How we dumped the kids and became a happily retired couple - Susan Morrison

They saved hard and they’ve done well. It’s a nice little pad in a converted bit of Glasgow's industrial past. They get on very well, and so have no problems sharing their first rung on the property ladder.

After all these years of a household unit of mum, dad, daughter, son and occasionally granny, the house now only has him and me rattling about

It’s got two good sized bedrooms and a stunning view of the traffic queuing for the Kingston Bridge. I thought it would be noisy, what with all those cars, but I am assured that no-one moves very fast, so that keeps the decibels down.

Naturally their Glaswegian granny is thrilled to see the lure of the West was too strong for the grandweans to resist. She believes the ancestral voices called. Could have been, but there’s also the considerably lower prices for Glasgow flats.

After all these years of a household unit of mum, dad, daughter, son and occasionally granny, the house now only has him and me rattling about.

The last time we were an unburdened couple, wars were fought cold, our Prime Minister was a woman who lasted a lot longer than a lettuce and we both had considerably darker hair.

We lived in a one-bedroomed flat, up three flights of stairs and in Leith, not far from where we live now, as a matter of fact. We didn’t realise when we moved in that we were to be Leithers for life, which suits me right down to the ground, being something of a shipspotter.

Trust me, I’m on overdrive right now, what with the muckle great semi-submersibles loading up with wind turbine monopile foundations, and the Spirit of Tasmania towering over both the dockside and our long term resident, the flatteringly named ‘Kommandor Susan’.

Back then in our little flat we were the archetypal 80s working couple. We’d leave for buses and offices in the morning, then home in the evening to work out what to have for dinner.

There were four or five hours in the day between getting home and going to bed where we nattered or watched Inspector Morse, laughing in the ad break at the Prudential pensions commercial, where a young couple talked about their plans for the future, which turned out to be wildly different.

At the punchline, the lad of the couple, Mark Williams with a distressingly strong Brummie accent, clasped his girlfriend's hand and said ‘We wanna be together’. Her face said otherwise.

Now, we are those pensioners. He’s retired. I tend to work from home most days. It’s one advantage of kids leaving. I have a little office upstairs. Downstairs I can hear him hoovering and talking to the cats.

We’ve turned into the people you see in the daytime TV ads, who seem obsessed with getting their partners to organise low cost cremations and urging each other to buy vibrating gadgets. Stop sniggering at the back there.

These doo-hickies revitalise your feet. I bought him one for Christmas. Well, if it's good enough for Clare Balding’s pal, then it's good enough for my husband.

Well, decades after Prudential made us laugh, it's just us again. But even after all this time, we still wanna be together.