Best of both worlds

On the pitch as a footballer, Georgie Best was an asset if not a god. As a human being, he was an abject liability.

As a boy, watching the 'fifth Beatle' as he was known, was one of the most gifted artists of his generation, akin to watching Bruce Lee demonstrating the art of fighting without fighting whilst wringing out 'Voodoo Chile' on a '68 Strat. Awe-inspiring and timeless. However, as the last hours ebb away for the golden-booted Stylo-Matchmaker-ed maestro, the subsequent long decades of meandering from one bottle of booze to the next, in some mordant slouch into a moribund state of intoxication and troubles, was much the same as Keith Moon's descent into the abyss: inevitable but always with an air of 'will-he-won't-he' avoid the edge and pull back to rapturous applause.

End of eras are always hard for those left behind, those who remember those same halcyon days are their own. It reminds them with a sudden, unwelcome jolt of their own mortality. Which is just how it is to be with the future for the welfare of pensioners in the UK. Blessed as it has been since the end of the Second World War, final salary schemes gone the way of the dodo, with a Pensions Report about to paid about as much lip-service as the Germans conceded over Sudetenland, the short-termism of a four or five year Parliament is by no means the appropriate arbiter over such decade-long insurance instruments. Not at all. With pensions suffering so heinously over recent years, whether post-Maxwell, stock market falls, economic bubbles and burdensome regulation, pension status whether private of public is akin to the consumption over years of alcohol in the sense that it's the long-term, drip-drip effects that make the effect.

Sure, paying in to a pension is also a drip-drip process, with the expectation of a decent annuity and a gold watch at the time of maturity. However, as recent pension collapses have proved, not even copper-bottomed guaranteed pension funds have been immune to the stuff. Even Georgie knew that what he was doing would come home to roost one day. Somewhere, in the back of that mind, he knew. But it was a live now, pay later blinkered stallion who raced headlong into the abyss. At least Bestie showed us his best in his heyday, whilst he had youth and we needed the role model of the underdog making good.

Sadly, at the other end of the time continuum, the plodders and the sensible have the a similar uncertainty of slipping into oblivion unless the regulators get smart soon and redress the balance again for the sake of the public good. If they can't, or rather, won't due to political expediency and choose instead to line up with the ostriches, then the consensus will shift probably irreversibly into other modes of certainty of financial vehicle, whether property, land, gold, antiques, or even wine. Just don't tell George. Though it would be rather too late now anyway. Que sera, sera.

Paul Quigley
Editor - A&F365
Paul.Quigley@ithacamedia.co.uk

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