Rejoice! School's back from summer!

Today is a true red letter day in the Hann household. Festal garments will be worn, jigs danced, barrels broached and bells rung.

Because where I live this is the first day of the autumn school term.

Newspapers are missing a trick. Girls jumping for joy about their A-levels could be matched by yummy mummies leaping outside primary schools on the first day of term.

I do feel a bit mean about my elation. I may be old, but I still remember the intense resentment I used to feel as a child about the constant bombardment of “back to school” advertisements, which seemed to begin the day after we broke up.

I don’t remember being a massive amount of trouble to my parents during the holidays. But then people were much more relaxed about leaving young children on their own in those days, despite the much greater number of dangers abounding in the average house, from open fires and floor level gas taps to dodgy wiring, mousetraps and mangles.

I grew up in a house built in 1939, but it still had a coal-fired range like this.

I remember that I read a lot, once I had mastered that skill, and was able to wander off and play with other kids in the street.

Sadly my children aren’t growing up in that sort of suburban community and, if they did just wander out of the front door as I used to do, they would stand a high chance of being mown down by a speeding car.

So, despite a panoply of entertainment I never even dreamt of at their age, from DVDs to iPads, they are bored. And, in the case of my elder, worried about the return to school and the move to a new class.

Throw in a slug of separation anxiety and a touch of paranoia about people being locked in rooms and unable to escape, and you have the perfect recipe for days spent “working at home” while keeping an eye on my son being transformed into a living hell.

Last summer we had relatively few problems. On the days when Mum and Dad were both working, the boy went happily enough either to an out-of-school club at his old nursery, or a rather wonderful project in the local forest.

There he climbed trees, made dens, and crafted catapults and peashooters like a child from an Arthur Ransome novel, returning home each night filthy, exhausted and elated.

The deep dark wood

But the organisers decided not to repeat it this summer because they had had a bellyful of Elfin Safety, the requirement for an OFSTED inspection and the plethora of rules we put in place in the name of child protection.

While the nursery out-of-school club holds no attractions because all of his old friends have moved on elsewhere.

The only good thing that has come out of my summer of occasional childcare is the realisation of how incredibly lucky I am in having an office to which I can escape. Never again will I sit behind my desk thinking, like a six year old, that I am bored. Or wishing, like a 60-odd year old, that I could retire.

Never happier

Retirement may present a fine vision of regular ocean cruises and beach holidays, sipping pina coladas as the tropical sun goes down. But the reality for most is eking out a meagre pension, worrying about their deteriorating health, and looking after the grandchildren who are dumped on them during the school holidays while their parents enjoy a quiet day at the office.

Or for that matter at the building site, coke works, scrapyard or glass bottle production line, all of which would offer more restful environments than my house did last week.

Years ago I knew a chief executive who was made redundant when his business was taken over. His wife did not read the business pages so he continued putting on his suit, leaving the house at the usual time and driving around until he felt able to go home.

At the time I thought he was barking mad. Now I realise that he most probably had young children, and I understand exactly where he was coming from.

I have taken a vow that by summer 2016 I will have identified a suitable holiday club for seven year olds, even if I have to found and fund it myself. Failing that I shall be seeking a quiet refuge for myself in a suitable old folks’ home.

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.

Now, what was I trying to remember?

Somewhere in my filing cabinet of curiosities lies the death certificate of a great-grandparent who apparently expired of “old age and decay”. He was around the same age that I am now.

I was reminded of this when an eager young stockbroker visited me on Friday to fill in one of those almost endless and certainly mindless box-ticking forms that regulators in every field now demand to save us from ourselves.

“Would you still describe yourself as semi-retired?” he asked. I shook my head and, in answer to the obvious follow-up, gestured around the bombsite that is my sitting room, strewn with toddler-related detritus.

He did not even bother to wait for a reply to the question “When do you plan to retire?” He just smiled sympathetically.

I am doing my best to earn more, but as I do so I am increasingly struck by the following paradox. On the one hand we are all being told that we must work for longer, as life expectancy steadily increases and pension funds buckle under the combined strain of longevity, lousy stock market performance and Gordon Brown’s half-witted tax raid on their resources.

Yet at precisely the same time, the optimum age for earning serious money grows ever lower. Every major political party in this country is now led by someone (a man, harrumph, or rather harriet-umph!) under the age of 45. More relevantly to me, the average age of a FTSE-100 chief executive is 52. Why would anyone choose an adviser older then themselves, when they could so easily find one who is younger, fitter and considerably more attractive?

The traditional answer used to be: experience. There is good reason to think that our current financial hole would be considerably shallower if there had been more people around who could remember that property and other financial bubbles always burst one day, and that the proper reaction to any claim to have abolished boom and bust is hollow laughter followed by a robust swipe with a blunt instrument.

But sadly it appears that my analogue experience has little relevance in the digital world, where the relentless advance of technology requires a cult of youth because only the young understand it. They may have a point. My son Charlie is not yet 16 months old and has already discovered functions in our mobile phones and remote controls of which we were blissfully ignorant.

However, it does raise the problem of how on earth we are supposed to keep working until we drop if we aren’t actually equipped to do anything useful. I have only ever possessed a modest talent for stringing words together, combined with a ferociously good short-term memory. This gave me a wholly unfair advantage in passing the sort of exams by which intelligence used to be indexed.

Now my memory is fading as fast as the snows on Kilimanjaro. My doctor quickly gave me a comforting diagnosis when I went to see him the other day about some skin blemishes. I repeated his words to myself on the 15-minute drive home, but when my wife asked me what they were I could still manage nothing better than “umm … something to do with carrots”.

I had to go on the internet to look up the real name of my non-cancerous growths: seborrhoeic keratoses. And I was only able to track that down because my doctor had laughingly mentioned the name by which they used to be known before political correctness took hold: senile warts.

So here I am, clearly well advanced on the path to old age and decay, my mind palpably going, but still in need of paid employment until I’m 80, in competition with all those people who are about to be downsized from the public sector or eased off benefits.

Any bright ideas, Prime Minister Whatsisname?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.