Ian McMillan: A quiet retirement? That’s not my cup of tea

And although I grumbled about more standing on windy station platforms that made your eyes water, and another feeble and gasping hotel kettle taking ages to boil, I was really happy because I was looking forward to the show and because my life had a purpose.

I would get to Buxton in plenty of 
time because that’s what I like to do and I would get up early for the train because I knew I had to, and if I didn’t there’d be a camera crew waiting around and looking at their watches. My day and the next day had a map, a plan, an A to B.

Then the show got postponed because the snow was lingering in Buxton and I cancelled the hotel and I had a free day. The map got folded and the A would never get as far as B. I glimpsed, in a minor and insubstantial way, what it must be like to have no employment to go to, to have nothing to do.

I’ve only ever been made redundant once, partly because I’ve never really had a job. I worked on a building site when I left college and one Friday in 1980 the gaffer called me in and told me they were going to have to let me go, like an otter being released into the wild, except he didn’t say that last bit. I remember that I had to work a week’s notice and on the morning of the last day I just walked away, thinking I was cocking a snook at authority but in truth just doing myself out of a few hours wages.

To be honest, I was scared; we’d not been married long and although my wife was working as a teacher, we really needed my wage. I remember getting home early, before she came back from work, and just staring at the walls.

When she got in, she was cross because I hadn’t started making the 
tea and I stirred myself slowly and got the kettle on, filling it up slowly, dreamily, because I was a man without direction. Idleness didn’t sit well with me though: I did a couple of days volunteering at a Community Arts place in Doncaster and then I got a job in a tennis-ball factory.

It really did seem that in those days, just before the major and terrible redundancies of the 1980s started to hit, you could walk into another job once you’d left one.

It was like being retired or redundant that day, the day of my cancelled show. People tell me that those first few days or weeks after a job has gone for whatever reason are a bit like being on holiday. You sit about; you lie in; you do the garden; you visit shops and garden centres during quiet parts of the day when there’s no queue. And then reality slaps you in the chops: this isn’t a holiday.

I had all those feelings in miniature after my gig bit the dust, or rather bit the snow. I had a nice lunch. I sat in the conservatory and read a book. I drank too much tea. At one point I found myself staring into space, and I realised that I had nothing to do until tomorrow, and I tried to imagine all those tomorrows stretching ahead like braces that will never twang. I stirred myself and started getting things ready for the filming on Friday because I didn’t want to feel that I had nothing to do, I wanted to feel that I really did have some purpose in life. I didn’t want to be like one of those hotel kettles I mentioned earlier, just hissing away quietly in the corner and not really doing the thing we were made to do.

Because, let’s face it, human beings were designed to work. Oh, I know that paid work is a fairly recent invention in the long timescale of human existence but we didn’t evolve to sit about and stare at the TV. Work, in whatever form it is, fulfils us and reminds us who we are and who we can become.

Ah, but people will say, it’s all very well for you with your cushy word-based career, but what if you’ve got a repetitive, back-breaking, boredom-inducing job that you dread getting up to go to?

Well, that’s the case for a living wage over a minimum one, so that going to work makes you feel good because it brings a good reward.

I can’t stop thinking about those people my age who’ve been chucked 
on the scrapheap and those jobless young people who’ve never had a chance to even climb on the heap.

I’m going to keep them in my mind next time I grumble about an early start, a late train: at least I’ve got somewhere to go.