Pension tension and my advice for the 30-year-old me

Dear 30-year-old me . . . I assume you’ve heard the radio commercials, seen the banner ads in the newspapers.

The pensions industry is attempting to persuade our younger brethren, the thirtysomethings among us, to put down their gaming devices, their running apps and iPhones, their wrinkle-free partners, their crucifying mortgages, their mind-numbing commutes and their ageing parents who need lifts to the dentist long enough to think about growing old.

The advertisements are probably what the industry would describe as “soft-sell”. You know the kind of thing: everyone sounds friendly and reasonable, and there is a hint of self-deprecating laughter mixed in with the sage and prudent advice on offer. “Oh ho ho,” chuckles the benignly patrician male voiceover featured in the current radio campaign. “Maybe it was a mistake to get that sister of the mafiosi up the duff on that stag do in Rimini. Hell, I may not have orbicular testicles any longer, but at least I had the foresight to start a pension while I was scraping the cement off my boots.”

Oh no, sorry, he doesn’t say that, does he? He says something like he’s sorry he bought a brown car when he was 30. (Maybe he was hungover and thought he was buying a horse.)

But, the script continues, happiness and relief flooding the airwaves, despite that shocking auto-livery faux-pas – despite having spent those rapacious, fertile years traversing the highways and byways in a brown car when he could have been driving a black car or even, heaven forbid, a red car, with bull bars, exciting endless possibilities for action under the hedgerows – at least he had the foresight to start a pension.

Unsuitable shoes

Of course, my chagrin, my childish dismissal of this worthwhile enterprise – getting younger people to put their money into pension funds rather than fritter it away on unsuitable shoes and sambucas (I can’t think where else I spent it) is based entirely on fear.

I, like many self-employed women of my generation, don’t have a pension, and unless the mangy, increasingly neurotic cat I live with starts extruding diamond pellets, I’ll be one of the poor unfortunates queuing up for a bed from the State.

I have a morbid fear that I'll end up eating puréed banana and clapping along to the theme tune from Teletubbies anyway, without the added stress of penury.

“Dear 30-year-old me,” the ads begin. I think this should be a collective essay title for everyone over 40; an internal exploration, a national rethink, something we could put our minds to in private while we’re counting our age spots and knitting a bed jacket for the national debt.

Were I to give advice to my 30-year-old self, it would fall into two categories: the general and the specific. Generally speaking, I would’ve drunk a lot less and smoked a lot less and eaten less carbohydrates, and I definitely wouldn’t have ordered the combination house starter quite so often. I’d have travelled more, read more and got up earlier on bin day.

Also, I now know that some people are just not born to be blond, and that the peroxide bottle is no friend of mine. Also I strongly believe that you can never have enough socks. (Yes, I did say socks.) More specifically, I absolutely wouldn’t have tried that backflip with the lesbian acrobat who was doing a few waitressing shifts, between her airborne routines, in the French cafe I was working in, in south London.

Fun and a gun

They were fun evenings, after the cafe had closed, with the staff gathered around the Pedrotti bottle, eating leftovers and polishing the cutlery. The backflip was on the same night that the guy turned up at the locked restaurant door with a gun, looking for the takings. I waved at him, indicating that we were closed.

This was no act of heroism; I was just too vain to wear my glasses and didn’t see his weapon. Remarkably, the would-be armed robber just went away. Saved from the unknown, and ignited by adrenalin, we opened another litre, and that lovely lithe girl, whose name I’ve long forgotten, tried to teach us all to flip. You don’t really think about your skeleton when you’re 30, or consider that your musculature has to last for a lifetime. Or maybe some people do.

Maybe that’s why the man on the radio sounds so self-satisfied, heading off into the sunset, pension in the pocket of his plus-four, while I’m checking the cat lit for diamonds.