Dylan should pen a blues number for his generation put out to grass

BOB DYLAN isn’t in the habit of displaying his bank account statements in public, but it’s probably safe to assume he doesn’t need to sing for his supper.

Sure, there’s that wardrobe of vintage leather jackets to maintain and his expenditure on nasal spray alone must be colossal, but chances are there are enough nickels and dimes in the jar to more than take care of the bills.

So why, after 45 years punching the musical clock, does Bob still work? Why does he tour and perform and write and DJ? Why doesn’t he just nestle comfortably in his achievements and let the royalties show him he’s king?

Judging by his performances in Cork and Kilkenny at the weekend, it’s a good bet he does it for the kick he gets out of it.

For the fun of being introduced on stage to Fanfare for the Common Man blasting brassily from the sound system. For the licence to linger on thoughts of love and lust while crooning Just Like A Woman.

For the satisfaction of being surrounded by good musicians. For the pleasure of having an audience sing the words and shout for more. For the thrill of thrilling.

Bob hit 65 last May. According to the maths, he should be avoiding all sensations likely to give rise to over-excitement. He should be sitting on his wrinkly backside reading a seed catalogue and wondering how long it will be before he can’t reach down far enough to clip his toenails. Bob should be retired.

Some people run towards retirement like it’s the white light at the end of a troll-filled tunnel. For others, retirement is the troll-filled tunnel. Everyone’s different.

Yet industry and officialdom in this country treat these differences in a uniformly bizarre way. In theory, there is no legally set national retirement age, but in practice it’s hard to get past 60 without someone in Human Resources hovering around dropping hints unsubtly by enquiring whether you prefer battery-operated or wind-up in a watch.

If you happen to be a garda or a member of the defence forces, you’re freed — or scrap-heaped, depending on your outlook — far earlier.

Make it to 65 — the legal farewell for many public servants — and you will definitely feel the cold draught of an open door wafting around the legs of your swivel chair. Think of sticking around longer than that and you’d better be a business tycoon, a judge or a TD.

Dr Patricia Comer is feeling the draught. The Health Service Executive have pushed the door ajar and are trying to freeze her out. Dr Comer will be 70 in a few weeks and, under the rules, she will then have to stop treating her medical card patients.

The good doctor is healthy, energetic, sharp and committed. The idea of having to abandon the 500 medical card-holders who attend her surgery is anathema to her.

She can of course — because illogicality knows no bounds — continue to treat private patients under the rules. But private patients make up only 20% of her practice, so even if she’s not being forcibly retired she’s being forcibly reduced, and that’s equally diminishing.

Her work is her life. Taking it away is like hiding Bob’s harmonica.

But if forcing productive people out of work at a time when continued prosperity depends on increased productivity seems peculiar, then check out the rules on pensions.

People who retire at 65 often question the age requirement, arguing that they don’t suddenly turn old and unproductive on the stroke of midnight when one second previously they were a worthwhile part of the labour force.

And they’re right. They don’t turn old until they’re 66 because that’s when they qualify for the old age pension. The year in between is a bit of an oddity.

For that period, they most likely qualify for the retirement pension which they can swap for the old age pension when the 12 months are up, but anyone who has read and understood the relevant information leaflet from the Department of Social and Family Affairs deserves never to be retired because they clearly have a far sharper intellect than normal.

The leaflet, SW111 as it is known, is possibly the scariest piece of dictate ever composed, with the exception of Mein Kampf, requiring the skills of a contortionist to work through the mathematics of the eligibility criteria.

Ever more scarily, it refers people who “have a complicated record” to leaflet SW18.

ONE thing does come across loud and clear, however, and that is that you can’t work for the year after you retire, or at least not carry out any work that brings in more than e37 a week. If you do, you lose your pension.

That condition is dropped when you reach 66, but by then you’ve already been through a year of cold turkey, having gone from full-time worker to full-time thumb- twiddler overnight, and it can be hard to warm up a well-chilled bird.

There are all sorts of other strange ways in which industry and officialdom handle retirement. Why, for example, do some firms and organisations push early retirement as a cost-saving measure when most State and private analysts say the general retirement age will have to be pushed back to 70 or even 75 in 20 or 30 years’ time to save money?

Retirement should be based on choice, need and ability, not rules, age and averages, but it seems that’s too much to ask. Ideally, the Equality Authority would take up the fight on behalf of those who want a say in when they finally empty their desk drawer but, bizarre though it sounds, the authority can really only challenge informal rules that discriminate on age grounds. Its hands are generally tied where discrimination is deliberately built into a piece of legislation.

The tiniest hint of a change in official attitudes is due this September when old age is abolished — in name anyway. The Old Age Pension (Contributory and Non-Contributory) and the Retirement Pension will be renamed respectively the State Pension (Contributory and Non-Contributory) and the State Pension (Transition).

That may do nothing more than make the day of a printing firm with a Government contract, but it might just help start to change the mindset around concepts of age, ageing, retirement and retirees.

It won’t do much for Dr Comer or other members of the reluctantly superannuated for whom the times they are a changin’ too slowly to be of any practical use.

They can only think ruefully of what Bob once famously said of the riches the music game promised him.

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”

Not everyone over 65 wants to get up in the morning, play golf or read seed catalogues and go to bed at night thinking of greens and flower beds.

Bob has often made it known he hates the Voice of a Generation tag that attached to him from his early days of stardom during the social upheaval of the ‘60s, but the generation that needed him then need him to speak for them more than ever now.