Three-score years and ten

To my own very considerable surprise, and I suspect the surprise of a good many others who have known me for at least some of those years I have reached the venerable age of 70. Yes, Pakistan Day and my own birthday coincide, which is something I am sure my parents never considered. Indeed I was unaware of it myself until well into my 40s when my work brought me into contact with the Pakistani community in my home city of Northampton and thence to where I am today, sitting in my office in Bahawalpur and tapping out this column as I do between 11 and 12 every Wednesday since January 2005.

A score-plus-four of those years have been spent in Pakistan, almost a third of my entire life, and I have lived in Pakistan longer than anywhere else. Why? — is a question asked less often these days but still asked, and it is not always easy to come up with a short answer. As the years pass though there is one very good reason that only gets better with age — being valued.

In Pakistan my years have real worth. They are quite literally money in the bank. My experience and knowledge and the ability to string a couple of dozen words together and make reasonable sense adds up to a monthly salary. At no point has my employer suggested that I might like to hang up my keyboard having gone past my sell-by date. Retirement will come but at a point of my own choosing. It was to have been this year but is now deferred and these columns will anyway survive long after I give up full-time work. If you hear a tapping from inside my coffin don’t worry… it will be my shade knocking out 700 words of op-ed for Afterlife Weekly. Writers anyway have a longer shelf-life than say stevedores, or ballet dancers and we can carry on regardless despite considerable physical impairment. So long as the grey matter is still in working order and there is a way of turning thought into prose, I’m in business.

Would the same be true in the UK? Yes and no. Us scribblers enjoy the same longevity everywhere, but as for formal employment once past 65 in England life is altogether trickier. For one thing you are a ‘pensioner’ — and there is something about being a ‘pensioner’ that subtly alters perceptions. There are still memories of my own father and grandfather retiring, of both being ‘around’ more than they were, and both doing that curiously British thing — ‘pottering’. All the dictionaries agree — ‘to occupy oneself in a desultory though agreeable manner’. With grandfather it was gardening and marquetry, with father calligraphy and woodcarving. But once past 65 I do not recall either of them being in paid work again. And another thing — they were ‘old’. They were ‘old’ five years before my own chronological age. My own perception of them was as ‘old’ and it shaped my expectations in hindsight.

Here in Pakistan it works a bit differently. There is a saying — ‘Old is gold’ — that I never really paid much attention to until I realised that people actually meant it, old really is gold. And those around me seemingly conspire to keep me young, or at least young in heart and head even if I am crumbling at the edges somewhat. There really are, at least for me, golden years ahead in which I am going to be productive, as active as physical decline allows me to be and turning up at my desk six days a week to do a full day’s work long into a future.

All that adds up to an enduring sense of pride in myself, the added value that goes alongside being valued, respected even. My guess is that these are things that we rarely think about, the ways in which we determine our worth and perhaps it is only in older time that there is a slowdawn of understanding of the sum of our parts. So my 70^th birthday will pass with nose to the grindstone, a deadline to meet and a cake to cut at the end. Could be worse. Tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2017.

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