Why You Should Never Retire

From The Economist

In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance.

Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.

People like Messrs Armani, Buffett or Munger are exceptional. But in remaining professionally active into what would historically be considered dotage, they are not unique. One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it?

The arc of corporate life used to be predictable. You made your way up the career ladder, acquiring more prestige and bigger salaries at every step. Then, in your early 60s, there was a Friday-afternoon retirement party, maybe a gold watch, and that was that. The next day the world of meetings, objectives, tasks and other busyness faded. If you were moderately restless, you could play bridge or help out with the grandchildren. If you weren’t, there were crossword puzzles, tv and a blanket.

Although intellectual stimulation tends to keep depression and cognitive impairment at bay, many professionals in the technology sector retire at the earliest recommended date to make space for the younger generation, conceding it would be unrealistic to maintain their edge in the field. Still, to step down means to leave centre stage—leisure gives you all the time in the world but tends to marginalise you as you are no longer in the game.

Things have changed. Lifespans are getting longer. It is true that although the post-retirement, twilight years are stretching, they do not have to lead to boredom or to a life devoid of meaning. Once you retire after 32 years as a lawyer at the World Bank, you can begin to split your time between photography and scrounging flea markets for a collection of Americana. You don’t have to miss your job or suffer from a lack of purpose. If you are no longer head of the hospital, you can join Médecins Sans Frontières for occasional stints, teach or help out at your local clinic. Self-worth and personal growth can derive from many places, including non-profit work or mentoring others on how to set up a business.

But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.

That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.

In “Seinfeld”, another television show of the 1990s, Jerry goes to visit his parents, middle-class Americans who moved to Florida when they retired, having dinner in the afternoon. “I’m not force-feeding myself a steak at 4.30 just to save a couple of bucks!” Jerry protests. When this guest Bartleby entered the job market, she assumed that when the day came she too would be a pensioner in a pastel-coloured shirt opting for the “early-bird special”. A quarter of a century on, your 48-year-old columnist hopes to be writing for The Economist decades from now, even if she trundles to her interviews supported by a Zimmer frame; Mr Seinfeld is still going strong at 69, after all. But ask her again in 21 years.

Why We Can't Retire

 

A Factory or an Ashram?

By Girish Menon

In the Malayalam cult classic Chintavishtayaya Shyamala, Mukundan the protagonist wishes for a carefree life playing and hanging out with friends despite having a wife and two school going daughters. As the pressure grows, from his wife and other members of his extended family, to change his ways Mukundan runs away to an ashram where the sadhus are known to meditate for moksha (release from worldly cares). After 6-7 months at the ashram, the head sadhu (note the hierarchical corporate structure) invites Mukundan for an interview (6.17). The head sadhu mentions that Mukundan had not yet volunteered to either teach at an ashram school or offer to take care of the ashram cattle. In the following scene Mukundan mentions to a fellow sadhu, ‘I did not know this was a factory. If I had to work, I could have stayed in town and not come this far’.

Today, in an increasingly religious India, such ashrams seem to burgeon all over the land. Amazingly, these ashrams seem to be run by unpaid volunteers who work from 5 in the morning to 9 in the evening, seven days a week. Many of these volunteers are retired from corporate jobs and have chosen to spend the rest of their lives obeying the diktats of a saffron clad guru and his managers. More importantly, these volunteers claim that their minds are at peace doing seva (service) for the guru.

There might be some inner need which the ashram job seems to fulfil and which the modern corporations are unable to do so with their workforce. I have seen some of these ashram volunteers complain incessantly when they were working at their corporate jobs. Today, the same person uses all her waking hours advancing the cause of the ashram without any material gain. Some of them have been known to give up their personal homes and even pay rent to the ashram for an opportunity to provide seva.

Of course, there is a difference in the profile of the volunteer as compared to the corporate worker. The volunteers are usually retired, have an empty nest and are at a loss to spend their waking hours. The corporate workers are younger, aspirational, have demanding partners and kids and are perennially short of time.

David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister, made a good point that volunteers need to be encouraged to take over large sections of society. This has increased the number of volunteers running sports clubs, charities etc. in the UK.  Usually, some of the older volunteers bring a lot of worldly experience which could enable their voluntary organisations to perform better than with younger paid employees. In India, the saffron clad gurus have shown their smartness by recruiting such zero-cost volunteers to enhance their corporate goals. However, this begs the bigger question i.e. is India forcibly retiring its experienced workforce too soon?

