Cold

There are times when it seems an advantage to be chronologically 75. I do remember the winter of 1947 that broadcasters and newspaper writers are currently describing with something like awe. But, in case you are reading this other than in the Northern hemisphere, I should explain we are experiencing a period, weatherwise, of extremely cold, snowy and, worse, icy weather in this usually benign part of the world. In 1947 it snowed and froze for the best part of two months, January and February. I remember getting dressed under the bed-clothes. We were comparatively affluent but that did'nt run to central heating. Indeed, it was not until I refused to bring my tiny baby in to a house without heating and no washing machine that things changed. Believe me, those refinements were for wimps and, now, I am coming round to something like sympathy with that view. I am torn. The 75 year-old is wishing people would get on with it, put another jumper on, go to bed early, buy some galoshes, or all of the above, rather than wingeing and whining and complaining about the lack of grit, but at least, my age gives me experience of this kind of hardship - amongst others - so I am better prepared to keep smiling and carry on. The inside youngster is throwing snowballs and skiing down the road.

Getting dressed under the bedclothes was fun: vest, liberty bodice, knickers. Socks were harder because you had to make a bigger tent to reach your feet and that risked letting the cold in. I bet none of you has ever made steam breathing out as you lay in bed. If you forgot an item of clothing in the stash beside the bed you would have to get out and fetch it on feet that then wouldn't warm up the whole of the rest of the day. You ask about a liberty bodice. Well, it was a sort of waistcoat, cotton, worn over the vest, buttoned down the front and under the next layers, blouse and school jumper. If you took vest and liberty bodice off together you got in to trouble because that would prevent them from airing: a disaster not to be contemplated in a well-brought up household. There is a wall heater in my present bathroom and I have been taking my clothes in there these last days and dressing in front of it. Less 'cosy' than in bed but easier on non-bendy joints.
Yesterday, I ventured down to the local shops; crept, would be rather more accurate. It was snowing on top of the extant deposit so crawl might be even nearer. Anyway, sensibly I had put my purse in my pocket so no handbag to control, mobile phone in the other, in case of emergency and off to go. Passing a man and woman outside a cafe, I heard them say:" that old lady shouldn't have come out. She'll fall and we'll have it to deal with. Where's her zimmer frame? That would be more sensible." I turned back, smiled sweetly, and told them it wasn't easy, but I would be sure they had nothing to deal with and, in spite of frailties, I wasn't deaf. They were very sorry, had meant no offence and so on and so on. I did'nt tell them that one of my first thoughts on registering the conditions was about elderly friends and how they were managing. It took a moment to remember I was one of them. The 40 year old was out there meals-on-wheelsing. (For loyal readers outside the UK, meals- on -wheels is a social service delivering meals by car to the house-bound elderly. Don't ask: delicious, no doubt). I do still have a little shock every time a stranger sees only the external me, addresses the external me. I AM one of the elderly, I qualify for meals, I don't deliver them. I constitute a danger to myself on the ice, I don't skate on it. Ah well: hurrah for central heating, washing machines and dishwashers and hurrah for a touch of the wimp.

PS An anonymous writer challenged my treatment of eccentricity. She/he said it was a choice. This is not how I see it. One just IS off-centre. It seems like the only logic if you happen to be it. You dont choose to do things differently if that is your constitution. You just do them that way. Of course, a choice can be made to do things differently, but that is not eccentricity: eccentricity is in-built and, crucially, to the eccentric, it feels centric.

