A message from the scrapheap

Lesley Riddoch in The Herald has discovered that some of us 50-somethings are not making much of an economic contribution (here):

"So 61-year-old entrepreneur Robert Smith is to tackle the scourge of Neets kids - Not in Education, Employment or Training. Good luck to him. But I'm wondering when someone will appoint a 17-year-old to tackle the even bigger problem of Fots: Fifty-year-olds On The Scrapheap. I'm not suggesting the plight of disengaged teenagers is unimportant. Simply overshadowed numerically by the massive disengagement developing at the other end of the labour market.
Unemployed fiftysomethings don't stand around on street corners, or mess openly with booze or illicit drugs, so the vast army of depressed and disillusioned Neet Fots is almost invisible."

Hey, we're not all depressed and disillusioned. And not messing openly with booze or drugs is more a question of a lack of opportunity than of inclination. But there's more:

"Fiftysomethings are seen as slow, bitter, reluctant to adapt to modern technology and expensive. Some of that may be true."

A trifle dismissive, don't you think? OK, so I'm not as quick off the mark as I used to be and I have difficulty with modern technology (what is this thing called texting?). But I'm not (excessively) bitter. And, rather than being known as expensive, I have been accused of being cheap (I know, it's hard to believe...).

But even if young Ms Riddoch's vapourings are completely true, it is unkind of her to say so. Not least because when I last met her in 1998 she bummed one of my fags.