Ex-cricketers are candidates for post traumatic stress disorder

Suresh Menon in The Hindu



It is that time again — when a long-serving, much-respected cricketer has questions thrown at him, which, in summary is: isn’t it time to retire, buddy?

Years ago, Anil Kumble’s young son wore a T-shirt with the legend: It’s time to call it a day. It probably referred to his bed time, but those who saw it couldn’t help thinking it was a gentle reminder for his father, who, however, was smart enough to pick his time of departure.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who has quit Tests, is now being questioned over his relevance to the white-ball format. He would like to play the 2019 World Cup — and has the support of national coach Ravi Shastri — but spirit and flesh aren’t always in consonance towards the end of a sporting career.

Sport is a wonderful servant when you are young and fit. It will joyfully carry you to the top, unmindful of your occasional mistakes, with the promise that whatever happens there is always tomorrow. But it’s a terrible master as you grow older, demanding, unforgiving of lapses, reminding you constantly that your tomorrows will never match your yesterdays.

Ageing cricketers make a pact with time: let me make one more century, bowl my country to one more win; it doesn’t matter if the century is unrecognisable from the one I made ten years ago or if my bowling lacks bite. Just once more, and in gratitude I promise to quit.

But few players keep their end of the deal. Kapil Dev was carried around in the end like a grandmother everybody had to be kind to because she was responsible for all the family wealth. His goal? Richard Hadlee’s then world record 431 Test wickets. When past admiration combines with present pity, it is not a pretty picture.

When Brian Lara retired, he asked his fans, “Did I entertain?” For the average fan, it is impossible to understand or even imagine the feelings of a national hero, who once played as if there was no tomorrow but suddenly realises that there might not be a today even. I think it was Hemingway who said retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

Can you go easily from playing the world’s fastest bowlers, guiding your country to victories, having a whole stadium, perhaps a whole nation chanting your name, and being, to quote John Lennon, “more popular than Jesus Christ”, to an ordinary life of buying groceries and and attending PTA meetings while watching someone else’s name being chanted nation-wide? If you think about it, ex-cricketers are prime candidates for post traumatic stress disorder.
This, despite the easy familiarity which cricketers develop with the big issues that are usually pushed into the back of the mind. Cricket — in fact, all sport — prepares us for loss, failure, even death. A batsman dies symbolically every time he loses his wicket. Yet, there is always another innings, another match, another year which converts apparent finality into something temporary, something one gets over in time.

Retirement is different. The finality is final. Only so many ex-players can coach, commentate, write or get into administration to maintain their connection with the game. Others are pulled out of obscurity on special occasions, like the World Cup. Till 2011, players who had won India the 1983 World Cup were featured in the media every four years. Now they will have to share the spotlight with the Class of 2011, if at all.

Retirement can be traumatic. Few teams invest in a system that makes the player’s transition smoother and more natural. For most players, cricket is the only thing they know, and when that is gone from their lives, the void can be difficult to fill. Some fill it with alcohol.

There is an organised system which prepares a gifted youngster to play for India. He is given technical, temperamental, tactical, strategic guidance as he graduates through the age-group tournaments. And then, in the early or mid-twenties, he plays for the country. It is the start of a wonderful ride.

If he is good enough, he plays on for a decade and a half, or more. But there is no similar organised system at the other end of his career. Unlike a couple of generations ago, today money is no longer a problem. But relevance is, self-esteem is, acceptance is. It is difficult to walk into a room and realise that you no longer turn heads. You might still sign autographs, but then might have to answer a young fan’s devastating question: “What’s your name?”

Some are happy to leave, to put the training and discipline behind them. Steve Redgrave, multiple gold winning British rower once finished with, said “I’ve had it. If anyone sees me near a boat they can shoot me.” But the more common feeling was expressed by the US jockey Eddie Arcaro: “When a jockey retires, he becomes just another little man.”

Dhoni is capable of walking away without looking back. He has other passions. But till he does, the question will follow him everywhere.

A world without retirement

Amelia Hill in The Guardian


We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.

