Measuring up to a life of retirement - Susan Morrison

Be wary of men with tape measures

They’ve got a trigger thing that you can thumb to stop the tape at just the right point for the width of the proposed fly screen / shelf height / garden trellis. And then, joy of joys, when you are finished doing the measuring, you can pull back the plastic trigger thing and the tape whooshes back into the case. I love that. It's like Luke Skywalker switching off his lightsaber but with the added advantage of making Jex the ginger cat jump about ten feet in the air.

He’s a bit bored, I guess. My husband, that is, not the cat. God knows, the last time he jumped about ten feet in the air he was considerably younger and fitter. Not that he’s given to habitual leaping, you understand. People from Yorkshire frown on such frivolous energy expenditure.

Since he retired, he’s had a few part-time jobs, but he’s presently at a bit of a loose end. He hasn’t really seen anything he likes, and, to be honest, he does have a few restrictions. Let's be honest, he’s not binman material.

It’s the same sort of problem that would face a younger person with a bit of a disability, really, and those jobs don’t come up as often as government ministers seem to think. It’s no good cutting benefits to encourage young people into work if there just isn’t the work there to encourage them into.

He’s moving into ‘volunteer’ mode, and looking for things that he can do which don’t involve working in a charity shop. I had to be quite ruthless about that. Retail, I said, is not your environment. He gets nervy in John Lewis. Anything smaller constitutes sensory overload and he just shuts down. He’s permanently baffled by people’s need to buy more than one T-shirt, and by people, I mean me.

And so he is measuring. There are plans for the garden involving a trellis. I can hear the tape rattling. He’s moved into the downstairs loo.