16th March 2011

To celebrate the increasing dignity of age we have decided that we should add our ages together, so today with another birthday arriving, we are declaring that we are jointly 129.

So Happy Birthday to us.

The menu for the Birthday supper has been planned with offal in mind. So a 'primo piatto' of Black Pudding and Apple, with Devilled Kidneys as the 'secondo corso' and Chocolate Pudding and Strawberries to end.

Of course the reference to the increasing dignity of age is made with my tongue pretty firmly in my cheek.

I haven't yet been publicly abused for just being old but the disrespect implicit in the lack of a box on the census form to say that I am retired, is pretty clear.

The economically useful are statistically significant and the Census wants to know who you are and what you are doing or seeking to do. But if you are retired then, quite simply, they don't want to know, you don't count.

You are simply economically inactive.

But if the reports in the papers are to be believed in fact we do count, we count because whilst we receive our income from a mixture of sources, generally occupational and state pensions and investment income, we pay tax on both kinds of pensions and then we spend the income received on goods and services, food and travel.

In fact pensioners contribute substantially to consumer spending in the UK and everyone benefits from that.

Added to that of course is the volunteering.

Over the years in a variety of roles I have been able to observe first hand the impact of older volunteers, not only in the UK but in Europe and in the States.

In the late eighties I went to New York with a group of charity workers from the UK. Our task was to observe and study volunteering in NY. I put myself down to work at a lunch centre for the homeless.

When our small group arrived at the centre based in a Church just off 5th Avenue, we were handed a ladle and an apron. Stand in line and serve the meal, was the instruction, with the additional comment, try and treat each individual as though it was Jesus himself coming in for lunch.

Wow!

At the end of service we met the Rector of the Church who advised us that the lunch programme, which the congregation regarded as its ministry, cost $1M a year.

The Church was falling down, it was too dangerous to hold Sunday Services, so they took place in the hall where the lunch was served, this was the 'sacred space' where each day's daily bread was broken and shared. This was the priority and he had been hired for his skills in fundraising, a $1M a year is some challenge renewed each January first.

But in my own parish ministries if you lifted up the church building and looked underneath, you would see a whole drama of activity as the congregation undertook their volunteer roles in a wide variety of activities which benefited the wider community.

Similarly in my work with the charity Toc H.

The average age of the membership was +75 years and my task was to attract a new generation of members. It was not easy. In fact we found ourselves increasingly drawn to a service provider model, funded through commissioned programmes often with short term funding.

But the aim was to rebuild the charity and make it fit for purpose in the C21st.

Whilst this rebuilding was working itself out, not with unanimous agreement from the wider membership, I was always conscious of the quite remarkable degree of activity still being undertaken by the membership; highlighted by the group who took older people on an annual summer trip the volunteers often being older than the people being taken away for the day.

Toc H operated on a model devised by its founder, The Revd. Phillip Byard Clayton known as 'Tubby'. This model was called the Four Points of the Compass and ran: Love Widely, Build Bravely, Think Fairly, Witness Humbly.

Sadly Toc H had, and still has, an old fashioned air to it founded in the First World War at a time when Europe was literally tearing itself apart. Clayton's vision was for the comradeship, fellowship and support that had been developed in Talbot House in Poperinge in Belgium being translated into an organisation which offered community service and support to all equally without regard to status or creed.

In the Britain of the '50's Toc H was probably the single largest volunteer organisation in the country, it's patron was the Prince of Wales and its annual meeting filled the Albert Hall.

Volunteering is only one aspect of how older people contribute to the good of society, many offer social care, family support, baby sitting, an endless list of works of supererogation.

It's a pity that the census didn't try to capture some of these pictures of how the so called big society is working in practice and whether it is wide, brave and fair and whether the vision is humble enough to accept that it has been going on for years.

Another Clayton aphorism was 'Do something useful every day and don't get found out' so maybe some older folk are just glad not to be answering questions in the Census questions that they fear may be used to make political capital out of their service.