In praise of being ordinary

Why is the Baby Boomer generation treated as if they are special and important? There’s nothing extraordinary about people born between ’45 and ’64, except there are lots of them.

I beat the rush. I was a result of the start of the war. In 1939 my mum met a handsome bloke, a new recruit who probably looked good to her in his new uniform. He enlisted almost as soon as war was declared. He probably used the old soldiers line “ I am going away, and might not come back. We only have tonight for me tor remember while I am over there, fighting”. He was right, he didn’t come back.

We war babies grew up in a society strongly over represented by women. I was on the map too late to have been a part of the great depression, but I can remember my family was still affected by the poverty from those times.

There was no male in the household to earn the normal male based income of the time, so mum worked in an armaments factory during the war, and my grandmother cleaned houses for the officers’ wives class. This was a time governed by shortages, not just shortage of cash. This was a time of rationing books, meat was rationed, petrol was rationed, eggs and sugar were rationed ” for the war effort”. Our family saucepans were taken, to melt down for aircraft parts.

My family saved string, darned socks and budgeted all week to give me threepence pocket money on Saturday when I started school.

Then I was too old and conservative (in my twenties) to really be bona fide participant in the youth revolution of the sixties, the one big time when Boomers did something for the world.  Boomer time was a time of plenty, and immediate satisfaction. They, and my grandkids want it all, and they want it now!

I was ready for retirement when most of the Baby Boom bunch were worrying about their mid-life crisis. The The government began to worry about the cost of paying pensions to that great swell of Boomers, so they announced a plan to give a big bonus to Baby Boomers to stay on at work instead of retiring. Sadly, I retired a month before the scheme started, so I missed out on a lovely big lump sum.

I went back to work because the pension for war babies wasn’t enough to live on.

And now the government has announced a new financial incentive scheme to encourage the Boomers to stay on a work. I am five years past the old retirement age; my employer has decided to make me redundant, to make room for more Boomers on the staff.

 I will work till I drop. After all, I am part of the generation who will make do. My only choice is to work independantly. The pension will put me on a new form of ration card

Now I am only a blogger. I am a late starter in this field. Its a new career, and I need to find a way to beat the Boomers, and make some living money from the business.