Nicky Taylor ties on a green apron four days a week and works the checkout at her local Waitrose in Brighton. Some shifts she packs Deliveroo orders. Others she restocks shelves. The first time she found herself stacking yogurts in the chilled aisle, she had just wrapped up 35 years as a top television executive.
“I earn in a week what I used to earn in a day and it’s exhausting,” Taylor wrote in the Daily Mail. She has just turned 60, and she says this is no gentle retirement. She does very little gardening and has not taken a single cruise.
When the phone stopped ringing
Taylor was a freelance executive producer who made food, travel and lifestyle programmes for the BBC, ITV and Channel 5. Her credits include work with Delia Smith, Loyd Grossman, Alan Titchmarsh, Timothy West and Prunella Scales, and the Hairy Bikers. When one series wrapped, another was waiting.
Then the commissions thinned out. The gaps between jobs grew. Taylor blames part of it on a changing industry, since streaming and social media have hit the middle ground of factual television hard, though she also wondered whether her age played a part. A seven-year relationship ended around the same time. “It wasn’t just the loss of work,” she wrote. “It was the loss of certainty.”
She says she was not alone. Talented editors were struggling to find work, and producers and directors were driving for Uber or making deliveries.
The little luxuries went first: the health club, then her Soho House membership. What really stopped her was cancelling an artisan olive oil subscription.
Saying yes to everything
Taylor updated her CV, called recruiters and rang old colleagues. Nothing came of it. “Nobody was coming to rescue me,” she wrote.
So she took whatever was offered. Care work, dog boarding, after-school science clubs, covering classes at Plumpton college in East Sussex and, in time, Waitrose. She began studying to teach English as a foreign language. She is a single mother of three grown children, now 25, 27 and 28, with a mortgage on a four-bedroom house in Brighton and years to go before she can draw her full pension.
Three months in, the job still overwhelms her at times. Her colleagues are around 40 years younger and pick up the tills and systems faster than she does. She says she enjoys the effort. Her days are as tiring as the old high-powered ones but more varied: one recent morning ran from two labradors fighting over a sausage roll to a class of equine management students, then care visits to elderly clients, then an after-school science club making fake snot.
She has also found that people talk to her differently now. A mother she knew from school-gate days 15 years ago stopped at her till and described how worried she had become about money.
Taylor draws on the “third quarter” idea from psychologist Lucy Standing, co-founder of Brave Starts, and author Victoria Tomlinson, who describe the decades after older generations once wound down as a time for reinvention. Printing the yellow reduction stickers at work, she says, reminds her how society treats older people.
“I’m not past my sell-by date,” she wrote.
