At 70, I cant wait to have my happiest years

By Oliver Pritchett Published: 3:45PM GMT twenty-three February 2010

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Victor Meldrew knows that being curmudgeonly is a joy

Only 4 some-more years. I can frequency wait. New investigate shows that we are happiest when we are 74. According to a new investigate in the biography Social Indicators Research, the spirit starts going down in the teenage years and carries on shifting until we strike 40, afterwards starts to climb up, reaching a rise in the mid-seventies, when, between alternative things, we have fewer responsibilities and monetary worries.

To reach this insight, some-more than 21,000 British men and women were surveyed, and continually asked how happy they were. I consternation if I was one of them? Can"t recollect now; I"m apropos forgetful. I competence have misheard or misunderstood; the old conference is not as good as it was. Sometimes I"m asked a question, and I take a possibility and say: "Yes." Maybe that"s what happened when a researcher inquired after my clarity of well-being. Goodness knows how majority surveys we pensioners contingency have mucked up over the years.

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Still, I contingency determine that the seventies are seeking flattering good so far. It"s good to be past the capricious rebelliousness of the forties, the insecurities and prudery of the fifties, the frustrations and sensitivity of the formidable early sixties. Obviously, one of the explanations for this gratification is that we septuagenarians no longer have majority parental responsibilities permitting us to have the refreshing and liberating find that the immature kids (and even infrequently the grandchildren) are some-more grown-up than we are. And it"s a smashing time for marriage. My mother and I outlay the time assisting each alternative recollect the names of close friends, films, books, streets and even towns and cities. It"s competitive, it"s fun and it"s so gratifying when you eventually come up with the answer at 3.15am.

Then there"s my renewed Freedom Pass, that arrived yesterday. It gives me free transport in London and right away additionally on buses via the country. It"s a unequivocally appreciative thing to have, and I suffer it some-more each year. There"s a sketch of a uncanny old man on it: the thinning grey hair is wild and the eyebrows are out of control; he has taken off his eyeglasses and he stares out in a faraway sort of way. My God, if that is me, I"m not astounded that kind people indicate me their chair on the Tube and that immature women infrequently grin at me in the street, enlivening me to keep going.

What was generally engaging about this consult was to sense that this sold settlement of complacency is quite a British phenomenon. The German Institute for Economic Research found that in their homeland, levels of compensation remained flattering fast via their life. Poor old Germans, with zero to see brazen to.

On the alternative hand, as a septuagenarian, one has a looseness to have the peculiar stereotypical observation. So I might be authorised to indicate that Germans, on the whole, go in not so majority for complacency but some-more for jollity. This is something the British try to equivocate quite in old age. Our special skills distortion in being grumpy, fractious and crotchety. And the investigate that certainly contingency be undertaken subsequent is to find the age at that British men and women are at their majority grumpy. I daresay it will show us reaching the rise at 74 that helps to insist because we are additionally at the happiest then, since that grumpiness can be one of the good pleasures of life.

All that"s left, then, is to work out how I"m going to applaud this turning point occasion. Maybe I"ll take a free medication and encounter a couple of friends for happy hour at the internal chemist. I"m a bit of a unchanging there. And as we celebrate, we can gangling a thought for all the bad miserable so-and-sos who have to control this kind of survey.