More bad news yesterday when the death of Steve Strange was announced. He was 55.
I was not a huge fan of the New Romantic era – I don’t think anyone has ever described me as a romantic in any sense!- but Fade To Grey, released a mere 35 years ago, for goodness sake, has always been one of those great pop songs that lingers and then lingers some more. For that tune alone, Strange deserves to be remembered with affection.
And then I think of his age again. 55. Hardly old by the way we measure these things these days. Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney are still banging out the tunes in their 70s, looking little different from how they looked in their heydays. Grecian 2000 and hair weaves can achieve wonders, mind you, although significantly perhaps, Dylan is often seen wearing a hat!
I was older than Strange when I took part in an exit strategy at work. Having buried so many people from my family and friends, including all my parents and grandparents, mortality is something that is no longer at the back of my mind. I am hoping that it won’t be my turn next but who is to know? There has to be time to do other things.
That is not to decry others who live to work and cannot envisage life without work or the extra material items money can buy. If someone’s raison d’etre is to achieve their maximum potential through work, then what is wrong with that? Having worked for over 40 years, I have known countless people who died before they retired and some who died whilst still being in work, despite being many years past the retirement age. To me, working full time beyond, or even up to, my retirement age fills me with horror. I want to write, I want to play golf, I want to read, I want to travel but I don’t want to spend 40-odd hours a week working my butt off.
Within a few years, the state retirement age will climb to 70 and maybe even beyond that as the population collectively ages, but I emphasise collectively. That will be an average because some will live to be seriously old and others will die younger. And anyway, how many of your very old days will really give much in the way of quality in your life? And there are the creeping illnesses too, the epidemic of Alzheimers, of Parkinsons and the myriad of cancers that will cut short so many of our lives? There is no guarantee that we will live much beyond the state retirement age and we all make a choice and take a chance.
Steve Strange would surely have had many years of creative writing and performance ahead of him, but that’s all gone now, cruelly taken away. The death of someone so young and so talented reinforces my view that work and money are not everything, at least for me. Other choices are available.
