How do you get here, at my age? How do you get to a rented cottage, with no more worldly possessions to your name than a distressed Edwardian sideboard, a nice collection of trowels and just under seven grand in the building society? I will give you the short version. You move from your northern birthplace to university, and when, not long before graduation, your sophisticated floppy-haired lecturer asks you out for a drink, you shyly say yes, then wait while he disentangles himself from his first marriage, then move to a too-expensive house just outside Oxford with him, then put your own larger plans on hold to work part time as a suburban librarian and part time as his second mother, then seventeen years later when you realise he is doing the same thing with one of his students that he did with you when you were her age, and probably has done with several students in the interim, you walk away from it all, stubbornly asking for nothing, and then just when you are back on your feet, your lone known parent goes into a nursing home, and you realise that being ill and dying are both expensive; then the years pass, and you escape for a while, to another part of the world, with no thought of what you are doing afterwards, which is wonderful, but temporary, and then not long after that it is the present day, and you are a year shy of sixty. But is this all that terrible a place to be in? And what standards are we judging this by? The standards of another university graduate from my generation, who has spent four decades firming up their financial security, living like life is solely preparation for retirement? Or the standards of being fairly healthy, and still alive, and living in a place with clean air and owls, with a job you tolerate most days and like on some? If I ever get lugubrious and start looking backwards in a self-pitying fashion towards a point in my life where I could have… solidified my future, Reka gives me perspective. It is unlikely she will ever be in a position to purchase her own house, no matter how hard she works at her job, and how hard she saves, and she saves hard. Last week, she told me, her entire food bill came to £18.47. She lives mostly on lentils and reduced price veg she finds at the end of the day in Aldi or Tesco. She buys herself no treats, with the arguable exception of the bicycle she found on Gumtree for £50, owns only two bras, spends at least an hour of every day singing, and seems far less unhappy than any of the young – or old – people I meet on the reception of the community college where I work three days a week.