I was one of the very first New Elizabethans. Born in 1953, between the accession and the coronation. I’ve been here for all three series of The Crown: The Optimistic Daughter, The Pragmatic Mum, The Stoical Gran. Liz Windsor has been my Queen forever. I’m 65 this month so now, hilariously, find myself in receipt of an old age pension from Her Majesty’s Government.
I can only apologise, boomerphobes. Old white git, already a burden on the NHS, receiving a universal benefit when there are so many more deserving people who aren’t old or white or gittish. I know I should feel guilty. But I don’t. I feel grateful, and weirdly vindicated in my quest to stay alive. Also, bollocks. I’ve been paying tax since the late 1960s and National Insurance since the early 1970s. It’s a little kickback, thanks very much. Her Royal Highness doing gun fingers, making that “chk” sound.
To be honest, I’ve secretly felt like a pensioner for years. Irritated beyond reason by intrusive noise and luminous glare and the general insolence of an artificially-intelligent century that flatly refuses to make itself understandable. I accept that this is my problem, that the world is in many respects better than it was in the 20th century where, let’s face it, I clearly belong, among the tripe and onions and smoke and dope and vinyl and pubs opening at half past five and hot metal type and our milkman’s horse and the amber air syrupy with sodium light and misted coal dust and the blank sky mutely awaiting an undreamed internet and whatever.
But I’m old. It’s my job to be reactionary, to acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness. That’s what pensioners are for. To moan. To whine about the privatisation of bloody everything, from our vast, lost public housing estate to the tiniest speck of digitised data harvested by monetised algorithms. To rage against the shocking, blatant transfer of wealth from taxpayer to shareholder. To mourn the passing of blameless public space, once left blank for our message, now slathered in apostrophic bullshit.
It feels, to this clueless old tosser at least, as if there’s a sinister symbiosis developing between our “real world” and the pixelated shadowlands of the internet. They’ve co-existed for so long, perhaps the two have been exchanging molecules, each increasingly becoming the other, to the point where they’re simultaneous identical realities in a Flann O’Brien universe. To wit, my local pharmacy was once a modest, quiet place. Now, a preposterous screen set into the window is ablaze 24 hours a day. All through the night it dazzles nobody with a looped queue of pharma shorts. There’s even a Sky News scroll across the bottom, keeping nobody up to date on the latest stabbings and celebrity apologies. I look from my front window and there it is – a permanent pop-up ad in a low-resolution world. Still, this is my life now. I’m a pensioner. Maybe my destiny is to simmer and, against earlier expectations, to fantasise about firebombing a pharmacy.
It’s not all fist-shaking and grumbling up here in the OAP lounge, though. There’s plenty of nostalgia, too, for a time before “customer services” when the person on the other end of the line was there to help you, not to minimise corporate liability. When local authorities had money and power and scope. It was in 1979, just before Margo from The Good Life swept to power with a mandate to crush the unions, hobble the councils and hold a fire sale of everything publicly owned.
We’d been renting a flat, had to get out, stumbled across a weary old terraced house and got a mortgage from Lewisham Council. They were lovely. The house was up for £14,000, they insisted on lending us an extra two grand; they knew we’d have to do it up. So yeah. Imagine that, little ones. A local authority mortgage. They said if we found ourselves struggling with repayments – we did – that they’d simply freeze the mortgage for a few months. They did. A properly humane system. I think of the absurdity of it now, a system skewed towards kindness, not business.
I’ve got “tetchy” and “wilful ignorance of the modern world” covered. But as I hit retirement age, what exactly am I supposed to be retiring from? Not work, obviously. The whole point about making a living as a writer is that you can carry on stubbornly until your consciousness is finally overwhelmed by a massive dose of palliative fentanyl. Also, have you seen how much you actually get as an old age pensioner? I don’t want to sound churlish, boomerphobes, but it’ll barely cover starters.
What else do people retire from – “public life”? I rarely leave the house.
No. I shall retire from cynicism. Life’s Act Two is very long, and I’m glad to be free of all the middle-aged mewling about Brexit, all that dead-end shrugging that this is How Things Are. I think Act Three has a duty to Act One, to be positive and optimistic about the future. Of course, of course, it’s easy to share the optimism of youth if your life’s not shit, and mine isn’t and I am deeply thankful. And yes, there’s plenty of evidence that negativity and pessimism is the correct disposition of the old: the beet-faced bastards of Question Time, the neuro-geriatrics who turned Twitter bitter, the sheer curdled hatefulness of every bleating “take back control” racist on statins.
But if old people can’t be arsed to remember how much more pride we used to take in ourselves, how we learned to stop deferring to wealthy arseholes like Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch, how we once believed in a better future and equal portions, then what is the point of us?
For God’s sake, I gave up smoking, I can surely give up cynicism. Thank you for my old age allowance, everybody. I promise to be cheerful and hopeful. I am Pensioner, hear me purr.
Ian Martin has written for “The Thick Of It” and co-wrote “The Death of Stalin”
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This article appears in the 11 Apr 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Syria’s world war