Working just as hard, but unpaid? What happens when women retire



Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”

It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)

Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.


Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population

The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.

Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.

Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation isarguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.

In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.

A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.


Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good

But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.

In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”

  Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.

I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Are we all really expected to work until we drop?

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian


As Tony Blair repeatedly confirms, and John Cridland notes in his interim report on the state pension age, a “significant” number of workers who left the labour market before the age of 63 “wish they had postponed their retirement”.

In many ways, the response to Blair’s longing for a second act, in full knowledge of his power irredeemably to contaminate any political project, is a timely reminder to younger workers, as the retirement age rises, of the need to plan ahead. Leave early – whether for reasons of ill health, burn-out or for being universally denounced as an avaricious, world-blighting menace – and it may prove almost impossible, as the TUC recently noted, for the older worker to find another job. 

But with his determination to defy the above obstacles, Blair is also a terrific example of the model, can-do, older worker. One whose undimmed desire to serve – or do incalculable harm to his own side – so compellingly supports the proposition, one especially dear to British politicians, that increased longevity should naturally be accompanied by an ever-extended working life. Cridland, the former Confederation of British Industry chief, is the latest to reassess the retirement age and is still consulting for a report due next year.

As it stands, the state’s reward for scientific advances that should usher millions more people into their 90s is the raised retirement age of 68 (rescheduled for 2041), the highest in the OECD. Behind Cridland’s interim report is the expectation, supposing longevity keeps increasing, that it should be raised again.

Quite why the British older worker should, if only in this respect, have become synonymous with drudgery, has never, so far as I can discover, been explained. Maybe decades of strong tea are what helps our oldest people to become, with their furious, late-onset capacity for record-breaking productivity, the envy of the world. Or maybe younger workers, or the politicians who should represent their interests, are lamentably passive. As it is, with their proved success in delivering, by adjusting the retirement age, what are, in effect, huge fines on generations too youthful and busy to notice, there is every reason for British politicians to continue to impose penalties for age-defying insouciance.

And with so much to divert public attention, now is the perfect time for the pensions minister, Richard Harrington, to mention that he has asked the Government Actuary’s Department to recalculate life expectancy and project what might be a nifty way of relieving younger generations of a few more hundred billion pounds – if the percentage of adult life (from the age of 20) considered eligible for state-pensioned retirement were lowered from the current 33.3% to 32%. “People are living and working longer than ever before,” Harrington said. “That is why it is important we get this right to ensure the system stays fair and sustainable for generations to come.” Or, alternatively, until modern medicine buys the government another year or two’s pension deferral.

Supposing the lower figure were adopted, a pension consultant told the Telegraph, the government “would struggle to find a more politically painless way to take £8,000 off tens of millions of people”. Moreover, if and when affected workers began to make a fuss, many of those responsible would, themselves, be safely retired on final salary pensions, and protected, as Women Against State Pension Inequality protests – by 50s-born women obliged to work beyond 60 – has shown, by intergenerational indifference.

Described by the New Statesman, in its article “Tony Blair’s Unfinished Business”, as looking “anything but broken” – and allegedly reminiscent of the figure whose cojones were so esteemed by George Bush – the tanned Blair, no less than orangeTrump, is, in contrast, a poster boy for the five decades of toil that will, if some pension lobbyists have their way, become the norm in the UK and the US. Trump’s example was somewhat compromised, in this respect, by his age-related insulting of Hillary Clinton. “Importantly,” he said, “she [also] lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on Isis and all the many adversaries we face.”

As many future, almost 70-year-old workers may eventually discover, strategies for reducing age prejudice and intergenerational resentment have failed – largely through not existing – to keep pace with deferments of state pensionable age and the end of obligatory retirement. Outside politics and the BBC, and anywhere else Farage’s “big silverback gorillas” are not delightedly deferred to, the lingering presence of pension-defying, grandparent-age colleagues can, one gathers, be distinctly unwelcome to co-workers – and not only those hoping for promotion within the next century or so.