Eccentricity

Happy New Year! I am a very pleased person because the Guru has collated all the blogposts so far, from 2008 and 2009, and presented them to me, spell-checked, in a beautiful bound cover. That makes it appropriate for me to start this year with the first of the new series. Mind you, I could have done without the spell-check. I always saw myself as a good speller and even, long ago, earned my living as a proof reader and sub-editor, so I was not best pleased that he did find spells to check. I do, as it happens, even read over the posts, myself and still, it seems, the little blighters escape. Never mind; nothing is fool-proof even if you are both the fool and the proof reader. To the point: since eccentricity is a flavour that permeates all my blogging, it does seem superfluous to give it a post all of its own. However, for want of a more direct nomenclature, eccentricity feels the kindest compromise as things stand. So, I had better tell you how things stand. First, I simply can't believe a month has gone by since I last wrote. I have looked at the sitemeter and, to my horror, see that that have been zero vistors this week. What can I say? Please, do all come back. I can't think how to alert those of you whom I don't automatically alert but I shall just have to hope that in Australia and Canada and wherever else I am privileged to have followers the Wizard of Cyberspace will relent and send waves you can't fail to pick up. Anyway, eccentricity: lately, the scale of my ' I- can't- believe -I -did- that' activities has been increasing to the stage where something official had to be done. You know the sort of thing, keys in the fridge, cheese on the doorstep; telephone a friend and find quite another one in your ear. No, seriously, I put in a rate-buster code for Austria so as to pay only 2 pence a minute, dialled the number and heard the voice of a beloved friend in Ireland, with a totally different rate-buster code, whom I could have reached for 1 pence a minute. In a court of law I would have sworn that I dialled not only the Austrian pre-code but also the Austrian number. The scale of my forgetfulness is just about border-line funny. One more occasion and I'll be over the border before you can say " what was I saying."

What to do? Well, I arranged to have a dementia test with my lovely GP. He seemd sanguine about this, like he has dotty old women taking this test every time he has a surgery. It started rather inauspiciously: I got the time of the appointment wrong. No, don't laugh, although the Doctor had difficulty not to. This mistake left me rather flustered even though he was kind enough to see me anyway. Dear Reader, I scored 29 out of 30. The fluster was my excuse for not holding on to one of three words I was asked to remember as the first question. Other than that, I got everything right, even counting backwards in sevens. Neurotically - I am, you will have judged - I still doubted the veracity of the outcome. I was asked the date. It was the birthday of a close friend so very much in mind. But, temperamental doubts allowing, I did well enough and have been greatly helped since then, when the 'eccentricities' have multiplied, eg leaving my keys in the front door for 12 hours or so until the Guru came back in the middle of the night, (he's young) and found them. He said he couldnt see any blood on the stairs and a lovely silver jug I have was still there so he stopped worrying, wrote me a HUGE stern note to find when I got up in the morning and took himself to bed. But, now, when I do some thing dottissimo, I can comfort myself with knowing I am eccentric, but not demented....yet.

Keeping up

It was all the hospital's fault that I havent been blogging. That's what I'd like to think and what I'd like you to think, but we all know this isn't true because, short of tying my hands or keeping me sedated, it really is not possible for a hospital, however technically advanced, to stop you doing much you really want to do - in the intellectual sense, that is: I can't see them allowing, for instance, kick-boxing or abseiling. Anyway, I have had a short stay in hospital without my laptop which, on a scale of one to ten unpleasant, where ten is the least pleasant, comes out at about four hundred and thirty four. (The stay, not the laptop) You don't want to know the details, or, if you do, they wouldn't add much to your pleasure in the blog, only spoil your supper, but, believe me, unpleasant is it. The problem was that the stay was followed by days at home when I suffered a sort of reaction. I had a high temperature and much aching with no sore throat or any other nicely identifiable flu-like symptoms. When referred to the G.P., bless his heart, the symptoms were diagnosed as the reaction of a very cross body. Quite. (Now, as you will have noticed, I don't really approve of non-sentences, but "quite" is what does it for me in these circumstances and I promise to be more forgiving of other peoples' slipshod sentences in future). Fortunately, nothing untoward emerged from the unpleasantness, so there the matter ends, Deo Gratis

When I finally got myself together to get up, stay up and put some proper clothes on, I was appalled at the accumulation of jobs undone. There was your predictable pile of envelopes to be binned or paid; nothing warm and friendly other than a flyer indicating that some friends would be giving a recital in a nearby church in a few days' time. How did I keep up with all this when I was also working, I asked myself? There's no doubt that there is a mathematical equation somewhere that expressess the distribution of time in ratio to brown envelopes. Perhaps, the busier you are, the more of them you can deal with: work expands etc., but I do believe it is more complex than that. There simply is more time, the egg-timer is bigger, the clock has more minutes when you have lots to do. I made a resolution to keep absolutely up to date with my desk and my life from now on. After all, at my age, you never know when 'WHEN I come out of hospital', may turn in to 'IF I come out of hospital'. Let's express it like this: a cupboard a day keeps chaos at bay. ( I swear, that phrase came totally unbidden from my inner voice so it must be true). Someone I am close to has spent a month in isolated retreat while all this was going on for me. Not so very different, spiritual or physical tidy -up followed by a difficult and busy period of re-entry. He hasn't come back to too many brown envelopes but SOMEONE HAS TIDIED HIS OFFICE and now he can't find a thing. So what's new. See you before long.

