Dear LPG readers.

I think that even though many of us oldies think that, as pensioners, we are left in a pretty negative financial situation, we are not as badly off as we might imagine.   I realise that I am only talking from personal experience but, while there is a wide spectrum of situations, and every pensioner finds themselves with a different and unique set of circumstances to face, I think that we can all agree that things could always be worse.  

Since I retired I have made a point of keeping the social channels open to me, as open as possible.  I got involved with a couple of social clubs and a charity not long after spending a few weeks alone in the house.  I thought that having loads of time to myself would be the best aspect of my new status but soon learned that getting involved and staying busy was the way forward for me. 

I enjoy friendly debate and I have found myself in the middle of more than one conversation where the general chat gets narrowed down to how disappointed some of my new older friends appear to be with their post-retirement lifestyle, even though, according to the office of national statistics, the British public are at their happiest during those initial retirement years. 

At the moment your average 65 to 85 year olds are at the happiest point that we are ever going to be in our lifetimes so, in spite of all the ailments that slow us up, as we pass through those 20 or so years we need to make the best of them.

Finances might not be perfect, but at least for most of us we know what our income is from week to week and if we really want to, there is so much to do out there in the world beyond our homes.  All those things that we could not fit into our lives while we were working, or at least some of them, have to be worth revisiting and while you can only do one thing at a time, having a couple of projects to work between is not a bad thing. 

We people in that age bracket will have lived through times when, in my estimation, on reflection, so many aspects of living at any time of life seemed much better to me.  We did not have all the gadgets and modern technological advantages of living today but it seems to me that for all those inventions all too many of us are still having trouble finding the time to get everything we want to do done.  

For many of us there are still not enough hours in the day but for the first time in a long time we have complete control on what we do with them and, when you take away the need to be at our various health appointments, anything we miss or get to late is not going to cause us embarrassment because we are at the point in life when we can just reschedule. 

So, while there will always be pensioners for which it will not be true, in general and in spite of all the inconvenience that living in this often quite gadget-filled world that modern times has provided us with, and no matter how boring, busy, lonely or overcrowded   each of us consider our individual day-to-day lifestyle to be, perhaps Harold Macmillan’s words ring truest for all but the oldest pensioners among us…   

JA, Ladyewell

JA shares the statistics she found…

(►►►)  

…and, even though it is from the USA, some internet advice on being happy…

(►►►)     (►►►)