LONDON LETTER: Musings of an official pensioner

I am now a lot more older and a little more wiser

A couple of weeks ago I passed a milestone that didn’t particularly thrill me. I reached official retirement age.

I stress the word ‘official’, as there is no way I ever see myself retiring.

Not because I’m a youthful, energetic sexagenarian who has discovered the elixir of life. It’s because I’m too poor.

This is no weepy excuse. Management and I knew that when we emigrated and I cashed in 25 years of South African pension that was gobbled up in six months’ rent in the UK, we would take a big hit later.

It was a simple fact we accepted.

So while I dream of fishing in exotic places in my dotage, the reality is that I will be banging out computer keys in an English village rather than doing battle with high-jumping tarpon in the Florida Keys.

However, the one thing I am acutely aware of is that like many people, I never thought I would actually reach retirement age.

Sixty-five seemed eons away. I never even took out life insurance as a young man as I thought, what’s the point? I’m young and bulletproof.

I’m now almost as old as my mother was when she died, and although I was devastated, at the time I bizarrely thought she’d had a good innings.

That comforted me a little then, but it certainly doesn’t now that I realise how young she actually was when she left us.

My one sister, who reached this milestone three years ago, tried to cheer me up by saying there are also perks.

I can travel free on the buses, not that I ever use them.

At some coffee shops I can get senior citizen discounts, but they don’t serve Irish coffee.

Of more use is my annual fishing license now comes with a £10 pensioner’s discount, which I can spend on pouring a little Irish into my free coffee.

My one brat, who has the same problem contemplating the sheer antiquity of being 65 as I did at his age, asked jokingly whether I would do the same again if I had my life over.

The answer is no.

For a start, I would not go into journalism as one of the abiding disappointments over the years has been watching social media gossip become the primary news source in the Western world.

Dogmatic opinion is now regarded as iron-clad fact, and bullheaded comment as indisputable truth.

The only sources I trust are the regional media – such as the newspaper you are reading now – and a few fearless international bloggers who are barely eking out a living.

I also would chill out more (but everyone says that).

As the Irish poet WB Yeats remarked, life is a long preparation for something that never happens. Or if it does, it’s not necessarily a big deal.

Too true. I have often strived to climb the top of a metaphorical mountain only to find what I was searching for was what I already had.

Through no real initiative of my own, I’ve had quite an adventurous life. It just happened organically.

In my childhood, sailing and fishing were like breathing.

I then blagged my way into journalism during a volatile period that eventually morphed into a low-intensity civil war. It was intensely interesting, if often gloomy.

Also, I have through circumstances rather than design managed to wet lines in a variety of wild places such as Tristan da Cunha, Brazil’s Angra dos Reis, the Bazaruto archipelago, and closer to home, the Maluti Mountains.

So yes, I’ve been lucky.

However, the one thing all of this has taught me is that contentment is the ability to live in the moment.

What I have done in the past, whether reporting on strange times or fishing in exotic locations, are distant memories that I sometimes think about fondly, or cringe inwardly.

They are no longer in the moment.

The biggest cliché in life is that happiness is a state of mind.

It’s also the biggest truism – even though I have taken 65 years to grasp that.

But then I always was a slow learner.