Bureaucracy

It is absolutely not good form to complain, I know, but, at my stage in life it is actually a rather scarce source of harmless fun. Indeed, I am, actually, a bit shocked to find just how much I enjoy that which I used to condemn in my Mother and her gossipy friends Anyway, the latest complaint: I was renewing something or the other. I don't even remember what, and I was asked to provide proof of residence and some photo identity. You have to be pretty well air-brushed to look anything like human on a photograph at 75+, never mind a passport-type job, but I took the medicine and posed quietly. It was the eve of Halloween which will probably explain why the machine condescended even to do its job without exploding. When it came to proof of residence, back home, I wandered down the stairs with a recent gas bill to use my fax/copier. It was out of ink so I did another wander down to the local Chemist shop to use theirs. So far, so sensible. However, I was not at all familiar with their model and, looking round for help, saw that both the Pharmacist and his assistant were deep in consultation with other callers. Alone, I pushed this and pressed that and lifted the other, all to no avail. Then, thanks to the Angel of Mechanics, who, unlike the Wizard of Cyberspace, does have some compassion towards those of us who feel pain when standing too long, a young boy came in, understood my predicament, lifted a huge lid that had looked integral to me, not at all liftable, and off to go, as we say in Wales. By the time the whole enterprise was over, I could have made a cake and even seen it come out of the oven. I was exhausted and cross. It came to me that I get so many damned bills that I needn't have bothered to make a copy; they could have had an original. I wouldn't have missed it.

If only it had ended there. A year ago, I put some money, in a fixed Bond, in to a Bank that shall remain nameless. I can't, now, remember if I have told you the following. I hope not. So boring of the elderly to repeat themselves. Anyway, I'll tell you again, in case not. This particular Bank was offering a very good rate until 3pm one Friday. A'financial' person filled in the forms on my behalf and sent them off. On that very Friday they came back to me with mistakes to be rectified. No way could such a form be posted back in time to catch the special rate. Well, Dear Reader, I filled it in , rang a mini-cab, (local car service, to those of you who kindly follow me from distant places) and dashed down to the office in the City listed on top of the form. Only, it was not an office; it was Head Office, with a locked door and no access without a pass key. I knocked, several times, I willed the Receptionist I could see through the glass doors to look at me. Nothing, nil, I did not exist, neither for him nor for the one or two privileged souls who had the pass-key to Nirvana and used it leaving me standing outside. Finally, I banged on the door with my walking stick. Now, an old lady banging on your door with her battered old stick is not a good look in the City of London. Within seconds I was let in and before you could say " and about time, too" a representative had come downstairs, with a second -" for Data Protection purposes" - and taken my cheque and my details and agreed I could have the special offer even though the branch I should have gone to was in Manchester. The preamble, long as it is, was necessary to give you the background to another bureaucratic Hell. I tried ringing them to find out how the account stood, now, at the end of a year. I was asked for my password. I dont have a password. I dont remember being given a password practically standing in the street in the City. I dont remember one coming in the post. I tried guessing. I got one letter right, one wrong. Stalemate: I could not be given details of my account without the password. I could, however, go to a branch of the Bank with photo ID and proof of residence and they could help me, there. That's where you came in. See you soon.

