I have a friend who is a fellow teacher at my school. She and I spend our days doing much the same thing — trying to get teenagers excited about the sine rule and the division of labour. She has four years’ experience to my two, so she bails me out whenever I’ve forgotten to take the register or neglected to turn up for a detention I’ve set. At the weekend we sometimes do the same thing too: we go on dates with random men we have met online.
On Mondays, back in school, we compare notes, which usually means discussing the various ways in which the men will not quite do.
There is one difference between us. My friend is 25, while I am writing this article on the morning of my 60th birthday. My life at 60 is not what I was expecting — nor what the Mayor of London can have expected when he popped a 60-plus card into the post for me, allowing me to travel around London for nothing. Evidently he thinks that having reached this age I’m now too feeble and too impoverished to get from A to B unaided.