“Old age is not for sissies.” David Attenborough (87) 18 Sept 2013 on Radio 4’s ‘Today'

I'm now officially an old man - at long last!

I'm an old bod, a grumpy old man (and with the mug to prove it, from Becky), a full-time old age pensioner with one foot in the grave, who has left the world of work to make room for a younger person to come along.

Years ago, I thought 2013 was an impossibly long way off and would never come.  How wrong I was.  Now for my new career of sheer idleness, leisure and pleasure, of spending the kids inheritance before the second half of the retirement career - of, perhaps, gentle exit from the world of everything!  I've given it all up at the politically correct age of 65, too.  Unfortunately, the next politically correct age of three score years and ten is all too near!  But, then, without departure there can be no new arrivals.

Even ten years ago, I would never have thought that I would end my working days cycle commuting for an hour, every day, over the roads through the Clent Hills and over the top of Romsley Hill - even with dodgy knees.  And, often, even longer routes for the return run!  But, I did have to gradually jettison weight in the final 18 months of labouring over the hills.  Surrendering the laptop, in 2012 meant a lot less weight on my back!  This past year, I've cycled through one monsoon-like downpour with mud and debris sliding down the steepest road, Uffmoor Lane, that I had never had before.  Often, in this last job, I had early morning commutes with cloud draping the hills but, so much better than jam packed in a London tube that was my very first paid work!

I want to acknowledge, here that brother in law, Tony was quite brilliant in supporting me over the most stupid, the strangest, the most mendacious incident that I was caught up in, in over 40 years of employment.  It was yet another nail in the coffin for my withdrawal of support for local government in favour of alternative ways of running services rather than local authorities.  Yet, my experiences of local authorities reinforces how very, very fallible all of us humans are in running our affairs – whether it is the public or private sectors.  This is a further reason why, I think, we are imperceptibly sleep walking into a nightmare of entirely our own making.

“Old age is not for sissies.”  David Attenborough (87)  18 Sept 2013 on Radio 4’s ‘Today'