Charlie Tyson's mind-tickling piece Idleness has just sauntered into the stimulating online magazine of ideas The Point.

He looks at all sorts of influential ideas there have been about idleness, for and against it. He opens by barracking for idleness.

"Idleness is as ordinary as it is inevitable," he muses.

"As everyday as blinking, sighing or sexual fantasy, it is the most insouciant of human states, a default condition into which we sink once our exertions pause or cease. It is also often credited as a precursor to rebellion. Governments and other powerful actors have accordingly sought to minimise idleness among certain coded populations (think of work requirements for welfare) ... 'The idea that the poor should have leisure,' Bertrand Russell remarked in his 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness, 'has always been shocking to the rich.' "

This has a contemporary ring for us, doesn't it readers! The Morrison government, made up of rich people, is so shocked by the idle/unemployed poor (does it fear that they may turn to rebellion?) that it seeks to cattle-prod them into work with an impoverishingly low Newstart allowance and with drug tests that shame and stigmatise them.

But Tyson does examine idleness's down sides, and looks at the horror idleness can stir in the bosoms of the naturally busy, in the minds of those who think being busy is the moral way to be. I am one of those, perhaps influenced by the Bible (where "sluggards" are lectured about their idleness), and by Marx, who lectured that idleness is selfish and egotistical and that paid work is ennobling and character-building.

It follows from this that for some of us retirement-idleness can feel character-demolishing, character-rusting. One can only play so much tennis, grow so many dahlias, attend so many University of the Third Age (U3A) classes, take the dog for so many walks ("Not another one!" my dog implores me with his eyes, begging to be allowed to loll on his couch), write so many letters to The Canberra Times (although I've yet to succumb to the latter tragic vice).

One of my aforementioned U3A sessions is a poetry group and we have just been looking at the often morbid and cranky (but deservedly popular) poetry of Philip Larkin. Lots of you will know him for his famous poem This Be The Verse that opens with the insightful diagnosis "They f--k you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do."

But, doing my Larkin prep for our Larkin session, I came across another Larkin poem that seductively spoke to something going on in my own post-retirement life.

Larkin was for decades a wage slave, (because writing poetry didn't give him a living) a very senior librarian at a provincial university. He called his full-time job his "toad". And yet it was a toad he quietly, a little grudgingly, loved. It suited him.

In his poem Toads Revisited he has gone out into a public park during his lunch break. At first sight everything seems "better than work" what with "the lake, the sunshine,/The grass to lie on".

"Yet it doesn't suit me," he muses. It is that the world of park people he sees, the old and retired, the "waxen" pale, the "palsied" doddery convalescents, those "dodging the toad work by being stupid and weak", those with nothing to do but potter in their dull Lobelia-infested gardens, is so inferior to the relatively lively world of his (very average) workplace.

"Think of being them!" Larkin imagines, in horror, studying those palely loitering, idling in the park.

Yes, by day our city's public places, its public transport, its galleries, its doctors' waiting rooms, its supermarkets teem with oldies alarmingly like oneself, with the "them" that so upset Larkin. To go to the movies by day is to be just another granny in a theatre full of grannies. During the day all the pulsating, attractive young are out of sight, at work.

I realise that one of my reasons for avoiding Floriade (how Larkin would have hated it and its patrons!) is that by day it will teem with just the sorts of "them", the people (their greyness contrasting with the vulgar Technicolor of Floriade's flowers) that a horrified Larkin saw in his park.

When you are retired life bristles with so many sinister idleness-magnets, retiree-magnets. Floriade is a retiree-magnet, its patrons all old and shuffling and hyacinth-sniffing. The retiree finds his feet conspiring to try to press-gang him into going to Floriade, in my case very much against his will.

To resist them (his bullying feet) he instead plonks himself in front of the TV to watch that slightly less evil retiree-magnet, live question time from the House of Representatives. He notices, with envy, what a kick MPs are getting from being at work, from not being at Floriade, from revelling in the fulfilling toad of their (obscenely overpaid) day jobs.

The retiree suddenly notices too how depressingly youthful they are. One realises one is growing old when the MPs, even the Liberals (who always seem old, because their minds are so fossilised and wrinkled) are young enough to be one's nephews and nieces.