running out

I once found it ridiculous that nearly every mention of anyone in a newspaper should be followed by a bracketed reference to their age. Why on earth did that matter?

Today, Keith Hann (58) is completely nonplussed in the rare instances when this detail is omitted, because age provides the essential context for my reaction. An accidental death at 19 is almost always going to seem sadder than at 91.

Though if the 91-year-old met their end surfing on top of a train after downing a case of alcopops, it does make for a more unusual and arresting story.

I remember being mildly amused by the fact that my parents’ first port of call in their Journal and Evening Chronicle was always the “deaths” column; but it has now been mine, too, for many years.

I cannot recall exactly when death changed from being a vague, theoretical possibility to the central consideration of my life, but I suspect that it was somewhere around the age of 40. Perhaps it comes later for women, because Mrs Hann just laughs when I try to explain that some element of her forward planning is of limited relevance to me because I won’t be around to see it come to fruition.

It does not seem so long since I found myself similarly frustrated when suggesting improvements to a family property and being met with indifference on the grounds that “it will see me out”. Though in that instance the pessimists proved correct, as pessimists so often do.

Right now, Mrs Hann and I are juggling my desire to live and die in rural Northumberland with our work commitments elsewhere, and the knowledge that where we are living this December will determine where our older son starts his first school next September.

Buying a new home is not the simple option it once appeared, when a 25-year mortgage would run until I am 83 or, on the evidence of 300 years of Hann family mortality statistics, long dead. A fact that is evidently not lost on potential sources of such finance, judging by their marked reluctance to provide it.

The revolutionary iCoffin: surely the perfect last word for a PR man? (With acknowledgements to onceuponageek.com)

I have no life insurance, because what was the point of spending money on that when I had no wife or dependents to benefit from it? (Added to which, I hoped that more distant relatives and godchildren might greet the news of my demise with unadulterated sorrow, rather than as the harbinger of a lucky windfall.)

While my pension provision, thanks to the feeble performance of the stock market as well as my own improvidence, makes my retirement seem a more implausible fantasy than my three-year-old’s current concerns about the ogre that apparently inhabits a tree in our garden, or the tiger that regularly takes up residence beneath his bed.

The bottom line is that I find myself with responsibility for the future of two small boys and a strategy for their housing and education almost entirely based on winning the National Lottery.

Or, after 40 years of mainly scribbling for a living, suddenly coming up with the latest answer to Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. Realistically, I think we have far more chance of winning the Lottery.

But, as you read this, I will be sitting at my desk with my phone off the hook and my email inbox disabled, staring at a blank screen as I try to start the short book that someone recklessly commissioned two months ago, and which now needs to be delivered in just five short weeks.

I will be breaking off only for my long deferred annual check-up at the doctor’s tomorrow, which can surely only add fuel to my slow-burning fire of fatalistic gloom.

My book? Oh, it is a supposedly humorous short guide to opera, about which I know a little. Though my main hope, if I get it done, is naturally for a follow-up commission on my specialist subject: trying to work out how much time I have got left.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Remember that it will all be the same in a hundred years' time

As Europe teeters on the brink of an almost unimaginable economic catastrophe, one that may make the events of the 1930s seem like a perfect summer of cream teas and croquet on the vicarage lawn, my thoughts keep returning to a valuable saying of my mother’s: “It will all be the same in a hundred years’ time.”

Bearing this in mind, one of the many things I cannot get worked up about is pensions. Partly, I will admit, because my personal late breeding programme makes it highly unlikely that I will ever be able to retire. Though the other thing making retirement totally inconceivable is the dreadful performance of the investments that I was persuaded to make over the years in a pension fund.

I remember that this concept was sold to me with various projections based on differing growth rates. But I do not remember ever seeing these include the reality of no growth at all, or at any rate growth so low that it barely covers the fat fees of the towering geniuses managing my fund.

My pension fund: how it was meant to be

The image "My pension fund: how it turned out" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. But imagine the one above with the arrow pointing the other way and you will be pretty much there.

I was financially sophisticated enough to see through the great endowment mortgage scan, even though I was called a fool for insisting on a dull old repayment mortgage when I could have this fantastic product that would not only pay off my debt at the end of its term, but leave me rich as Croesus, relaxing in a hot tub in the Caribbean with a minimum of three bikini-clad babes. It was like choosing a penny farthing when I could have had a top-of-the-range Rolls Royce.

I was even bright enough always to tick the “no thanks” box when persuasively offered Payment Protection Insurance, though this does not stop me receiving repeated automated phone calls from helplines eager to pursue my mis-selling claim.

But a pension I fell for, hook line and sinker. Tax relief on the money going in, and a tax-free environment in which my money would surely grow. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start Gordon Brown (peace be upon him for saving the nation from the euro) came along came along and concluded that we were all having it too good, so reduced those tax breaks. Then piles of onerous and expensive regulations were heaped upon funds to prevent another Robert Maxwell craftily using them to line his own pockets. And to cap it all, the stock market went to hell in a handcart.

Not to worry, though, because my pension fund managers kept coming up with brilliant new wheezes for putting money into bright, shiny new things that offered so much more potential than dull old shares. For all I know, they could have included packages of mortgages on trailer parks in Detroit, dressed up as Triple A bonds. Because I made the critical mistake of getting so bored with the whole thing that I broke my lifelong golden rule of never investing in things I did not understand (which basically restricted me to a portfolio of pubs, breweries, hotels, restaurants and bakers) and saying the grown-up equivalent of “Whatever”.

So now I find myself with untouchable pension savings that were originally supposed to fund a comfortable if not luxurious retirement just two years hence, and would now buy me an annuity best described as pitiful.

Do I feel sympathy with those public sector workers who are going on strike tomorrow because their contributions are going up and their prospective pensions coming down? Of course I do. But I also feel that, to coin a phrase, “we are all in this together” in the face of inconveniently rising life expectancy and lousy investment returns. And the one thing I don’t feel inclined to do, as I contemplate the ruin of my own hopes of retirement, is to pay a penny more in tax to support their hopes of putting their feet up at my expense.

Working until we all drop sadly seems the only answer. Just like it was a hundred years ago before people started living long enough to make the whole idea of a pension industry worth dreaming up in the first place.

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.