I am fed up with the government claiming that half a million professionals aged over 50 are reluctant to get back to work. They make it sound like we’re all on cruises, gardening or watching telly. But have they actually tried getting a job after the age of 50?

I’m not doing nothing, I hasten to add. Part-time, I run a successful, if tiny, NGO, producing plays with refugees. Our work is studied at universities all over the US and Europe. I write books and screenplays and I once made a film that got into Cannes. But none of this has yet translated into the security provided by cold hard cash, so I spend half my time applying for jobs.

I have had dozens of interviews over the past two years. I always get down to the last three, but never any further. Though I’ve been a journalist for 35 years and have an Oxford degree and a postgraduate diploma, no one wants my ideas and my experience – or they don’t want to pay for it. I was headhunted by Deloitte, in 2020, to work as a consultant in the Middle East. Despite signing a contract, that job fell into a Covid-shaped hole and never reappeared.

Part of the problem is the perception of over-fifties’ expectations. I’ve had prospective employers say: ‘We’d have to pay you £250,000 a year, and we can’t afford it.’ When I say ‘I’d be perfectly happy with £75,000’, they sound shocked: ‘But that’s what we pay the 30-year-olds!’

Or they say: ‘How hard do you actually want to work?’ The answer is: very hard.

Or I hear: ‘We worry you’d just be bored.’ To which, in desperation, I once replied: ‘You’re not bored, are you? So why would I be?’ In any case, being bored is better than being broke.

All of this does companies a disservice. ‘The primary reason for the big economic growth in the 1980s was the workforce increased as women started to work,’ says Octavius Black CBE, founder of the Mind Gym, an organisation which supports business through the application of behavioural science. ‘The next boost in economic growth will come from older people working. It’s ridiculous to have to give up work at 52 when we’re living to 92. And work is good for your physical and mental health.’

Try telling that to employers. A friend in his early fifties has applied for 85 jobs without success. Another highly experienced friend has been job-hunting for nine months and has gone to interview after interview – always, like me, getting to the last three. ‘Each time you’re rejected, your resilience is worn down,’ he says.

And the picture is worse for women. According to Chris Brooks of Age UK, only 67 per cent of women aged 50-64 are in work, compared with 75 per cent of men. ‘And statistically the women are far more likely to be in low-paid jobs,’ says Brooks, who himself sounded suspiciously young.

If you’re an older woman, there seems to be an unspoken assumption among prospective employers that you’re being supported behind the scenes by some man. One female friend, a high-powered aid worker, has been offered several fascinating and challenging jobs which, it transpires, they expect her to do for free. I once said to a prospective employer who was clearly thinking along these lines: ‘Just think of me as though I were a man.’ I didn’t get that job either.

Brooks says there is also an assumption that women have ‘caring responsibilities’ which might disrupt their work. Not me: I’m a childless orphan, but it’s hard to let employers know that on an online form, and they are not really allowed to ask.

I often get asked to apply for jobs – which I then don’t get. I always used to get jobs in my thirties and early forties, and I don’t think I’ve become less competent. I’ve come to suspect that employers just want to tick a diversity box to say they’ve considered a middle-aged woman.

The truth is that most organisations are feudal. In your fifties, you are too old to be a protégée. If you’re high-powered, you’re a possible threat and/or too expensive. And if you’re not a threat, then perhaps you’re past it.

Being past it doesn’t mean worthless: Octavius Black says that many organisations recognise that even the off-peak still have valuable experience to offer. Unfortunately, employers can’t hire us on the bit less money we’d be delighted to accept, explains Black, because of age discrimination legislation. We’ve been stymied by the measures brought in to help us.

Malcolm Brabant, a foreign correspondent whose BBC career hit the buffers a decade ago, thinks America is ahead of the UK on this. Brabant was given a second chance by the US channel PBS in 2015 on his 60th birthday. He has gone on to win two Peabody Awards (US broadcasting’s Pulitzer Prize). ‘But that wouldn’t have happened in the UK,’ he said.

For me, the upside of failing to get these jobs is that I get to produce plays and launch a podcast. I can write my novel about Lucrezia Borgia, compile a Ukrainian cookery book and make films. But it’s very boring indeed always being broke.