So Prince Charles has made it to 50, apparently with his sanity intact, against everyone's expectations, and his life now sailing through calmer waters (give or take the odd patch of turbulence, such as television programmes alleging that he wants to dethrone his mum).

He's a reflective sort of bloke at the best of times, but I would think that the past week has found him more thoughtful than ever.

The half century is supposed to be the time when we take stock of our lives. It used to be 40, but all that has changed as people stay younger longer. Besides, 40 never was the right age at which to assess where you've been and where you're going.

At 40 you're still there in the thick of it, probably battling on as a parent with adolescent children living at home, striving at work to maximise your income, nursing ambitions that have stuck with you since you first launched yourself into adulthood and fretting because you have yet to achieve them.

At 50, though, even if you haven't yet got it sorted you will have made a start. Life begins to come into some sort of perspective when you've reached that invisible marker. It doesn't suddenly all fall into place. It's a slow process. But 50 marks the beginning, the dawning of a new realisation.

If you're lucky, your children will be independent of you, at least financially. Your mortgage might be paid off. The two big pressures - to provide a home and to nurture the next generation - will have either eased considerably or gone away completely.

New pressures will have replaced them, of course, mostly connected with the need to provide for your own old age. But somehow those pressures don't seem as heavy. The burden of responsibility to yourself (or yourselves) is never as great as the burden of responsibility to your offspring. Nature made us that way to ensure the survival of the species.

Besides, you might well be philosophical and even sceptical about the need to worry too much about your old age. After all, you might never get there.

Because the down side of passing the 50 mark is that you increasingly come up against reminders of your own mortality. Your eye starts to be drawn to the ages of people in the "Deaths" notices, particularly the ones which are close to yours.

If you've any sense, you'll soon stop reading those notices. But they'll have had their effect. You'll have adopted a more "live now and let the future take care of itself" attitude.

And part of that new approach will show itself in your attitude to your work. You'll have stopped running so much and started to learn to be content to walk at a steady, determined pace. You'll have learned to assess your own worth rather than anxiously looking to others to try to discover how good or bad you are at what you do.

As for your ambition...Well, by now you might have had a chance to reassess the chances of it ever becoming a reality. You'll either start reshaping your life to minimise the distraction and allow you to go for it at last, or you'll have realised that it simply isn't ever going to come about and have kicked it into touch, probably with a great sense of relief.

Prince Charles at 50 can't do that, of course. He can't sideline his ambition to become monarch because the job is almost certain to come his way - eventually.

But he can console himself with one little thought. From now on he's fully qualified to read Who's Counting? unashamedly in his own right, without having to sneak a peep at it when he thinks no-one is looking!

There seems to be a basic difference between the German and the British approaches to the fact that there are more workers in their countries than there are jobs.

The German proposal, according to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is to reduce the retirement age to 60 to free jobs for younger people. On the other hand, there's increasing talk in Britain about raising the retirement age to 70 to cut the pensions bill while at the same time paying 16-year-olds to stay on at school.

So which is the right way? Do you pay older people a pension to free places in the jobs market, or do you keep them in those jobs and pay young people to stay out of the jobs market by continuing their education?

When politicians come up with such diametrically- opposed proposals, it's a fair bet that nobody really has the faintest idea what should happen to sort out the employment and pension problems of the new millennium.

Personally, I'm with Herr Schroeder on this one. I certainly don't approve of people being forced out of their jobs when they're perfectly capable of continuing in them, simply because they've reached a certain age.

But I do think that if the right sort of pension income could be arranged, many 60-year-olds would be only too happy to leave the formal workplace to do other things, making room in the system for youngsters.

I Don't Believe It!

There are angry mutterings coming from several Who's Counting? readers at present. They are people who have shares and are going to be worse off because of a tax change which will take place next April.

These aren't fat cats. They're just ordinary people who have a few shares, usually a windfall when building societies have converted to banks, which bring them in a few pounds in dividends.

Personally, neither I nor Mrs Mildew are too hot on financial matters. So I have to rely on people like Geoff Holmes, of Idle, to explain the problem.

Geoff says that in April the Advance Corporation tax on dividends paid by companies is being abolished. A side-effect of that is that some pensioners will lose money. "Many pensioners who have had their savings in building societies received a small number of shares when some societies converted into banks," he says. "The dividends they receive are at present taxed, but non-taxpayers have been able to reclaim the money at the end of the year. They won't be able to do that when the concession has been removed.

"The least wealthy will be the only ones who will suffer," he says. "The extra pounds that the non-taxpayers receive back are an important supplement to their income. In some cases it can be the difference between claiming Income Support or being independent of the State."

Geoff says that Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson told MPs in May, and again in June, that he was aware of the growing anxieties among poorer, non-taxpaying pensioners and would make his position clear as quickly as possible. We're now heading towards the end of November, the tax change is less than five months away, and no further announcement has been forthcoming.

Edward Ackroyd, of Keighley, is another who thinks it's about time Mr Robinson got things sorted.

"It isn't a lot of money that we're talking about," he says. "But it does put a bit of jam on the bread for people who have been thrifty."

So maybe it's time for a concerted Mildew-style grumble by Who's Counting? readers. If you're likely to be affected by this change (or even if you're not, because we Seniors must stick together), write to the Paymaster General and to your MP insisting that the rules be changed so that some pensioners don't find themselves even worse off than they are at present.

If you have a gripe about anything, drop a line to me, Hector Mildew, c/o Newsroom, T&A, Hall Ings, Bradford BD1 1JR, email me or leave any messages for me with Mike Priestley on (44) 0 1274 729511.

Yours Expectantly,

Hector Mildew

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Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.