It's no secret that my official retirement was some five years ago.

But I'm glad to have been given the chance to continue in partial harness while I still feel fit and able to — just as Celia is with her enthusiastic musicial excercise sessions.

I was quite envious of Celia's lithe abilities when I saw her class-leading action on BBC Television the other evening!

I was so pleased with Celia's success in her appeal against her "premature" retirement, welcoming the council's flexibility in extending her contract beyond the extra two months which had already been granted to her.

It would be sad if arbitrary job-chops awaited all those whose employment time was up, whether or not such people are still willing to lead a useful working life.

Thankfully, some firms do employ such senior staff, who are valued for their input of reliability and life-experience.

I see many of them in DIY and food stores, and think what a grand example these people show, compared with that section of the population who prefer benefits and long lie-ins to holding down a job and not sponging off workers who have more pride in the way they live.

It's these layabouts who help to burden the rest of us with high council tax, and how many of them manage to live the easy life by claiming falsely to be too sick to work?

The government's new welfare adviser, investment banker David Freud, says that up to two-thirds of people claiming incapacity benefit are not entitled to the state hand-out.

More than 2.6 million people claim incapacity benefit at a cost of more than £12billion a year to the taxpayer. There were 700,000 claimants at one stage in the 1980s, and from then on the whole system has gone downhill.

Despite all the extra tens of billions of pounds ploughed into the NHS over the past 20 years, the population appears, on the face of it, to have got drastically sicker.

I say, pull the other one!

Calls have been made this past week for a big shake-up of the GP sick note set-up.

I couldn't agree more with the idea of giving GPs more scope in indicating whether a patient is probably fit for some areas of work.

The present sick-note process can too often be a one-way street that starts in the GP's surgery and ends as a lifetime on benefits.

Heaven forbid, I'm not advocating a work-until-you-drop policy — everyone deserves an enjoyable retirement in the end.

But until then, give a chance to those, like Celia, who do find working beneficial, and make sure that work-shy leisure-lovers are made to pull their weight if they are well enough to do so.