Keep on burning

But unless we address our underlying feelings and assumptions about retirement, we won't even see these thorny facts clearly. And before I do that myself, I have to contend with the contrary nature of the two retirement stories I know best: Mum and Dad Kane.

Dad's gone now, but was delightedly marked for retirement about 20 years ago in the face of his sly bafflement at new technology. His remainder on earth was a Still Game utopia of walks, whisky, football, bowls, the occasional language course and yearly foreign holidays. He couldn't have gotten out of his tedious, 40-year railway administration job quickly enough; and he couldn't have explored the possibilities of grey leisure, backed up with a combination of state and occupational pension, with more indolent enthusiasm. The Silver Fox was the soubriquet my brothers gave him, and John was well-named.

Mum's still here, but it's safe to say she had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the labour market. After 40-odd years of triumphant midwifery, she took on part-time jobs as a care-worker in a nursing home, doing heavy lifting and skilled attending until she was 70. "I know what people need, and I love to care" is her slogan: she is the definition of the vocation-driven nurse. Yet even though she pushed her body too far in the last years, and now has restricted mobility, her mental and emotional life is teeming.

There are the solicitations (and occasionally demands) of her sons, her granddaughters, her own ageing relatives; and there is her permanent listening to Radio Four (and regular dates with Dimbleby on Question Time) which make her fearsomely well-informed. "I'd be working now if I had my legs," she's just told me.

Let's consider this boomer generation - those who were part of the population bubble in the West between 1946 and 1964 - the beginning of which is now entering the pensionable world. Much of the scholarly talk is about how the values of that generation (individualist, consumerist, liberal, education-oriented) will drive a change in how we think of retirement. They will have different attitudes to work, social rights, popular culture and so on.

But anyone with their own stories of their parents might join me in saying: wait a minute, policy wonks. Born in the early 1930s, my parents come squarely from the middle of the war generation - supposedly more conservative, more averse to diversity and change, than their successors.

Yet here are two war-generation tales of retirement that anticipate much of what we regard as the possible futures of the "new old". One eager to retire from the fray and assiduously relax and consume, enabled by a good mix of public and private provision. Another equally eager to stay engaged with the world, fulfilling a life's vocation, but betrayed by a heedless attitude to physical limits.

At this point it might be worth noting the obvious. That to some degree, it's a subjective issue: you are as young as you feel (or as old as you've been numbed). As the early boomers' hero Bob Dylan sang, "he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'". To be "still game" is something that might come from a private realm, and from personal wiring, inaccessible to the reach of any policy-maker.

Yet as TS Eliot didn't quite write in The Ballad Of J Alfred Prufrock: we grow old, we grow old, we wear the bottom of our denims with turn-ups done in cool red stitching. When crinkling trendies think of retirement, our pre-dementia heads go into a psychedelic whirl: 65 is 20 years away, and 25 is 20 years ago ouch.

And looking at the field of issues, there are a few obvious places where the domed head of policy meets the I'm-not-listening smiley-face of boomeritis head-on.

One place is money. The current gathering panic in the UK is centred on the collapse of our post-Thatcherite patchwork of pension provisions. Determined to shrink the state, the new right in the 1980s made it easier for people to put more of their money into commercial schemes, whether company or personal. This went happily alongside the Blatcherite liberation of credit and debt, enabling our consumerist blow-outs. Both of these trends were propelled by the very recognisable boomer manifesto: "Let me control my own money".

o shrink to "disgracefully low levels" compared to continental Europe, in the words of pension guru Ros Altmann. It also subjected those private schemes to the vagaries of shareholder capitalism - which is no news to any of us at the moment. And it's shaking down through even the more stable parts of the system. See last Friday's call for strike action at Barclays, which is closing its "final-salary" pension scheme.

The next big area where boomers hit reality is work. While unions are right to challenge employers to maintain their bargains with their workers, I have to confess that I'm part of a large group of late boomers who look at that situation from the other side of the glass. I belong to that quarter of my kind, according to Demos's The New Old report, who are in "atypical" employment (self-employed or part-time). And as the think-tank notes, this comes along with a whole range of boomer attitudes - ranking private life and free time as ultimately more important than working hours. "It seems that the key issue is going to be greater flexibility not in when retirement begins," says the report, "but in what it is allowed to mean, and the range of different activities that can be accommodated within it."

Of course, that means nearly three-quarters of working boomers are in typical employment - though presumably "typical" also means the short-term and performance-related contracts that have dominated the jobs market in the last two decades. So we can surely say that the late boomers have grown up with a presumption that work isn't a stable institution. And more pointedly, we also don't automatically accept the deal that 40 years of dutiful grind will provide 10-15 years of relative lotus-eating and then - ffftt. Hippie counter-culture, punk defiance and post-punk creativity have given boomers a strong appreciation - how shall I put it? - that life before death is a Really Good Idea.

