Great Expectations

When I worked in retail jewellery many years ago, customers would request things which didn't really exist. I give you an example. Many was the time I was asked if I had a water-proof watch to sell. I would then go through the rather laborious process that I had a number of watches many of which were water resistant to great depths. Resistant. The same mistake is replicated elsewhere as people seem to think they can surpass the laws of nature. There is now age-resistant face cream. This I expect to be about as effective as King Canute at the seaside. Perhaps we feel we have to put up this defence against the inevitabilities of life. I read a quote from Pete Townshend of The Who many years ago. When Jimi Hendrix exploded on to the London music scene in 1966, the top British guitarists of the day didn't quite know how to react to the reality. Clapton, Townshend, Beck, Page et al all knew only too well that they could never be as good as Hendrix. At an early Hendrix gig, Townshend said, "one day I'll play him off the stage". He later conceded that he almost had to say that or there would have been no point in him carrying on. He was seeking to save face and I'm sure he wasn't the first or the last to take that particular course of action. I observed last week the first rumblings of what could yet become the winter of our discontent. Firefighters have elected to take industrial action over their pension provision. This is because they are being asked to work until they are 60 rather than 55 in order to get full pension. We would all concede that their job is fraught with risk and I can only assume that they do too when they seek that career. That is not in debate. The government has said that they just can't afford to pay them full pension at age 55. What is not reasonable about that. A fireman taking full pension at age 55 might have contributed to his or her pension for 35 years or so. But their life expectancy is now going to give them a pension for about 30 years. Its hard to see how they can accumulate enough money to make this possible. The truth of course is that they can't. This and previous governments have guaranteed final salary pension schemes. If I took the current system to a bank as a new business idea, I would be laughed out of the door because it is completely unsustainable. I do have some sympathy for workers exercising their right to strike. The postal workers are a case in point. The Royal Mail is the latest asset to be stripped. With privatisation will come job cuts and Post Office closures. This is undeniable. In a sense then, what have the Postal Workers got to lose? Yes they are trying to turn back the tide but strike action is all they have left before inevitable redundancies. The firefighters have no such threats to their jobs. They are just being asked to work until the ripe old age of 60. The truth is that people don't like change. That's life. People, like animals, react if confronted and that is what is being enacted in the UK today. Like the age-resistant face cream though, you can apply as much as you like but you can't stop the second hand. Sometimes we play our lives like a sales transaction. We sometimes put an unreasonably high price on our worth knowing that we can be knocked down a little. If we start the transaction at too low a price, our bargaining power is lost. At the root of this is avarice and greed. Wanting that bit more than the next guy is at the heart of human nature. So, I want a watch which is impregnable to water, a face that still makes me look 18, a full pension at age 50 and a first class letter which has a better than average chance of arriving at its destination tomorrow. Sadly, the last one seems the most realistic for now and on recent evidence, even that is a trifle optimistic!