The recent proposal, by the Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, that older graduates consider, like her, a pre-retirement switch to teaching elicited some wry responses from members of a profession where the average retirement age is 59. For instance: “Teaching is a young person’s game.”
The word “ageism” does not appear in Cridland’s 100-page report, a document that may not only cheer politicians praying for the go-ahead on 70, but reassure anyone who fears – whether from experience, or from listening too closely to health officials, or from reading too much literature – that advancing age and physical decline are in any way connected.

“Old age isn’t a battle,” thinks one of Philip Roth’s ageing protagonists. “Old age is a massacre.” Not any more, to judge by the cheerful Cridland. “Longevity is changing the pensions landscape.”

A decade after Roth’s Everyman, Cridland depicts many of us as promisingly situated for the payment or, rather, non-payment, of pensions, since, with “quite substantial” geographical variations, “healthy life expectancy (the proportion of life someone can expect to spend in ‘good’ or ‘very good’ health) appears to be keeping track with overall life expectancy”. If a man aged 65 can expect around nine years of good health, some will ask: why not use up over half of those at work?

It is for academics and actuaries to judge how Cridland’s analysis squares with the gloomier conclusions of a 2015 government report: Trends in Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy. Its key finding: “Increases in health expectancies in the UK are not keeping pace with gains in life expectancy, particularly at older ages.”

Still, if Cridland is willing to factor into his pension recommendations the assumption of protracted liveliness in Britain’s long living over 65s, Generations X and Y may want to consider how this sunny outlook might feature in their own career plans. With flexibility on the government’s part they could offer to work, say, between 70 and 80, later if the actuaries agree, in exchange for a state pension in their 20s or 30s. Just in case, through sheer over-optimism, a Cridland-influenced proposal keeps them indentured until the last five years, or less, of healthy life.

Any interested generations have until 31 December to tell Mr Cridland how they feel about becoming the oldest non-pensioners in the developed world.

Ever-lower interest rates have failed. It’s time to raise them

Mary Dejevsky in The Guardian

When the Bank of England reduced the base rate to a record low this month, there was one, tiny consolation for savers. The governor, Mark Carney – almost the only individual to have emerged from the Brexit shambles unscathed – said he was “not a fan” of negative interest rates. He thus seemed to rule out the nightmare – for anyone even just in the black – that we would have to pay the banks for keeping our money, rather than the other way round.

Carney’s effective rejection of negative rates – as already introduced in Japan and Sweden – was welcome. But it does little to help UK savers, who are recommended, in that infuriating phrase, to “shop around” for higher rates. Shop around if you like, but I was recently informed by two banks that rates were being reduced below 0.5%, and short of entrusting your cash to an emerging market, real options are few.

If the next thing is overt, as opposed to covert – charging for current accounts – then we will be in negative territory in fact if not in name. Then what? Despite everything I was brought up to believe, stashing cash under the mattress suddenly looks like sage planning.

The catastrophic fall in returns to savers over the past few years is, of course, a long-term consequence of the financial crisis; but a grievously neglected one. Each time rates have been reduced, the loudest voice has been that of creditors and their advocates. The supposed rationale is that low rates will get us all spending so as to get the economy growing again.

For those acclimatised to living not just with mortgages at absurdly low levels, but with overdrafts and credit-card debt as well – the benefits are evident. The cost of servicing that debt is reduced, and repay-day is again postponed. Small matter that the credit bonanza of the early 2000s was a direct cause of the financial crisis, and that we are also being urged to save for our retirement: ever-cheaper credit remains the economic growth hormone of choice.

For those of us told from childhood not to live beyond our means, who have also done our best to save for retirement, the potential effects are dire. Whenever I hear any mention of a new round of quantitative easing or a cut in interest rates, another dark cloud appears on my financial horizon – and not mine alone. We were led to expect a return on our savings that would supplement our pensions; a half of 1% even on a goodly sum will not do that.

Those now contemplating retirement on private sector, non-final salary, non-index-linked pensions – the majority – will see the rewards for their prudence not just trimmed, but slashed.

With interest rates low, investment funds look attractive



All the talk of intergenerational strife and the “plight of the millennials” omits the betrayal and impoverishment of savers, who are mostly older and have no means of increasing their income. What use is cheap credit to them? You don’t get a 1% tracker mortgage on care home fees.

The focus on house prices as the evil of evils for the young is also misleading. Low interest rates have helped push up housing costs in areas of high demand by making mammoth mortgages affordable. Saving for a deposit is the problem, and low interest rates don’t help.