Defiance

The inside of my head resembles spaghetti junction. I have been following this, that and the other path trying to work out the difference between defiance and rebellion. I have always seen defiance as: won't, shan't, can't make me. Rebellion turns up as a picture: for example, pulling a tablecloth from under the china and glasses, food, too, if I am feeling particularly got at. I sense there is a difference but I cant quite quantify it. For a lucid moment, there, I thought defiance may be seen as disobeying an injunction, and rebellion as resistance to authority. Is there, actually, any difference ? I'll give you a for-instance from real life. I have a condition which means I should not eat sweet things. I do - eat them, that is. Try as I may to analyse this, all I come up with is the above wont' shan't etc. In the same way, if I am having a meal with a friend who, as my Mother would have said, eats like a bird, I pile my plate high and eat as much as she should have eaten as well as my own legitimate portion. I catagorise that as defiance. Rebellion would be more like the example in the last blog post: throwing out the food- waste bin all together. Incidentally, someone whispered in my ear that I may be fined £1000 for not re-cycling food waste. Oh Dear: the choice seems to be between the Pied Piper, running the rats out of town, or finding £1000 of taxed money and throwing the scarlet swimsuit - see a long way below - out of the door since there would be no more money for holidays. (Should that have read "re-cycling the scarlet swimsuit"?)

There may well be an element of resistance to authority in rebellion: that is, one needs A.N.Other against whom to rebel. Defiance could be against perceived rules, either in society or in one's conscience. Is it that defiance is a feeling and rebellion an action? Then defiance may lead to rebellion. Oh dear,oh dear, clearly we do have a spaghetti junction scenario. I know that I have written pieces actually called Rebellion before. This seems a whole different semantic ball game. And, you may well ask, what does it have to do with being 40 in a 75 year old body, anyway. Well, the answer would be largely in the physical. I will keep trying to do physical things I would have done without thought when I was 40. Alone in the house I decided to move a couch in to a different position. It was defiance that kept me at it and back-ache that laid me low for two days thereafter. There was also some denial of reality: as in, 'I would have moved this piece of furniture without difficulty when I was 40. I will move this piece of furniture now'. If it were rebellion would it have resulted in throwing the damned couch out? I don't know. You work it out and then tell me. On reflection, it may be just that defiance is what is left to you in the crucible of life when you are 75 and have burned off all the more dramatic reactions. It takes less energy than rebellion and is more readily accomplished. You don't have to burn your bra: you can simply not wear it - or go on wearing it, depending which way your philosophy is taking you. You don't have to stop sharing meals with your anorectic friend, you simply have to go on eating more than she does.

You know what? I am going to go back to bed with the dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus and defy the world to interfere with my rebellion.

Disaffection?

Samuel Johnson said, annoyingly in my view, if you are tired of London, you are tired of life. Now London, itself, can be pretty tiring, or, perhaps, frustrating would be more accurate. Anyway, coping with the everydayness of parking regulations and Congestion Charge and crowded underground trains and buses that start before you have sat down, would certainly drive the best equilibriated person to distraction and I am, at the least, frustrated if not exhausted by dealing with it. I wouldnt agree that I am tired of life as a corollary but the question I would like you to answer is this: what does it signify if you are tired of re-cycling? I am prepared to consider that that may well mean that I am tired of life because how can we sustain it if we dont recycle? I'll tell you what brought this heart-search to mind. In the borough where I live we have been issued with a number of different coloured bins in which to put our stuff to be recycled. So far, so worthy. Paper and bottles and cans and the like belong in the dark brown one and there is a green one destined for food and garden waste. Here is the problem: that green one is big so has to be kept outside, at the top of the path where it can be easily collected, but it is nourished, daily supposedly, from a tiny green one which lives inside in the kitchen. Get it? You fill the little one with potato peel and egg shells and uneaten greens and so on as things crop up and then go, no matter what the weather, and tip it in to the Grandma one which waits patiently to be cleared by the Refuse Collectors. Old ladies are not that keen on wet slippery walks up the garden path so daily is a bit of an ask. The Grandma bin is emptied only once a week. Food waste smells. Thus, you have a situation where the good citizen of whatever age is torn between saving the planet and feeding every rat and fly within whiffing distance. Dear Reader, I have given up. I am no longer recycling food, and, further to emphasise my rebellious disaffection with that aspect of saving the planet, I have put the little green bin inside a bin bag inside the black bin labelled 'miscellaneous' and thrown the b....r right out.

