We're asked to deem this pensions pot half empty. "Sorry, you'll have to work longer!" wails the Mail on behalf of "millions face seeing their dreams of retiring at 65 shattered". "One in five men won't reach retirement if age rises to 67," echoes a sepulchral Daily Telegraph. Outrage, outrage, oodles of outrage. So why, when you turn 67 (just like me) is there a more than half-full tendency to smile?
Hang on to that sly little chameleon of a word - "work" - for a moment. It can be monumental: a work by Velasquez. It can define the Victorian misery of the workhouse. In the great depression, America had no work until FDR worked his New Deal miracle. In the City, only a decade ago, any capacity for work seemed to expire at around 48 as bank managers by the thousand were offered "a package" and pushed out the door.
Take a man in his 50s who lost his job when the Conservatives were anxious to cut unemployment and has been on long-term invalidity benefit ever since. Perhaps he's sitting at home doing a bit in the garden and watching daytime TV - but Gordon Brown wants to get him back to work. Take a man in his 60s who loves his work - and doesn't remotely want to settle for Richard and Judy and pruning the roses. See how "work" is both a threat and a roseate promise. Switch the context and everything changes in an arbitrary trice.
I wonder whether the Mailmen who wrote that "Sorry" story really see many "shattered dreams" in retirement at 67, not 65. Need they fear the curse of the gold watch as they plough into the 70s? Surely not. Lynda Lee-Potter was massively mourned last year, at 70, because she could write no more.
And it will be just the same over at the Daily Telegraph one bleak day when Bill Deedes, 92, can't turn on his computer any longer, thus leaving his new bosses, the Barclay twins, bereft at 71 - and planning a memorial service of such pomp that Rupert Murdoch, 74, may even be persuaded to attend.
The point about working, then, is that it's an individual condition, a state of mind, not some blanket political concept. Roy Hattersley, one page back, works harder and more fruitfully now at 72 than he found possible 20 frustrating years ago. Bobby Robson would clearly wish the same. Peter Hall is a whirlwind at 75. John Prescott, 67, can still see red-sock mists and put the boot into chaps who've put the boot into him. There's a straightforward equation here: live longer, remain more active, and - actuarially - either a working life stretches or a pension fund needs to swell. That is the problem Lord Turner and team have been sweating over. That is the genesis of question 67.
But any truly rational answer needs to be flexible and individual, not some lumpen agreement negotiated en masse. States of mind are just that: particular, infinitely variable, like states themselves. Ken Clarke is supposedly too old to be Tory leader because he'll be 68 at the next election; John McCain, who'll be 72 in 2008, is the current Republican frontrunner to succeed George Bush. Porter Goss, Bush's "new" CIA director, turns 67 this week (by which lights Stella Rimington, at 70, could still be on the MI5 job).
The "young" country, if you look closely, is much keener on age than the old country. It sides with India, where the new prime minister is 73, and the tiger of China, where the new Hu would already be drawing a pension in Britain. Tony Blair, as his ministers gossip, may have a mental block about appointing anyone past 50 to his cabinet (which is why greying hopefuls grow disconsolate and John Hutton mops his brow, ducking under the tape by a whisker) but this is a Blair thing, a Brit thing, not a world thing.
So we've got a national problem - the problem of living too long, too energetically and of producing too few young people to support us in traditional ways. So take the next step. Say that work keeps you fitter and brighter, not wearily stressed. Say that work is a boon, not a blight. Stop banging on about lost dreams and remember the nightmares of wasted lives you lamented the week before last.
Value, at every level, the companionship and comradeship that work has on tap. Value the fun and the laughs and the achievements. Cherish the chance of carrying on where you can. Embrace that little chameleon. It's the half-full way to stay joined to the human race.
