Happy New Year and being Sixty

Happy New Year to you all. I have taken a quick few days off to celebrate the sixtieth birthday in peace and contemplation (alcohol assisted, it must be confessed). On the pleasure of the location, I shall shortly wax lyrical. But for the time being, it is enough to say that the new year is just about to chime --and that's it.

I have already taken delivery of my senior railcard. The website was truly ghastly, full of advertising granny talk. "It means you can save money on visits to the grandkids, trips into town to catch a show, or weekends by the seaside" ran the spiel, apparently oblivious to the fact that the years 60-70 were now working years for most of us lucky enough to be employed at all, and "weekends at the seaside" were not really in our purview.

And I realised from the Today Programme that I would now get free prescriptions. So what about a bus pass, I wondered.

You will detect that I feel a bit conflicted about this. I shall be using my senior railcard with enthusiasm. It doesn't give you much more from Cambridge to London than the Network card, but you can use it on the 9.15, rather then waiting for the 10.15 to get the discount -- and that makes a hell of a lot of difference for most meetings.

But there is a bit of me that is puzzled that some of these "privileges" of being elderly have got stuck to an earlier version of retirement age, and on what basis. So far as the railcard goes, I am really not sure what the point is (grateful as I am). Is it an attempt to increase rail use by privileging yet another group that might be encouraged to go out of rush-hour? is it a reward to those of us who have coughed up huge amounts for half a lifetime? Or is it a social service to the immobile elderly? Or what combination?

So far as the free prescriptions.. well that just seems bonkers. Nine out of ten prescriptions in England are actually free anway, whether to the old, the young, the chronically ill, the pregnant, or whoever.  In which case what is the point in charging, and the infra structure of the age and identity checking. After all, they all all free in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What is England doing? (I wonder if UKIP have a policy on this??)