I’m a broke pensioner – quite a jolly one – not like those people Age Concern show wrapped in blankets, the caption informing viewers that she daren’t put the heating on. I’m not like those pathetic old people, I tell myself (untruthfully). I do put the heating on but, like the poor old dears in shabby armchairs, I worry about how I’m going to pay my heating bill – especially now Labour has taken away my wonderful winter fuel allowance.

Being broke at 68 is humiliating. But it is also only to be expected, given how little money I’ve managed to make in my quite long life. Sometimes I get resentful and start to do a Cleopatra’s Nose on my life: what if I’d stayed married to the father of my children? He was rich (but terminally unfaithful) – couldn’t I just have waited the 30 years or so it would take him to die? Or what if my mother hadn’t lost all her family money in the Lloyd’s of London debacle in the nineties?

‘You’ll never........

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