Most people would prefer to retire a little later

When the state old age pension was introduced in 1909, the retirement age was 70. In 2019, when people live on average about 15 years longer, it is 65 (rising to 66 next year).

This is silly, not to mention punitively expensive. The state pension was not supposed to create a whole new era of doing nothing, but to relieve the want of those no longer capable of working. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a conservative think tank, has noticed this. It thinks the pension age should rise to 75 by 2042, by which time a quarter of the adult population will be over 65. In return, far more effort should be made to retrain older workers and make them central to the workforce, instead of trying to shuffle them off.

I consider myself a bit of an expert on the ageing process, having interviewed about 500 people for my biography of Mrs Thatcher, almost all of whom are over 60. The great majority, I have found, fit the CSJ view.

Such people do not want full retirement until they are truly old – which nowadays usually means 80 plus. They often want different work, with shorter, more flexible hours, but they also feel energetic and capable. If they are effectively forced out of work

just because they are 65, they tend to go to pieces and die: the need to get up in the morning is, oddly, one of the things which make life worth living. I should have thought that a higher pension, collectable at a later stage, would reflect these desires.

Obviously the wishes of the older generation are not the only consideration. One must think about employers’ needs, too. Here older persons have an important advantage, unmentionable by politicians. We

(I am 62) were taught to read, write and add up properly. Among the young, these skills are dying out just as surely as coracle making or ploughing by hand.

Le Paradis is an odd name for Hell. On 27 May 1940, the 14th Company of the SS Death’s Head division attacked 99 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, in that village in Northern France during the retreat to Dunkirk. Cut off, the Norfolks occupied a farmhouse and cowshed. They fought until all their ammunition was spent. Then they surrendered.

An SS company disarmed the Norfolks and marched them down the road to a barn where two machine guns were set up. There they massacred them. All 99 men were shot; but two, Privates Albert Pooley and William O’callaghan, were only wounded. The latter saved the former, and both were tended by the farm’s owner and her son.

Both men were soon captured and made prisoners of war, so the story was not known at first. Pooley was invalided home in 1943, but the British authorities could not believe the Germans could have done such a dreadful thing, and accepted his account only when O’callaghan returned home with victory in 1945 and corroborated it. Eventually, the SS commander, Knöchlein, was arrested, tried and, in 1948, hanged.

Oddly, although there are memorials in France to the men whose lives were so revoltingly taken, there is none in Britain. Now the Paradis Commemoration Group Memorial Appeal (Memorial4leparadisheroes@ gmail.com) is raising the money to erect one in Norfolk in time for the 80th anniversary of the massacre next year.

Men once so dishonoured should be honoured by us.

Green campaigners are increasingly attacking consumers as well as producers about what we eat, so it is time to take stock.

Many of us who do not believe that the planet is likely to collapse because of eating beef may nevertheless share some disquiet – more aesthetic than moral or ecological – at our vast overconsumption.

In my case, it takes the form of being annoyed by too much choice in restaurants. If friends kindly invite you to their houses for lunch or dinner, you do not ask for a menu. You eat what you are given (allowing for some variations, eg, being vegetarian). Ninety-nine per cent of the time, all is well.

If I were an entrepreneur, I would start a restaurant chain which offered no choice whatsoever, although the dishes would change each day. The chain would be cheap because it would not have to waste all that money on procuring, preserving or throwing away a vast variety of things.

It would be called Hobson’s. The lack of choice would mean that service was almost instantaneous. People would love it.

Speculation builds about how well Olivia Colman will succeed Claire Foy as the Queen in the coming third series of The Crown. Ms Colman herself has expressed anxiety on this score. There is no doubt that she is one of the best actresses of the age, but I have a doubt, too. She has a distinctly Left-wing face.

This is hard to describe, but easy to recognise. It is something to do with looking slightly resentful and ironic at the idea of having to play a public role which satisfies the demands of others. The real live Queen has no such face – allowing almost no difference discernible in public between the role and the person.

I hasten to add that I have no idea what Olivia Colman’s political views are. I just have a hunch, which I hope will be proved wrong.