There are signs, though, that the doctrine of ever-lower interest rates may be starting to run out of road. In the Financial Times last week a fund manager dared to challenge the orthodoxy that low interest rates necessarily stimulate demand. In the same paper, a reader argued that lower rates made him sit on his savings rather than spend. I suspect it has the same effect on others.

There are surely compelling reasons for a rethink. Reducing the cost of borrowing has not, in fact, led to a consumer boom, nor even to more modest growth. Without a perceptible rise in their incomes, it would seem that most people err on the side of caution. Either that, or their credit, however cheap, is maxed out.

We savers, meanwhile, are hanging on to what we have, for fear of even worse returns, and perhaps higher inflation, to come. Nor are negative rates likely to change this. The Japanese have not gone out to spend, even though this might seem a logical response; the result has rather been less money in banks and more, it is assumed, under beds.

So if ultra-low interest rates are not stimulating growth, and if they are simultaneously undermining messages about sound money and saving for retirement, how about trying the opposite? A rise in rates, perhaps?

The very idea would, of course, be greeted by warnings about mortgage defaults, repossessions, and hitting the poor disproportionately. But low rates tend not to benefit those on the brink; and an initially modest rise would offer a salutary reminder that borrowing has a cost. It could also exert downward pressure on house prices.

More immediately, it could encourage those of us in the black to indulge in a spot of so-called discretionary spending. In all, we could be reaching a point where the pluses of a rate increase outweigh the minuses. For savers, that point can’t come soon enough.

Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s'

• 18 April 2016
 
• From the sectionBBC Business

Image copyrightAP

Workers aged over 40 perform at their best if they work three days a week, according to economic researchers.

Their research analysed the work habits and brain test results of about 3,000 men and 3,500 women aged over 40 in Australia.

Their calculations suggest a part-time job keeps the brain stimulated, while avoiding exhaustion and stress.

The researchers said this needed to be taken into consideration as many countries raise their retirement age.

Double-edged sword

Data for the study was drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which is conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

It looks at people's economic and subjective well-being, family structures, and employment.

Those taking part were asked to read words aloud, to recite lists of numbers backwards and to match letters and numbers under time pressure.

In general terms, those participants who worked about 25 hours a week tended to achieve the best scores.

"Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time, long working hours and certain types of tasks can cause fatigue and stress which potentially damage cognitive functions," the report said.

Colin McKenzie, professor of economics at Keio University who took part in the research, said it would appear that working extremely long hours was more damaging than not working at all on brain function.

The figures suggest that the cognitive ability of those working about 60 hours a week can be lower than those who are not employed.

However, Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, said: "The research looks only at over-40s, and so cannot make the claim that over-40s are different from any other workers.

"What the authors find is that cognitive functioning improves up to the point at which workers work 25 hours a week and declines thereafter."

He added: "Actually, at first the decline is very marginal, and there is not much of an effect as working hours rise to 35 hours per week. Beyond 40 hours per week, the decline is much more rapid."

Tendulkar - David to a thousand Goliaths

  

Tendulkar has become a national symbol of optimism and pride but when he bats, we still see him as an underdog

Mark NicholasNovember 14, 2013

 

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The airwaves fizz every time Tendulkar walks out to the middle © BCCI

 

For the past two decades, the fall of the second Indian wicket has created an unparalleled frenzy. This comes first from the crowds, who at once animate a mild sadness at the departure of one man and an unbridled joy at the entrance of another. In homes all around India, families alert one another to the moment and gather close to their television screens.

At the ground itself, the cameramen have switched their focus from the pitch to the Indian dressing room, where a small, strong man is reacting. Still sitting, he pulls on his arm guard and rubs his hands as if drying the palms. Before standing he puts the first batting glove on his right hand and then, as he rises to his feet, he carefully positions a protective helmet upon his head, eases the strap under his chin and tucks almost 3lbs of bat under his left arm. As he begins the walk to the middle he pulls on his right batting glove. He is now ready for the calling that has been his life.