The policy thinkers are trying to put a whole new tray of senior labels before us, hoping we'll pin them to our Harrington jackets. Instead of "retirement", think "reordering". Allow yourself to be "elderpreneurs" of your own lives, composing new balances of employment and self-employment, leisure and education, care and self-care. Indeed, elder boomers should be offered the same kind of "flexible" life-and-work arrangements that young working families now enjoy.

Those boomers who have forged a play ethic at least as robust as their work ethic will, I hope, make a good stab at making retirement "mean" something different. The ideal response of the engaged and motivated elder of the future might well be: retire from what, exactly?

There's been a 30-year debate about the creativity and flexibility afforded by an information-driven economy. How can we create institutions of social support, or even just coherent lifestyles, which will help us to master this accelerated pace of living, bring up families and thus achieve a saner balance between work and leisure? The boomers young and old, with their confident defence of the values of authenticity and self-control, might well be in the vanguard of this debate. And it's in their years of "retirement" - better put, their re-engagement - that they might show us exactly how to square the circle: how to live decently in the information age.

The third big theme might on the surface seem like the New Old dragged back into the Same Old: health. Our curve of affluence and social complexity seems to inexorably raise our expiry dates year-on-year, but our great fear is about when we become the Old Old - that our quality of life will be awful. A horror story of fragility, senility and loneliness, parked in a dusty care home, or connected up to a battery of exorbitant, life-maintaining treatments. We'll live longer lives, but thinner ones: our two feet being slowly lowered into the grave, calibration by calibration.

Well, again, hold on. What experts call the "compression of morbidity" - the possibility that we don't just live longer, but experience more healthiness within that lifespan - isn't so easily ruled out. NHS studies have noted that while long-term chronic conditions are on the increase, we have fewer severe and acute health problems. And this particular boomer keeps a close eye on the biogenetics sector: we shouldn't discount a range of discoveries that might transform our societies as deeply as the microchip, or in its time penicillin. When they figure out how to safely disable the chromosonal triggers for human cell decay - already achieved for some rats - most longevity bets are off.

Scotland, as we know, is the home of the wildly varying health factor - but along entirely the wrong axes. Abstract discussions about shifting the definitions of retirement into our eighth decade will have less-than-zero meaning to the grizzled Calton resident who pegs it at the median age of 54. Whereas it'll be fragrantly relevant to the silver-haired granny in nearby Lenzie, mistily departing at 82.

Recent works such as Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better make it abundantly clear. Pensions and retirement must be seen within a much bigger context of the redistribution of wealth and life-chances, and the physiological consequences of a lack of wellbeing throughout the lifespan. For your living conditions to kill you 10 years before you get the chance to even think about being an "elderpreneur" is truly obscene.

Yet although politicians will exhort us towards "preventative" health - nutrition and exercise now as the foundation for sparkly seniority in the future - the mental furniture has to be properly arranged also. In our collective heads, I'd say we've got it tough in Scotland. Our generally appalling health and age states, by far our greatest shame as a developed country, must be connected to that dark whirlpool of industrialism and Calvinism - both their crushing impacts and their devastating departures. The unsettled nature of our national identity adds another poisoned tributary.

And how do those dark waters dispose we Scots towards the rethinking of retirement, indeed towards work and life itself? You'd need a Max Weber at the height of his powers to write that thesis adequately. And you'd need a repatriated Douglas Coupland to write the story of Scotland's boomers: gym membership in the one hand, sausage roll in the other.

But surely too many of us sons and daughters have our own sad tales about the dangers of retirement after work, rather than the pleasures. Battering through their hard-working, overtime-dominated 40 years - sustained by too much drink, too much stodge - with the glimmer of a pensionable rest from wage-labour pulling them through the murk and mediocrity and then expiring a few years after retirement. There's an obscure implosion in their tired bodies and minds: betrayed by their selves, just at the moment they return to full self-possession.

You see, some of us sons and daughters aren't just commenting that we live in a post-industrial Scotland. Some of us passionately aspire for that to be a truly realised state of affairs. Some kinds of work, in other words, are consistently too dangerous to retire from.

What can we learn from the furrowed, often self-destructive labours of our parents? How can it teach us wisdom about our coming senescence? Could we make a virtue of serenity and calmness in the face of our coming austerities, both financial and ecological? Are we able to remove the compensation of consumerism from our boomer souls?

Too many questions: but the more I think about it, the luckier my personal inheritance feels. I had a playful father, and an ethical mother. I got a lot of the former and still hope to get more of the latter. He was a true hedonist, even an aristocrat, with his leisure; she has recomposed her vocation, maintaining her agency amid her infirmity. She still embraces the game of growing old; and to a degree both defied the influences of their epochs and trends.

I wish their idiosyncracy on others, and myself. In the face of what often seems like implacable social and economic tendencies, we need to esteem our ability to take our realities lightly, to cast old and seeming certainties in a brand new context for ourselves.

Back to my tech, my Obama and my positive psychology. There's creative life to be lived, right here, right now.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic and one half of Hue And Cry