Carry on working
Developments are now catering for retirees still in work, reports Jane Slade
WHAT does one do with retirees who refuse to retire? That’s a question housebuilders are having to ask themselves as they seek to attract non-retiring types.
According to research from Merrill Lynch, 47 per cent of retirees say they are either working or plan to work in retirement, and 72 per cent of people in the 50-plus range say they plan to do the same.
Trained ballet dancer Gillian Robinson, 75, still teaches. She even built a studio in the garden of her marital home, now owned by her son, where she puts private pupils through their paces.
‘I fell in love with dance at the age of 13 and nothing makes me happier,’ she tells me from the two-bedroom retirement apartment she and her husband share at Audley Inglewood, a retirement village in Berkshire. ‘I am not thinking of retiring.’
Neither is her husband Alan, 75, a former BA pilot. ‘Alan still flies,’ says Gillian. ‘He has a Pioneer Hawk and even took up paragliding in the Alps.’
Gillian was in the Royal Ballet School and has shared a stage with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev at the Royal Opera house.
She trained to be a teacher and examiner running her own ballet school in Buckleberry, just 25 minutes from the couple’s new home. Nick Sanderson, CEO of Audley retirement villages, says developers need to redefine the outdated concept of retirement. ‘We recognise reaching the age of 55 does not mean you’re ready to slow down, nor give up work,’ he says.
‘This philosophy is reflected by the many ‘unretired’ people living at our villages who have chosen to continue in work or volunteer.
‘ We provide flexible, shared space where owners can work, meet and entertain colleagues.
‘We also place huge importance on the location of our villages, which have good transport links.’
Audley’s Chalfont Dene is 20 minutes by train from London, while its St George’s Place development, in Edgbaston, is close to central Birmingham. One-bedrooom apartments start at £270,000, audleyretirement.co.uk, 0121 516 6130)
Marian Walter, 69, bought a twobed ground floor apartment at Elmbridge Village in Cranleigh, Surrey a year ago. (One-bed bungalows from £ 285,000, retirement villages. 01372 383950) Marian, divorced with two children, sits as a magistrate at adult courts in Wimbledon and Lavender Hill in South London and the Family Court at Holborn. She says: ‘Working in retirement keeps you connected to the outside world. ‘I like making a contribution to society. I feel I can do anything I want with my life here.
The proximity of Retirement Villages’ Cedars Village in Hertfordshire to the M25 and a regular train service to London, proved ideal for Jenny Pardington, 72, who is the researcher and personal assistant for Lord Dubs of Battersea in the House of Lords.
‘My boss, who’s 82, is still more than capable of carrying out his job, and so am I. It gives me a sense of purpose,’ says Jenny.
SOMEHOw, you may have missed International Bath Day. It was on June 14 but didn’t exactly cause a splash, not least because the very notion of International Bath Day smacks of desperation.
Indeed, these are desperate times for those of us who prefer lethargic tubs to power showers. a survey of 2,000 people last week revealed that only 4 per cent — that’s one in 25 — bother with a daily soak in a relaxing bath.
apparently, after a stressful day we unwind by browsing Facebook and catching up with Poldark.
Mind you, that might be because fewer people than ever actually have a bathtub. Just as many modern hotels now only offer guests showers (making much of their monsoon-like qualities), new-build flats and houses increasingly tend to do without baths on the grounds that they take up too much space and use up too much water.
There’s a contradiction here, of course. we are forever being told about the perils of stress and the need for ‘mindfulness’ and yet we’re happy to jettison one of life’s simplest anti-stress rituals — although the U.s. designer Tom Ford does seem guilty of overdoing it with his five-a-day habit.
Ford said recently that when he’s feeling particularly anxious he takes a bath ‘every hour or two’ to ‘ just lie in the water and kind of think. Or not think. It has intensified as I get older. I don’t think my mother would ever have let me take five a day.’
No, but his mother equally would be appalled by the encroaching death of bathtime. Dear old winston Churchill, one of the patron saints of bathing, would be aghast. His nightly soaks, complete with cigar and glass of something or other, while barking orders to his secretary, are part of our heritage.
ah, it’s a generational thing, sings the chorus. well, yes and no. I probably didn’t see a shower (a dribbling one) until I was a teenager and long associated them with overcrowded public swimming pools awash with chlorine and old discarded Elastoplasts.
But I also remember my late father saying that the one thing he longed for while serving in the army during world war II was to slip into a bath brimming with hot water, with some bubbles as an extra bonus. For me, too, baths have remained one of life’s cherished luxuries.
and don’t for a second take seriously what americans say about baths giving the British a chance to simmer in their own dirt.
In fact, people who know about these things say lying in the bath allows for more dead skin cells to be removed than is ever possible in a shower, so you are actually cleaner in the long run. The ritual of a bath has inspired paintings by Degas, Cézanne and Picasso, while the only cultural reference that showers can claim is director alfred Hitchcock’s grisly bathroom scene from Psycho.
‘There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them,’ wrote the poet sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar.
‘whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”’
THEN, there’s the question of what to have in your bath and what to take into your bath. It’s like planning an event and mixing a heady cocktail to go with it, although in my experience most of the stuff on the shelves in Boots is all tonic and no gin.
spend a little more on proper bath oil and you won’t regret it. after all, Jo Malone practically made her name from her lime, basil and mandarin bath potion.
what does all this mean in the buying and selling of property? Times change, is the answer.
‘Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable not to have a lovely big bath in your home, even in London,’ says Jonathan Harington, from Haringtons, the property buying agents.
‘Now it counts against you if you don’t have a super-duper walk-in shower — and if you have space for two of them side by side, so much the better.’