Sachin Tendulkar is 40 years old. He first played for India when he was 16. He made a hundred for India when he was 17 years and 112 days old. He has made 51 Test hundreds and 49 one-day hundreds. He, along with his captain MS Dhoni and a couple of film stars, is the best known person in a land of more than a billion people. But even his recognisable peers do not carry the hopes of that nation each minute of every day. Tendulkar is a victim of himself and so powerful is the impact that adoring followers hyperventilate around him.

He is unarguably a great cricketer and a near-perfect ambassador for modern, progressive India. He likes popular music, clothes and cars, and he has worn jewellery. Yet he retains an old-fashioned perspective. His wife is a doctor, his children like cricket. The family takes holidays behind walls or disappears into cities on faraway continents. He is unfailingly polite, angelic almost. He is as much a part of the fabric of India as the Red Fort, the Pink Palace, the Maharajas, and Diwali. Indians like cricket but they truly love Sachin Tendulkar. He has been David to a thousand Goliaths. He may, or may not, be the second-finest batsman to have played the game. To many Indians, he is a god. Or God. And now he retires from the game that has defined him.

Twenty yards from the pavilion, he stretches his back and rocks his torso from side to side. He rolls his shoulders and swings his arms before linking his bat to his body with a series of left- and right-handed movements. He rehearses some strokes. The bat looks too big for his body. It always has. He twists his mouth and contorts his jaw. He squints and then opens his eyes, wide as they will, to the brighter light. He looks to the heavens, as if acknowledging a friend.

The television director brings the statistics of a life's work to the screen: 15,837 runs at an average of 53.87; 67 fifties, 51 hundreds; highest score 248 not out. The commentators talk lavishly of his achievements and of the legacy. The excitement is at fever pitch. The spectators stand and roar their appreciation. The airwaves fizz. The viewer feels a shiver through his spine.

“There is no single thing that can be attached to Tendulkar. You cannot say he has a style and he reveals little of his personality

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Tendulkar takes guard, marking a line in the crease with a forceful rip of the spike in his shoe. I think back to Karachi in 1989 when he did this for the first time in a Test match. The attack against him was Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Abdul Qadir. He may have never faced better. He looked boyish then because he was a boy. He still appears boyish now. In those days, he had set records at school, club and state level. India wondered if the kid could cut it. Now they know. In the fourth Test of that first series, Imran floored him with a short ball. Tendulkar refused the idea that he should retire hurt, dusted himself down and made a fifty. He may never have achieved more. But he did.

Now, in Kolkata, in the only innings of his 199th Test, he looks around the field. Is this for fielders or for gaps? He blocks convincingly off front foot and back. Then he drives Shane Shillingford through the gap at midwicket. The ball rolls over the boundary rope. Two balls later, he hits the same gap. The ball speeds over the same rope. The crowd goes apoplectic. He fiddles with his thigh pad, pushing one way and the other and then he squats, stretching out his groin, before repositioning his protective box and settling deliberately back into his stance. These fidgets, these idiosyncrasies, have never changed. Ball after ball, match after match, year after year they have remained the same. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I think back to the catch at Lord's on his first tour of England. An athletic, running effort that hinted at real talent. I think of his match-saving hundred in the next Test, at Old Trafford, when, aged 17 years and 112 days, remember, he appeared to marshall his senior partner, Manoj Prabhakar. I think of the way in which hard-bitten Yorkshire embraced him as their first overseas cricketer. I think of his smile and of the sense of fun that burst from his youth.

Oddly, this makes me think of his bowling, which always looked like a release from the strain of true responsibility. I think that I remember him saving a match with the ball. I look it up. He did, using a quirky mix of swing and spin to restrict South Africa to just three runs when six were needed from the last over of the Hero Cup semi-final in Kolkata. Mohammad Azharuddin was his captain then.

Tendulkar plays quietly forward. It is an aesthetically pleasing push/punch. His hands hold the lower part of the bat handle, revealing the butt at the top of the grip to be covered by a different colour of rubber. In the push/punch the blade of the bat is exactly straight, showing its whole face to the bowler. It was ever thus.

