…fifty years ago, also a grey Monday morning, I turned up at 2-12 Gresham Street, EC2, for the first of 10660 (I think) days on the payroll of the Post Office and later its offshoot BT. My first assignment, symbolically enough, was to room G01 - room N°1 on the ground floor. My rise through the ranks was hardly meteoric, but I managed to rack up enough promotions to get me a good pension, and have now been drawing it for nearly 21 years. That’s probably the most notable achievement of my salaried life. Jobs of one kind and another took me to many different countries, in some of which I could eventually use the languages I’d studied at school and university. But of all the subjects I dabbled in, I think it was history that gave me the skills of research, analysis and argumentation that my work called for. Let nobody talk down the value of a broad-based arts degree.
I’ve maundered on in the past about the Post Office and BT, and their curious ways, language and addiction to reorganisation, so won’t go back into that. Living was not too easy in the early years. Flat-sharing was a necessary evil, relieved by kind, generous relatives who gave me lodgings at intervals (I was the boomerang nephew for some years). Eight years into salaried work I was finally able, aged 30, to buy a comfortable little house. I could have done so a few years earlier. I wonder how many of today’s graduates can do the same? Similarly, I doubt if many, if any, can expect to stay and progress steadily through a variety of jobs with the same employer throughout their working life, let alone retire at 50 with a decent index-linked pension. Though I grizzle about the afflictions of age, I know I have much to be grateful for.
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