We need to stop fantasising about early retirement

The lack of regular stimulation increases the likelihood of the spectre of dementia

Does anybody else remember this gem of a Nineties advert for Prudential? A Brummie man (Mark Williams, who went on to Fast Show fame) and his slightly posher Liverpudlian wife, are seated together talking about their hopes and dreams for later life. Or rather he is talking and she is listening with growing consternation.

“We want to be able to live a little,” he says.

“I wanna be able to live a lot,” we hear her thinking.

“We want to be able to go out once in awhile,” he drawls.

“I want to be out every night,” she thinks, dismayed.

“We want to be able to enjoy the garden,” he adds.

“I want to be able to say ‘stuff the garden’, hire a big yacht and disappear round the world!” she emotes, silently.

“We wanna be together,” he ends. She stares ahead, her face a rictus of well-bred horror.

Whenever I visualise retirement, it tends to my ultimate holiday dream. You know the sort of thing: turquoise water, icing-sugar sand, villas on stilts.

Think of every single tick-the-box cliché going; a Kuoni brochure dovetailing with that insurance ad in which a silver fox is smiling enigmatically and looking manageably buff in half a wetsuit.

But if this sounds like the stuff of fantasy, then that’s because it probably is – especially as the Department for Work and Pensions has revealed that early retirement before the age of 65 has fallen by 25per cent in just seven years.

Pension experts in turn have predicted that in the near future we will all need to work well into our 70s. The blame has been placed on higher life expectancy and the demise of final salary pensions, which are these days the stuff of urban myth.

Ultimately my thoughts of retirement are unrealistic, unimaginative and bear no resemblance to the reality of winter heating bills and council tax for a cheek-by-jowl Victorian terrace in north London.

In theory I could, of course, rent it out to cover the cost of my barefoot luxe lifestyle, but I fear that could lead to ructions with my spouse, whose idea of late-life bliss would be sitting tight and re-reading his 20-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians while he potters about waiting for University

Challenge to begin.

My husband, you see, has a company pension and is still planning on retiring at 66. Even if nobody makes him! In just nine years he’s planning on bowing out of the world of paid work. And he’s looking forward to it. By his reckoning, he’s got a lot of books, operas, pottering and shouting at students on the television to do, so even if he lives as long as his artist father and reaches 101, he can fill his time.

Worryingly, I am reminded of the Japanese phenomenon called RHS or Retired Husband Syndrome, which sees as many as 60per cent of wives suffer debilitating physical symptoms when their spouses retire. By way of revenge they refer to their former salarymen as sodai-gomi, or oversized piece of garbage.

I’m not quite at that stage as my husband is quite useful around the house, but the idea of spending the foreseeable future losing him and then myself in a really good book still makes my heart sink.

So, maybe we need to rethink the whole way we see retirement and our working lives. Is it time to stop perceiving working for longer as an imposition at all? Indeed, if we consider it to be a corollary of better health for longer, it could be time to stop dreaming about pressing the stop button and instead embrace our working lives as something that is positively good for us.

Research has shown that brain function declines rapidly as soon as people stop work and put their feet up; earlier this year a major British study tracked 3,400 retired civil servants and found that short-term memory declined nearly 40per cent faster once employees became pensioners.

The lack of regular stimulation not only takes a heavy toll on cognitive function and speeds up memory loss, but it increases the likelihood of the terrifying spectre of dementia.

Against that background, staying on at work makes sense. Of course, this presupposes you enjoy your job and that you haven’t already been made redundant in favour of your 23-yearold son who really needs to get a toe on the career ladder.

Older people are used to being unfairly castigated as “bed-blockers”. Given the employment climate it’s not long before we’ll be pilloried as “job-hoggers” unless, perhaps, we also change our attitude to the sort of work we are willing to do.

The charity sector has already expressed concern at the shrinking pool of mature volunteers who are its mainstay; if older people are in paid employment they won’t be able to play a role in staffing fundraising shops and carrying out vital community support.

I’m not sure what the solution is to that intractable problem, but if we need to work and are fit enough to do so, then I don’t see that we have got much option unless there’s radical shake-up of the Third Sector.

Could more part-time work be a solution? Involvement in sociable activities whether at work or unpaid boosts moods and last year a study showed that social participation dramatically lowered the risk of type-2 diabetes.

It’s something of a truism that women have a tendency to look outwards more with age (new skills and experiences) while men turn their focus inwards (hobbies and home).

I’ve got a whole nine years to turn things around. Wish me luck…