I do see that I have made a few complaints of the I-am-against-hassle kind in the last few posts. Perhaps the chronological me is getting a bit short of energy for the administrative side of life. Recently, I queried an item on my Bank statement. As a result, my bank card was stopped. All very fair and good for security. The replacement has not yet arrived so I am barred from holes in the wall and have to find a branch of the bank to withdraw cash. Innocently, I telephoned the bank to enquire what the card's status may be: had it been dispatched, had it been ordered, what about the current flurries of postal strikes? Fifty seven minutes later I lost my temper. I had been through security thrice, I had been cut off once and I still didnt know what or when to expect salvation. I asked for a supervisor and was told by one agent that they didnt take calls and by another that they were all busy taking calls. I shouted that I was a caller, too, and then hung up. I am certainly tired of that sort of scenario. But not tired of life, yet, because the story ends better. I dialled in again, pressed a different option and found a helpful person who offered to re-order the card ab initio, so to speak. I was back to waiting another between five and ten working days but I did have a bit of hope. It is hard to reconcile some things with the way they would have worked when I was forty. I was in St Pancras station, yesterday. At least, I think it is a station. It looks and behaves like a giant shopping mall. You cant see any trains at street level, there were no announcements to be heard while I was there and there was no recognisable staff. To my amusement, I was stopped by an Australian with a mountain of baggage and asked where there was an ATM. He and his brother could not even take a taxi to their hotel until they had some English cash. No staff, no ATM, no porters, what's a traveller to do? I hadnt seen an ATM but I had seen a Bureau de Change - now called 'Travel Money' in my local Post Office - so I was able to help. Why had he stopped me from the throng available? I looked like I'd been around a long time and, with no suitcase, must be a local. So there you are. I am not the only drawer of conclusions on the planet. But London, as typified by St Pancras had better look over its shoulder at past levels of service or I, and those Australians, will surely get tired of them both. G'day.

Tinkerbell

Now there's an irony: it came to me that it might be a good idea to talk to you about my old friend Tinkerbell, you know, the fairy who needed the constant reassurance of applause to affirm that she existed, when I realised I hadn't been here for just over two weeks. Obviously, the applause must have died down to the extent that I felt I had ceased to exist. I do exist and, as it happens, and as I think you know, I very much enjoy writing, communicating, via this blogspot. So, please, keep the comments coming and the SiteMaster clocking up and this particular Tinkerbell need have no fears of fading in to non-existence. You may say the whole Peter Pan thing is implicit in a blog called 75going0n40, but I don't really think so because 40, in itself, is mature enough. The predicament, as I see it, is not in the emotional discrepancy so much as in the physical. Eventually, it risks losing its funny sense when the Guru says he'll just go down the road and buy a parking ticket while I get out of the car.

The inspiration for Tinkerbell thoughts was actually my computer, or, anyway, its mouse. You will have noticed that the computer and I have, at best, an uneasy relationship. This very morning something locked so that I couldn't move the little arrow at all, in any direction and very often it is floating wilfully about, totally unresponsive to my attempts to give it direction. The Guru routinely insists I must have done something and I have determined to buy a video camera to record my time - and movements - while I am communing with the Wizard of Cyberspace, because, NO, I have done NOTHING. Things just happen. I have tried shortening its cable. I have tried lengthening its cable. I have tried picking the mouse up and starting again. I have tried setting The Cat on its trail. Nothing works. It does its Tinkerbell thing and vanishes off the margin of the screen up, no doubt, in to Cyberspace where it carves another notch on the bar of the Wizard's wand. At its most benevolent, it wanders off the line to one above. If, like me, you don't touch-type, you can, unwittingly, type a whole phrase bang in to the middle of a previous one without noticing. Example: uneasyCyberspeace becauserelationshipCat.

Now, I need to confess, that, as it happens, I do have a soft spot for Tinkerbell. Hers is a phenomenon I am familiar with, as are all of you, I suspect. It is to do with the difficulty of establishing, in such a way that there is never going to be any room for doubt, that you are a person capable of being loved. There is any number of reasons why this belief fails to gell. You may just have learned to trust that you are the centre of the universe when a little sibling arrives. How many people do you know whose search for perfect love and therefore security leads them in to serial relationships and permanent disatisfaction? Family, in the love and support sense, may never have occured for you. An early 'mistake' may have left you feeling worthless. You don't really need me to go on with the obvious, but, clearly, there is a way in which we all need reassurance from time to time that we are loved, therefore we exist and Tinkerbell's insistence that, for her, only the applause will provide that assurance and reassurance, is perfectly justified. Perhaps my little arrow does have a life of its own, or, perhaps it just knows that I cannot love it unequivocally...yet.