At the age of sixty four, I used my GOLD CARD over-60s' free bus pass for the first time. Off the leash for the evening and slightly drunk, I boarded an evening 6-1 service bus back from Matlock to Cromford.
To get to the point, if you were never a bus-enthusiast and the mention of Midland Red, Greenline or Barton leaves your hormone levels unaffected, just skip the next three paragraphs.
When had I last caught a bus or a coach? Going down to London for the Stop-the-War march? - no, I wasn't even 60 then. Oh yes, it was only a couple of years ago, still holding out against my Gold Card entitlement, that I caught a Trans-Peak express coach back from Stockport bus station. After the entire Hazel Grove Rambling Club got on (all but two of them card-showing free-riders), I stood for almost an hour to allow an old (or should I say older) lady to sit. This noble act connected me directly with the sixth-form or student self that I still feel I really am, who in 1963 would give up his seat to a lady, to display that chivalry was not dead among the young and that civilisation would be safe in our hands. Now, as the Trans-Peak sped out of Buxton along the Serpentine Wye Valley, it was more a case of demonstrating that in 2007 a sense of balance and a strength of grip had not entirely deserted me.
The 6-1 from Matlock stirred different memories and reactions. What make was it? How fast could it go? How many was it "licensed to seat"? I used to be a boy bus enthusiast, fiercely patriotic towards the rattling, slow-revving, Bristol-engined, green United Counties double-deckers that ferried me between Spratton and Northampton Grammar School. I would never really accept, despite the loss of every hill climb and drag-race, that they just couldn't keep up with the nimble red automatic-gearboxed Daimlers of Northampton Corporation. On holiday car journeys, I would admiringly watch Dad's speedometer climb to 50 MPH while following a Leyland single-decker along the Bridlington road - fantastic top-speed!!I was soon mortified to find this speed eclipsed by the Fiat-built coaches in Poland's Tatra Mountain travelling down to Zakopane at what felt more like 80mph in overdrive. Another point of competition was the number of seats. A double-decker might have 54 seats, but by removing a luggage rack or replacing a double-seat by a side-facing 3-seat bench this could become 55, or by squeezing in another bench even 56. This was before the days of 80-seat Leyland Antlanteans. Nowadays, single-deckers have more seats than a double-decker did in the 1950's. I must emphasize that I have grown out of this phase, or maybe it's mutated into other nerdish obsessions: heights of church spires, temperatures of bathing places, earliest date of digging new potatoes.
Ayway, all these long-dormant boyish absorptions came back to me as I clung excitedly to a seat in the nearly-empty 6-8. Can a bus really be a GREEN form of transport? This throbbing, bullish projectile, tobogganing down a main-road Cresta-Run scarcely wider than its wing-mirrors, felt as if it were rejoicing in the exuberant, diesel-drinking frittering away of raw power. The driver must surely feel a sort of fascist megalomaniac satiation, controlling this snorting, surging, absurdly over-sized, tank of a vehicle.
The Point to get to.
I am totally opposed to free or subsidised public transport for the over-sixties. Many, perhaps a majority of us, are better off financially than we have ever been, while most of the generation now in their twenties can't work enough hours to pay off their debts, buy a house or start a family. That's why I had waited nearly five years before applying for my Gold Card. I had also told myself that I if I ever did use it, I would donate the fare I had saved to a deserving young person. So, on my very first free over-60 bus-trip, as the bus swung through 90 degrees into Cromford Marketplace, unfamiliar with any other way of stopping it than catching the driver's eye, I lurched down the aisle from pole to pole, sorely trying those shoulder muscles that I still retain. Stepping off into the night, I flung a £2 piece into the lap of a lad on the front seat.
Here, would you like my fare?
O.K. mate, cheers, thanks!
He seemed to take the gift entirely for granted - no embarrassment on either side. Perhaps lots of gold-card oldie travellers do this? Should we start a society? Might we be allowed to transfer our Gold Card completely to some more-needy under-forty relative or friend. I would withdraw my opposition then (the government will be relieved to hear), and the old who really need free transport can still have it.
Postscript: Re the relative wealth of young and old:
1. It is natural to accumulate monetary and resource wealth over a lifetime, BUT
2. can it be right for a retired public-service worker, whose mortgage, child-rearing and commuting expenses are entirely or largely in the past, to be earning, gross, as much as, or more than, a young person on a starting salary in the same profession? Beside every NQT in front of a class is an invisible, but fully paid, ghost.
3. My first job out of university paid £2050 per annum and I struggled to buy my first house (now the bookshop) for £3800, less than twice my annual salary. I was lucky; less than two years later it would have cost £7000, three and a half times my salary, which I would not have been able to borrow. Contrast even this latter situation with that of my eldest son.
4. His starting salary as a graduate engineer in 2007 was around £23,000, not apparently dissimilar from mine in real terms, BUT a starter home (hardly comparable to my five-bedroomed first purchase) would, even in a not very fashionable part of the country, cost him between five and eight times his annual salary. And of course, he has the student loan to pay off as well. As it happens, his job was in London (starter flats fifteen times annual salary?) and he probably ran at a loss sharing a flat with five others. He's trying again in China.
Much of the golden handshakes we oldies get - free swimming is the latest here in the Derbyshire Dales - is actually golden palm-greasing. Every election is preceded by an auction of bribes, into which the 18 to 30's seem not to enter many bids. But that is another diatribe.