I started work in 1961.
I left school before the term ended on a Friday and started my first job the following Monday.
I was paid Four Pounds and one Shilling a week.
Brilliant.
It felt really good to be a wage earner and whilst I couldn't live the high life, after I`d paid my Mum for my Board and Lodging, I still had One Pound One Shilling to spend on myself, and in those days it went quite a long way.
My next job represented a step up.
It wasn`t as responsible, after all I had spent a year fitting tyres and repairing punctures and balancing wheels on cars that might then be driven at high speed on the newly opened Motorways.
In fact for the first year in my new job I wrote Giro Cheques, by hand, in an office of The Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance.
I was a Clerical Assistant and when I wasn`t writing Giro Cheques I was filing which is how I once found two files, both paying full benefits to the same gentleman, once under his first name and once under his second.
But because my first job was weekly paid and my second monthly I had a major difficulty during the first month in my new job.
I still had to pay my Board and Lodging, but because my Mum was my landlady we were able to come to an amicable arrangement, so i wasn´t thrown out or made to go hungry.
But because my pay was a month in arrears it meant that for four long weeks I had to stretch my pound and make it last four times as long as it had ever had to it.
I think that even now fifty years later I am still catching up!
Now I am retired and when I rang the pension service to ask if I qualified for a state pension they confirmed that I did and then told me what amount would be paid each month.
But I was ready for them.
The pension is also paid in arrears so the first payment when it arrives has sat in a Government account earning interest for four weeks, whilst I scrabble around buying food and paying my utility bills on credit for which I am charged.
No, as I said I was ready for them, they trained me well in the MPNI, I had read the small print, so as politely as I might I said, very clearly, I would like it paid weekly.
I could hear the clerk wriggling, she tried to persuade me that monthly was the preferred method but I stuck to my guns.
So it was agreed I could and would be paid weekly.
So fifty years after first starting work I am back to being paid weekly and wonderful it is.
Apart from the satisfying clunk of the money bag dropping into my bank account every seven days it means that if I run out of Gin I only have to survive for seven days before I can replace the empty bottle with a full one.
But all this is about to change.
Mr Duncan Smith, who I doubt has ever been paid weekly and therefore has no understanding of the value to the person living on a low income or fixed wage of the reassurance that knowing that the next payment is due sooner than later.
As for people without a bank account who take their pension books to the Post Office even more reassuring is knowing that the cash is negotiable and the conversation with your neighbour can lift your spirits on a cold Monday morning whilst queueing for the Post office to open.
But Mr Duncan Smith´s focus is not on the poor or the elderly, his battle cry is efficiency.
So for now there is a stand off between a wide range of charities seeking to protect the interests of the poorest including the elderly and children in families and Minister who is driving forward changes that will harm those very people, all in the interests of efficiency.
There`s making work pay by making it more attractive, more rewarding, lowering the threshold for the disabled, offering better training for the unskilled and improving the routes by which people can enter work and making sure that the jobs are out there.
Or there is making work pay by reducing benefits, making it harder to live on benefits and harder and more degrading to claim benefits, this is the preferred route for Mr Smith.
Of course popular opinion has swung behind him, there is a strong groundswell of opinion that hate´s `benefit scroungers`, I don´t see it that way at all.
In the end it comes down to fairness in the distribution of the wealth created by the national economy, paid employment is the traditional mechanism and Beveridge saw benefits as a temporary bridge when a worker fell on hard times.
But now the structure of opportunities has collapsed.
We do not need full employment to generate the gross national income so we need to find a better, fairer way to share that income, so that all our citizens can live full, satisfying and creative lives, sometimes contributing through paid employment, sometimes via voluntary activity and sometimes by enjoying a period of leisure, education or training.
And soon my bank account will be restored to balance for another week.
I left school before the term ended on a Friday and started my first job the following Monday.
I was paid Four Pounds and one Shilling a week.
Brilliant.
It felt really good to be a wage earner and whilst I couldn't live the high life, after I`d paid my Mum for my Board and Lodging, I still had One Pound One Shilling to spend on myself, and in those days it went quite a long way.
My next job represented a step up.
It wasn`t as responsible, after all I had spent a year fitting tyres and repairing punctures and balancing wheels on cars that might then be driven at high speed on the newly opened Motorways.
In fact for the first year in my new job I wrote Giro Cheques, by hand, in an office of The Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance.
I was a Clerical Assistant and when I wasn`t writing Giro Cheques I was filing which is how I once found two files, both paying full benefits to the same gentleman, once under his first name and once under his second.
But because my first job was weekly paid and my second monthly I had a major difficulty during the first month in my new job.
I still had to pay my Board and Lodging, but because my Mum was my landlady we were able to come to an amicable arrangement, so i wasn´t thrown out or made to go hungry.
But because my pay was a month in arrears it meant that for four long weeks I had to stretch my pound and make it last four times as long as it had ever had to it.
I think that even now fifty years later I am still catching up!
Now I am retired and when I rang the pension service to ask if I qualified for a state pension they confirmed that I did and then told me what amount would be paid each month.
But I was ready for them.
The pension is also paid in arrears so the first payment when it arrives has sat in a Government account earning interest for four weeks, whilst I scrabble around buying food and paying my utility bills on credit for which I am charged.
No, as I said I was ready for them, they trained me well in the MPNI, I had read the small print, so as politely as I might I said, very clearly, I would like it paid weekly.
I could hear the clerk wriggling, she tried to persuade me that monthly was the preferred method but I stuck to my guns.
So it was agreed I could and would be paid weekly.
So fifty years after first starting work I am back to being paid weekly and wonderful it is.
Apart from the satisfying clunk of the money bag dropping into my bank account every seven days it means that if I run out of Gin I only have to survive for seven days before I can replace the empty bottle with a full one.
But all this is about to change.
Mr Duncan Smith, who I doubt has ever been paid weekly and therefore has no understanding of the value to the person living on a low income or fixed wage of the reassurance that knowing that the next payment is due sooner than later.
As for people without a bank account who take their pension books to the Post Office even more reassuring is knowing that the cash is negotiable and the conversation with your neighbour can lift your spirits on a cold Monday morning whilst queueing for the Post office to open.
But Mr Duncan Smith´s focus is not on the poor or the elderly, his battle cry is efficiency.
So for now there is a stand off between a wide range of charities seeking to protect the interests of the poorest including the elderly and children in families and Minister who is driving forward changes that will harm those very people, all in the interests of efficiency.
There`s making work pay by making it more attractive, more rewarding, lowering the threshold for the disabled, offering better training for the unskilled and improving the routes by which people can enter work and making sure that the jobs are out there.
Or there is making work pay by reducing benefits, making it harder to live on benefits and harder and more degrading to claim benefits, this is the preferred route for Mr Smith.
Of course popular opinion has swung behind him, there is a strong groundswell of opinion that hate´s `benefit scroungers`, I don´t see it that way at all.
In the end it comes down to fairness in the distribution of the wealth created by the national economy, paid employment is the traditional mechanism and Beveridge saw benefits as a temporary bridge when a worker fell on hard times.
But now the structure of opportunities has collapsed.
We do not need full employment to generate the gross national income so we need to find a better, fairer way to share that income, so that all our citizens can live full, satisfying and creative lives, sometimes contributing through paid employment, sometimes via voluntary activity and sometimes by enjoying a period of leisure, education or training.
And soon my bank account will be restored to balance for another week.
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