Early retirement

I refer to my earlier rather frivolous comment but there was a serious side to it. Consider that now a conservative MP has removed a posting because, well he was actually right.

My point is that he was looking at the effect on mental health of unemployment. May I say that there is the same problem with regard to retirement, especially early retirement, for men and women in their fifties.

Many firms will retire their older workers rather than make them redundant. I hope that they have received some form of counselling because it comes as quite a shock when you are at home with somebody all day when you previously only saw them for a short time. Not everybody will be able to spend their whole day commenting on Nick's Blog or studying with the Open University. Golf is not the answer either.

I am lucky, I planned for my retirement and my previous employer would reduce the working week by one day for every year that you were closer to retirement. This gave people time to adjust, a very good employer indeed.