I look into the mirror. I even need glasses to see my wrinkles these days. I think about the labels I’ve had in my life.

Baby Boomer is one. I arrived a year too soon for the NHS so it cost my dad’s trade union three guineas for my birth. I did benefit from everything else egalitarian Britain had to offer in the fifties and sixties. Until I was three we lived with my grandparents in a Home for Heroes on a respectable council estate. Solid houses built between the wars for soldiers returning from the trenches, boosting a depressed economy. It’s Social Housing now, Councils don’t run many.

I passed the Eleven Plus and became a Grammar School Girl, a free place   granted by the 1944 Education Act and my smart navy blue uniform paid for by the Parish.

“You shouldn’t educate a girl” warned my aunts but mum and dad were proud and excited about the opportunity. It was only after I left that my school was relabelled elitist and divisive. Politicians talked about social mobility .

“ You must hold your knife like this “ was my first lesson. I was prepared for re-birth   into the middle class.

My school did its job well and the Welfare State continued to provide for me, this time free university education at the London School of Economics. Our family income guaranteed a full maintenance grant.

” How does it feel to be one in five hundred?” asked my sociology lecturer-working class girls were a rare species in higher education. With seven men to every woman at LSE my social life thrived too. I enjoyed being a Sixties Swinger – riding along Oxford Street up on the back of a Triumph Spitfire, “It’s Good News Week” blaring from the radio.

I became a Revolting Student . Globalisation didn’t mean free trade- it meant we believed we could change the world. I didn’t protest against the Vietnam war at the American Embassy – I was deployed back at LSE to tend the injured. I marched when the government refused entry to Kenyan Asians. I worried when anyone anywhere was treated unfairly and hated the BNP when they invaded a meeting and called my friends niggers.

Did I feel grateful for the secure welfare state bubble? Of course not. Did it make me work less, thinking I could lie in bed and still get the money? Of course not. Welfare was a right that came with obligations. The Welfare State was something to be proud of, not a drain on the public purse.

I worked every vacation . I enjoyed delivering the Christmas post, and found useful occupation on hospital wards and in cafés . Debt was anathema in our working class world .

“You’re putting a millstone round your necks “ was my grandmother’s view of a mortgage. Banks weren’t yet wooing students with promises of generous overdrafts.

I emerged from my student chrysalis into a world where a university degree was a scarce commodity and graduates knew they would get a job . I was baffled by my flatmate’s   excitement at the prospect of advertising for Unilever; I just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for the ice cream and paper knickers he was aiming to sell. I only applied for one job and I got it .I became a mental health social worker a Do Gooder. It was our family creed.

I worked to protect the runaway teenagers who arrived on my doorstep, I removed abused children from their parents , I tried to convince people who tried to kill themselves that life was worth living. We gave help to families who couldn’t cope , supported them  to   get their lives together. We didn’t have to sort shirkers from workers or even skivers from strivers. Politicians didn’t use those sort of labels then, at least in public.

Prejudice made me a Feminist. I became a Career Woman. My response to the press interview when I became Director was

“ I feel I’d have got there earlier as a man”.

Money and power came as part of the package although they held no attraction for their own sake. Saving for a pension was encouraged so I did. Employers and employees believed that pension funds were a good thing , not something unaffordable to be ditched when business wasn’t booming. I worked sixty or seventy hours a week convinced most of the time that I was still Doing Good.

In London of the eighties, Thatcher battled with the unions, social workers went out on strike but people still needed child care, day care, protection, home helps. I carried on trying to provide them.

Eventually I fell foul of local politics- easy for a Director of Social Services- I was in the way of a politician’s ambition. Even then I didn’t give up Public Service . The NHS gained my experience for a few years.

Now I serve on the Parish Council deciding whether swings need replacing. I am Chair of Governors making sure children get a good education. I talk to Rotary groups and Girl Guides, persuading them to raise money for water supplies in Africa. I am carer to my ninety year old mother so she can stay in her own home- the list goes on. According to Mr Cameron I’m a Pillar of the Big Society.

I live on a generous public sector pension. I receive a Winter Fuel Allowance. I get a flu injection every winter. Can the country afford me? According to some politicians I’m a Gold Plated Vampire depriving future generations. Now the election looms and I am part of the Grey Vote, George seems to think I am a responsible person, capable of making complex financial decisions or perhaps he just wants me to blow it all to boost consumer spending.

I wonder whether you can have an identity crisis at sixty six.