Why Fifty Sense?

Jan 18, 2015

So… despite a few years spent as a Grumpy Old Woman it turns out I was not that well-prepared after all; plenty of people had arrived at Fifty before me and sussed out the lie of the landscape. And guess what? We’re perceived to be over-the-hill at fifty.

Apparently it’s the norm for working women of around my age (and as my friend India Knight’s most recent book has it, very much In Your Prime) to leave DOBs off job applications and re-imagine ageing O'Levels as a sprightly set of GCSEs. Indeed, just a few weeks ago there was an article on this subject in the Sunday Times (January 18th).

There’s no gender bias in the article (it was written by a man; men over fifty have a tough time too, bless them), yet I only have to look around my industry to see countless fiftysomething men busily and contentedly in-their-primes, very much on a Headhunter’s hit-list and *pulling down the Ks* commensurate with their age and experience. 

So the article focused on 50-year-old Sally Nailard, formerly a high-flyer at Unite until she took voluntary redundancy last August. Since then she’s sent fifty job applications to companies as diverse as M&S, Legoland and Nationwide, and received no replies. Sally — youthful and stylish-looking, for what it’s worth — said she was ‘bewildered’ as to why she was being ‘written off.’

Until relatively recently I would have been just as bewildered as Sally, however last year, having just turned fifty, I pitched an idea to a magazine editor about… applying for fifty jobs. ‘No thanks Kate—’ said the editor (female, fiftysomething, flying deservedly high) ‘—that’s not for us’. Fair enough, maybe it was a rubbish idea... but hey, I did it anyway. (I'll write about it in the future).

This year — 2015 — I am *celebrating* thirty years in journalism — a business which, happily, doesn't always judge on appearances and can usually recognise the equation: Age + Experience = Better Copy. Unfortunately it's also a very beleagured business. Having had their words (and pictures) — aka 'content' — given away for nothing via newspaper websites, skilled 'content-providers' are increasingly priced out of the post-print-era equation, especially when/if they find themselves freelance.

For female journalists of my age who do not have a contract, do not live in London, may be single-income-with-mortgage and still have young children (for example, I’m old enough to be a grandmother however my youngest son is eight and my father is nudging eighty: Sandwich Generation), the solution is to do what you know and love in a different kind of way.

Since taking voluntary redundancy from The Observer in 2010, I’ve set up a seaside holiday let, written two novels, been appointed a Visiting Fellow (unpaid) at my local University and become a Trustee (unpaid) of a local charity that will have a very real impact on my local community (www.hpcharity.co.uk).

All of this sounds great — and indeed it has been intensely creative. However much of the pleasure of that creativity is cancelled-out by the not inconsiderable stress of worrying about an income which has dropped by... well, let's just say an enormous amount and, very Britishly, leave it at that. Anyway, the point is that if I were a plumber or a brain surgeon of thirty years' standing it is inconceivable that I would be asked to do my job for no, or negligible, pay. However, I'm always being asked to blog somewhere or other for nowt. Sometimes I'm tempted (if I like the people, or it's an interesting subject, for example) but I've yet to cave in. In a climate in which the work of a skilled creative ‘content provider’ is eroded by a marketplace stuffed full of part-time mummy-bloggers, ‘celebrity’ columnists, shouty tweeters and cheap-as-chips interns who can work on multiple platforms (because they're snap-happy i-Phoney Vlog-tographers, too), then those of us who learned our trade on just the one 'platform' — via typewriter and dead trees — can either put up our feet (I was a TV critic for a decade; this comes fairly easily) and shut-up shop, sighing ‘I’m getting old, me — I thought Google Glass was cool'. Or we can entirely reconfigure the parameters of our working lives.

I’m trying to do the latter (and I always knew Google Glass was utter crap) while watching my credit-rating hit the floor. I'm wondering where it will all end and knowing that, until I get carted off in a box, it probably won't. But I'm buggered if I'm still going to Keep Up Appearances for the sake of it.

So here's the thing: I don't shop in Lidl as some sort of hipster statement — I shop there because it's cheap. This isn't shameful. There are a LOT of 'squeezed middles' out here who have taken the redundancy, like Sally, and cashed in our pensions and who know that there is no 'security' anymore. Luckily, I'm neither proud nor entitled and I have had a wonderful career, even if it does seem to be mostly in the past tense. On top of that, I'm (rather famously) not afraid of honesty — whether or not it's the 'best' policy). Plus I have an impressive work ethic, even if I do say so myself.

So the bottom line is that those of us with CVs as long as our arms and bucketloads of 'Fifty Sense' hope that, with a bit of luck, there's a way to redefine the meaning of 'security'. In the meantime, I got very bored with still having lots of things to say and nowhere to say them, so I took a look (I needed a confidence boost, frankly) at my fuck-off, all singing, all-dancing CV... and I sat down and made this site. 'Build it and they will come...'? We'll see...