Millions of people aged 50 to 64 are out of work – sidelined by sickness, care duties or ageism. If Labour can’t convince them they’re a priority, Farage will step in

Penny Lancaster was 50 when she retrained as a special constable. Wrangling Saturday night drunks and shoplifters might seem an odd fit for the ex-model and wife of Sir Rod Stewart; she got the idea after making a Channel 4 show in which she temporarily swapped jobs with a police officer. But to Lancaster, who has previously disclosed that she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by a senior figure in the fashion industry, it makes perfect sense: she has said her weekly shifts with City of London police are a way of dealing with things that happened to her as a younger woman, where “the suspects never got found, justice was never had”.

Buried memories have a habit of resurfacing in middle age. But with them sometimes comes a fierce urge to be useful: to make changes in your working life while there’s still time, look out for other people’s kids now your own are nearly grown and pass on life lessons you didn’t realise at the time were valuable. On a policing podcast recently, Lancaster talked about drawing on her experience as a mother of teenagers to talk down a suicidal 19-year-old who approached her on a bridge. Not everything in policing, she pointed out, is about chasing bad guys down the street. Steadiness, patience and emotional maturity matter too.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist