Free at last, free at last……..

So, 14 days retired as of yesterday. Do I feel any different? Is it going as I expected?

Well, I still haven’t done the tasks I was putting off and off until I had “more time” (cleaning, maintenance, sorting and taking unused clothes and books to charity shops, etc. etc.) but otherwise …. no to the first and also the second.

Silly questions really. I mean, what was there to change in the first place?

True, the government no longer requires me to even pretend to earn a living – and will now pay me a basic income (once their office drones get round to pressing the right button or their computers do it for them). But I was hardly doing that anyway, was I?

In truth I started retirement the day my loved ones decided I was surplus to requirement and threw me out. In fact – being vaguely organised – I’d already started the ease into retirement 10 years ago.

For instance, I’d already decided to kick back at work and do little more than turn up and do only what I was asked. To be honest my job was simply to help ensure awful excuses for humanity with far more money than they need hang on to it, so I rarely bothered to do more than that anyway.

I was just ensuring a mortgage, rates and utility bills got paid. Once that necessity was removed there was little point in being there, so I got out as soon as I could gather enough courage to go and do…. well…. nothing…. At least for a while.

Only a mixture of arrogance and economic necessity prevented me from being state subsidised to do that. I never wanted to officially count as one of the underclass (council house, semi-invalid on sick benefit, etc.), so as I had rent and utility bills to meet on my bijou private flat I needed a job for a little longer to meet them, and care work suited me down to the ground.

It was hard(ish) physical work, with rubbish money, facilities and hours and barely literate workmates – some of whom were just there as they had no other job choices, having slept through school and wasted every life opportunity. But I have no complaints about the last two years.

Being paid a pittance to be of practical use to somebody for a change was useful, personally satisfying… and sometimes interesting. Also, a way to prove to myself that you really, really don’t need much of the rubbish you’re told you do, and that you can get by on next to nothing. In an odd way, almost like renouncing the world and becoming a monk.

Now that stage is over. I’ve adjusted to my secular monasticism and will have just about enough cash coming in to live as I want to and where I want to.

By the standards of the world, I am now a pauper. But I don’t care, because I will never again be at the beck and call of the dull or idiotic, which makes me a millionaire.

As Lou Reed put it so aptly, ‘Champagne in the morning/and my breakfast at night/I’m beginning to see the light!’

Then yesterday I was saddened to see an obituary notice for one of my favourite residents – a 99-year-old gentleman who’d survived World War Two, gone on to marry, found and run a small-town business and raise a lovely family, and lost none of his old school manners and charm as age and decrepitude overtook him. Though it’s said far too often (and usually of those who were nothing of the sort), he really was the last of his kind. A modest model of decent, responsible masculinity that simply no longer exists.

Well, does it?

It was final confirmation of the end of an era. Two weeks ago, I finally retired from a place of work that was nice enough but simply not what it was when I started.

The older, sicker residents died off – as they obviously do in a care home. But the ones who went were characters, while those coming in were… different. More demanding, selfish, whinier.

Rather than the hardy souls who’d seen wars and risen from real poverty these were the first cradle-to-grave welfare state brats and social climbers. People who’d had every little luxury served on a plate. Better medicine, education, housing and social welfare, bigger cars, fuller shops, the first foreign holidays…. you name it and they had it on tap, and usually at somebody else’s real expense rather than working for it or contributing to it. But they still whined.

I know – everyone says that’s what old folks do. But as someone who has looked after succeeding generations of oldies since my teenage years, I can say with authority that they never used to.

The wards full of WW1 vets I nursed when I first left school just got up in the morning, had a cup of builders and…. got on with it. Successive generations – mostly – had some of that spirit of self-reliance, self-respect, good manners, and community-mindedness. Prior to admission, many had to be pestered to start picking up their pensions and would die of shame before claiming other benefits.

And as for complaining in shops and restaurants –and in particular about public services (hospitals, GP surgeries….) … not done. Ever.

This incessant crinklie moaning is a phenomenon that – at my guess – started with those who reaped the first benefits of post-World War Two growth and stability and has got worse amongst those who hit late middle age in every decade since.

The current baby boomers (and, yes, I am a tail-end example) are worse than the golfing Rotarians and public sector gravy-trainers with friends on the local council who immediately preceded them.

Generation X are shaping up to be even more self-obsessed and pathetic, Millenarians make Gen X look well balanced, and as for what might follow……well, thankfully, I won’t be there when their grandkids are cursing them, so I don’t need to give a flying one.

‘But’, you are asking, ‘aren’t you doing the same? Just moaning like a typical old fart?’

No. I’m laughing at them. I don’t take such whingers seriously. I don’t demand anything should be done about it. To be honest, they’re too dumb and the phenomenon too daft to worry about.

And if people get upset because I point it out? Well, that’s even funnier, and I’ll laugh even louder and longer.

And the funniest thing? I now have all day and no distractions to stop me.