Julia Hamilton

Dear old Coutts, the private bank used by the King, now requires clients to have £3 million in the kitty before they deign to allow you to open an account. The £3 million minimum deposit is the biggest single jump of the bank’s wealth test in its illustrious 333-year history, designed to attract ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ apparently. Whoever they are, I am not one of them.   I had an account at Coutts opened for me by my mother when I was 15 at a small, rather cosy little branch it used to have on the corner of Sloane Street and Cadogan Square.  As I went in and out, I got to know the cashiers who greeted me by name, which made me feel I’d really arrived, although where I wasn’t quite sure.

‘Grannycore’, the latest TikTok trend beloved of Gen Z, seems to be about a nostalgic aesthetic centred on the comforting style and hobbies of a ‘traditional’ grandmother. In real life, however, things could hardly be more different for us Boomer grannies.  Yes, we cook and possibly do needlework if we feel like it. We might even knit. But if you’re expecting a storybook grandmother – a stooped, doughy figure with a wispy white bun held in place by kirby grips, clad in a twinset and pearls and wearing sensible shoes – then you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree. As a Boomer granny born in 1956, my early life was profoundly influenced by the 1960s – when sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll first appeared on the scene.

Apparently, it was Lytton Strachey who coined the term ‘filth packets’ when he was describing Virginia Woolf’s room of her own; for Virginia this meant envelopes containing bits of this and that – old nibs, bits of string, used matches, rusty paper clips, all the stuff that gathers on the desk of a writer, or did in the 1920s. According to Lytton, Virginia sat in the kind of armchair very familiar to me to write, which appeared to be suffering from ‘prolapsis uteri’. Nevertheless, in spite of her filth packets, Virginia had staff – albeit not as many as there were in the house where she grew up in Kensington – but there was always someone to cook and clean the house and stop the grot spreading into other rooms.

I’m a broke pensioner – quite a jolly one – not like those people Age Concern show wrapped in blankets, the caption informing viewers that she daren’t put the heating on. I’m not like those pathetic old people, I tell myself (untruthfully). I do put the heating on but, like the poor old dears in shabby armchairs, I worry about how I’m going to pay my heating bill – especially now Labour has taken away my wonderful winter fuel allowance. Being broke at 68 is humiliating. But it is also only to be expected, given how little money I’ve managed to make in my quite long life. Sometimes I get resentful and start to do a Cleopatra’s Nose on my life: what if I’d stayed married to the father of my children?