A primeval instinct: the upper cut off Shoaib Akhtar in Centurion in the 2003 World Cup© Getty Images

He went to that first hundred at Old Trafford with a wonderful boundary past mid-off from his back foot. It is about the most difficult stroke there is and it is a Tendulkar trademark. That, the straight drive that misses leg stump at the non-striker's end, and any number off wristy leg-side moments that draw intakes of breath from opponent and audience alike. Then I think about theslaughter of Shoaib Akhtar during the 2003 World Cup in South Africa and the almost primeval approach to that innings that set him apart. Even Virender Sehwag has not played an innings of such brutality. Tendulkar has said that he was once like Sehwag. But we all run out of years.

He dips at the knees in that squat once more, shuffles his box and settles into another perfect stance. Side-on, eyes level, bat tucked behind the right foot. He watches the ball closely of course, a prerequisite of good batting, and has uncanny balance in all his strokes. I think of the systematic attack on Shane Warne and the Australians in India in 1998 - pre-planned, well practised and brilliantly executed - a performance of which Ian Healy said: "Bradman must have been good if he was better than him." I think of the double-hundred in Sydney - a considered and controlled performance that came from a chronic elbow injury and the desire to succeed in spite of it.

A tweet from Brian Lara flashes across the screen: "The only man I would pay money to watch," says Lara of his old adversary. Was one a better batsman than the other? Perhaps the West Indian was the greater match-winner; the Indian, the greater technician. I think of two innings at the Kensington Oval in Barbados. Lara'sunbeaten 153 to outwit the Australians and Tendulkar's 92 on a really bad pitch, a dangerous pitch (one of the few on that fine field) against Curtly Ambrose and Ian Bishop. The most revered right- and left-handed batsmen of the age. I imagine them at the wicket together, a kind of nirvana.

The age of Tendulkar has seen five unarguably great batsmen. Lara had an arrogance, Viv Richards an aura. For Jacques Kallis' statesman think Ricky Ponting's streetfighter. But there is no single thing that can be attached to Tendulkar. You cannot say he has a style and he reveals little of his personality. Perhaps this is a conscious approach, designed to give the opponent no clue. Summarising his emotion is impossible, he doesn't do drama. If anything there is sense of vulnerability that makes him attractive. We still see him as the underdog, and this a man who has become a national symbol of optimism and pride.

Now he is in his stance again. Shillingford rolls in and delivers the doosra. It beats our hero on the back foot and hits him around the upper thigh. Shillingford and other West Indians appeal ferociously. The English umpire, Nigel Llong, gives it out. Ye gods, Nigel, what were you thinking!

My mind goes to Cape Town in 1997 and the post-lunch partnership with Azharuddin. I have never seen such batting. Nor, one suspects, had President Mandela, who had come to say hello. Of the first 12 balls of the session, 11 were hit for four or six. In 40 overs they put on 222. It took a remarkable catch to finish Tendulkar at 169. I was as disappointed then with the man who took the catch, Adam Bacher, as I am now with Umpire Llong. (Editor's note - I have always felt that batting was never better as in the Cape Town partnership.)

I stay in a Cape Town sort of mind for the innings less than three years back, when a spiteful pitch encouraged Dale Steyn and company. I asked Sachin about this and he rated the 146 that day among the best. I asked if the standard of bowling had diminished during his time in the game and he thought it had changed in method rather than quality. The bowlers defend better than earlier, thus his own game has retreated from aspiration towards attrition.

I recall Perth in 1992, when the free-thinking 18-year-old model flayed Merv Hughes and Craig McDermott on the world's fastest pitch. Incidentally, he thinks Steyn is as good as anyone, which, given a list that begins with Imran and incorporates Malcolm Marshall, Wasim Akram and Allan Donald, is high praise.

The crowd reacts with shock to Llong's decision. Tendulkar appears resigned to the moment, as if he has seen it before. The DRS would have saved him but he and colleagues have not supported it. With typical dignity he begins the long walk to the dressing room. The crowd rise to applaud, more than aware of the dying light. It is hard to be sure when greatness slipped away from Tendulkar but the World Cup win in 2011 seemed to provide the perfect final chapter to an extraordinary story. He chose to write an epilogue but it has lacked the possibilities of the previous narrative.

Suddenly he has gone from view. As he will next Monday, for ever. A piece of us goes with him. I have seen, either live or on television, every one of the innings remembered here and many more. Each of his journeys to the wicket has led to a nervous excitement and each performance has given immense pleasure. India's most precious son has been a gift to the rest of the world too.