This is the 15th September I’ve been writing my blog and my last that I will credit myself a legitimate worker. I will be 65 in a couple of years which was when people used to be retired , get a carriage clock and a shake of hands from the boss and the prospect of a wage for life for doing nothing.
But it didn’t work out , how I was taught as a schoolkid or student. We are living longer so we have to work longer but work has become less onerous. My computer lets me start early, work later and fill the middle of my day with exercise or debauchery (depending on your preference). I am amazed how many people read my posts before 6 am. Yesterday, a bank holiday, I had a meeting with someone for whom it was 5 am when we spoke. We congratulated each other, he me for working on banking on a bank holiday, him for working at what used to be an ungodly hour (God worked 9-5 when I started).
Today, my area’s weather forecast is 0% rain and a reasonable temperature. Sun in the morning , cloud in the afternoon, autumn is like summer. Summer was like being in Spain when I was growing up. The weather wasn’t very workable and we started taking siestas in my house with a return to work later in the day.
Early in the summer we put artificial rain through a hose onto our miniscule lawn but then the drought was declared. The grass turned brown, the river Thames virtually stopped and what we had was held in by a weir which held water back so boats could have draft.
Today is the first day of autumn , the first day of work and a return to some kind or normality after 6 weeks of children’s and their parent’s holidays.
For me August was the first month that we can get our CDC authorised , a month that started with the hangover of Nick Cave playing madly on the Pension Regulator’s doorstep.
Nothing much has changed. The DWP has got a new Director of Private Pensions who issued a remarkable statement which made my holiday.
What of September?
Keats got the tone right, writing at the end of his short life.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
For many of us, autumn presages the end of their year ; I’m sure there are many who would like my days challenging the institution to be in an autumn too. But I am stronger and more determined than for many years as my vision for pensions comes alive
This autumn it will be two years since I nearly lost my life and two years since I made a lucky recovery. I “have my music too” and this blog has become a place where people my age and older who are still working can vocalise their memories and make predictions based on experience.
The maturity of autumn is upon us, as Keats explained in one amazing sentence
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.