Coronavirus is forcing me into practice retirement – and it isn’t all bad

Keeping busy and in contact with friends stops your world from shrinking, and then there are the unexpected pleasures of being at home, writes Janet Street-Porter

Streets have been left virtually deserted as people have to busy themselves at home (PA)

Enforced house arrest is teaching me a new skill – how to stop work.

Boomers like me thrive on being busy and a huge number of us are militant retirement refuseniks, but thanks to the coronavirus outbreak now we are being forced to experience PR – practice retirement. Will it change our minds permanently about the benefits of work in later life?

We are the generation who wanted to rebrand ageing, and we associate the R-word – retirement – with shutting down, shrinking, giving up. But is that true? And when this pandemic ends, how many of us (of all ages) will decide not to go back to an office again, having discovered the joy of working from home?

Being busy (which I associate with fighting the ageing process) needn’t mean travelling to another place, and modern technology means we can chat without leaving our front rooms. I have spent more time at home recently than in the last 20 years. Isolation is relative – because communication never really stops, all that happens is that you use the internet or phone.

When my parents retired, their world shrank. They spent hours at home, locked into strict routines – the same food at the same times, the same radio and television programmes, and the same dreary trips in the car. Dad avoided mum by going to his allotment, or playing golf. She went to Welsh poetry classes and the odd game of bingo, only saw close family and stopped talking to everybody else. No cruises, no new friends. In short, she became a misery.

That pattern has to be avoided at all costs. At the start of the lockdown, I stopped watching the news in real time. The brain can only take so many pictures of temporary morgues, hospitals in conference centres, and graphs of rising death tolls. It might sound trivial, but the BBC’s constant obsession with the deaths in every country is beginning to sound to me like the results in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Do we really need to know how many people have succumbed in the Philippines or Japan just before our head hits the pillow at night? The 10 o’clock news is giving me nightmares, so I have cancelled it. Bad news can happen before 5pm, thanks very much. This isn’t denying reality, just fashioning it to suit current requirements – positivity at all costs.

I also baulk at “helpful” celebrities telling me how to exercise, be mindful and bake bread. I can do all that by myself thanks very much and I don’t want to be reminded how much you want me to “stay safe” while promoting your latest album or website – I am far safer and (touch wood) healthier than Boris Johnson and so is Badger our border terrier.

Anticipating boredom, I started tearing the puzzle pages out of old newspapers, but soon realised this was falling into the same old-style retirement routine as mum and dad, and chucked them away. Instead of slumping in front of cosy repeats of Midsomer Murders and Vera I’ve been reading Michel Houellebecq’s excellent new novel Seratonin – a brilliant politically-incorrect diatribe about modern life. It is nihilistic and thoroughly engaging. I’ve almost finished the Berlin series by Len Deighton – following the wheeling and dealing of MI5 during the Cold War is far better mental exercise than sudoku.

Each evening, I remove my comfy trousers and dress for dinner, albeit for the benefit of the same limited cast – partner and dog. Forget weights, a home gym or counting a hundred planks, I walk a slightly different route daily and photograph the grasses near my home. Noticing very small changes in the natural world is very meditative.

As for work, I was distraught when Loose Women was taken off the air – I love live broadcasting, and the unplanned conversation, followed by all the feedback from hundreds of thousands of viewers. The joy of being part of a group, of interacting with people whose lives are so different... I wish there was a way for that to continue. But I can’t deny that being at home has unexpected pleasures.

The trick is not to let the mundane take over your day – the cleaning, mending, tidying, jam-making and all that crap our parents told us was so essential. House arrest should be a chance to cook new recipes, and talk to friends you had classified as low priority callbacks. A chance to watch movies you’d missed at the cinema and plays streamed from the National Theatre.

Of course I am still planting potatoes in plastic bins, setting out my cabbage plants and lettuces and cocooning them in plastic against the chill easterly winds. At the same time I am deciding how much time in the future I will spend watching them grow – will it continue to be limited to a couple of days at the weekends, or will this practice retirement result in a more permanent change in my lifestyle?

Post-pandemic, will a shaky economy tolerate a rush back to work by all age groups? We are currently undergoing social isolation, resulting in enforced lay-offs for millions of healthy workers as well as spending billions in handouts, all to protect the elderly. All at a huge cost which could see the young suffer for decades. Would it not be fairer for the boomers to stop and think before they rush back to work? Perhaps this is a time for my generation to stop being so selfish.

The government might want to think about making work less economically attractive to the over-60s. After all, what’s wrong with retirement?