Retirement 3

Things keep cropping up to crystallise this retirement business. The other day I went to visit some friends who are setting up a trust fund for one of their young. I was asked to witness their signatures. Aside from the honour, I was taken aback when faced, for the first time since retiring, with the space that asked "Occupation". There it was: Retired. Writing it for the first time was actually more traumatic than handing back to the kindly Post Office agent the usual little batch of envelopes he was wont to hand me to facilitate paying in my earned cheques: there will be no more need for those.
What's more, there is time to notice the growth of the 'one-of-these-days' pile of things to do which the sharp-eyed among you will remember falls in to the New Year's resolution category of 'verboten'. One of these days, I resolved, has to be NOW. This is a convoluted way of telling you that I have booked to see the Hygienist, I have had builders come to fix a leaky problem, I have started to sort out cupboards and to enjoy being at home. Of course, I have already told you about my re-discovery of domesticity. However, I have a secret. All my older life I have rather turned away from the activities enjoyed by the 'Third Age'; turned away in the sense of a kind of 'them and us' approach. I was certainly never going to be one of 'them': I was always going to be 'us'. I remember seeing a group of 'them' at an exhibition once. Related by hair, I thought, at the time, i.e. all grey and all curly. I am lucky. At 75 my hair is still mostly brown, though without the chestnut glow that gave it life in the past. Nor does it wave as it did, but shucks, who cares. It is good enough and stops me being one hundred per cent a cliche. (I'm sure the Guru would tell me there is a facility on this machine for putting an accent on that last e, but I don't dare ring and ask him. Please visualise it). Anyway, the University of the Third Age was outside my field of consideration. I like my groups to be mixed-gender and mixed-age. Indeed, those of you in from the start will remember my advertisement for a young rugby player with a nice bottom to help me negotiate the airport. A group of contemporaries is very unlikely to afford that particular pleasure.
Dear Reader, my view has changed. Last month I was invited to join a group of contemporaries who meet once a month or so to discuss, well, I think I must say Life. The themes are taken from a book of sermons preached by a late lay-preacher known to us all. He was an intelligent and extremely well-educated man and worth considering. There was an almost forgotten pleasure in listening to and contributing with like-minded people and I was happy to take a piece of humble pie with my post-meeting tea. However, I did notice, apart from the hair, I was also the only one wearing lipstick. The experience inspired me to look at the possibilities in the actual University of the Third Age which has a branch very near where I live. Advanced French Conversation - where you can't see if I have put the accents on or not - and Very Beginners German are on the probable list. Thank Goodness for the Guru otherwise I might feel as if I had moved permanently to Planet Third Age. C u l8r.

Eavesdropping 2

The difficulty for a professional eavesdropper, nosey-parker and interferer is summoning restraint. When I was talking about my Chinese retaurant experience last time I side-tracked myself in to the Japanese experience and didn't get round to telling you the most tantalising bit. At one moment, my three 'companions' were talking about the star sign of the man one of them was 'seeing'. He is a Libran. The ladies were clear that this was a good thing. It made him well-balanced and stable. Now, this is not the case. I have it on the best authority that a Libran does love balance. However, there is a sneaky caveat hidden in this statement. A Libran does not just love balance, per se, so much as crave it, therefore he/she has continually to engender chaos in order to be able to achieve the balance which is essential. With me, so far? In other words, the drive, the raison d'etre, is not in having straightforward balance, but in the achieving of it. Balance is actually the end product. If there were no mess you wouldn't have the satisfaction of clearing it up. Right? How do I know this? Because, as a life-long Libran, I was thoroughly confused by my seeming contrariness to this balance thing. Although I was for ever tidying up, my life was for ever defined by piles of this and files of that, most of them on the floor or waiting to be ironed. Anyway, fate flung an astrologist in my path and the above explanation, Dear Reader, saved my sanity.

Its relevance to the three ladies was that I was so strongly tempted to lean across and explain all this that I had to get up and take a pit stop to remove myself from danger. Invisible is one thing: too high a profile quite another. Still, there was some amusement in imagining how they might have reacted. What would you have done if a dotty old lady had suddenly felt impelled to make a contribution to your lunchtime conversation with friends? (I suspect I am always half waiting for' les blouses blancs'). There was a time when I did butt in. How to tell you succintly. Again in a restaurant: an elderly lady - another elderly lady - was seated at a large table clearly waiting for others, since she forbore to order. Presently, in came a young woman carrying a stunningly beautiful baby around nine months, I'd say. She was followed by a girl holding the hand of a three year old boy. The resemblance between the elderly lady and the young woman was such that no white-witchery was needed to identify them as Mother and Daughter, thus, Grandma to the littles. I should also say that, while Grandma was waiting, sitting as if next to me, I was seriously overwhelmed by her powerful scent. Mother distributed her party, assigning the small boy to a seat next to Grandma, although he expressed a wish to sit at the head of the table. At that place she put the baby, seating herself opposite Grandma and , incidentally, next to the baby. The young girl, who turned out to be an Englishless au-pair, she placed next to herself and opposite the boy, who was, thus, furthest from his Mother. The tantrum that ensued will not be a surprise to you. I was ready to pay and leave, anyway, but the noise was a meal-stopper of mammoth proportions. Mother threatened the boy with excommunication to the car and, indeed, eventually leaned over, dragged him right across the table from his place next to Grandma and transported him out of the door. I followed to see her standing, red -faced, beside a car in which a purple-faced little man was desperately trying to pull open the door. Approaching her, I said that she may hit me for interfering if she wished, but, before she did, I wanted to say that her small son had had to put up with a coup d'etat for her affection, without prior consultation with him, from a contender who had, literally, taken his place, a Grandma whose perfume he might find overwhelming and the frustration of not being able to say any of this, his only resource being a tantrum. Her eyes filled with tears, she said she had never thought of that and she didnt want to hit me. I made off, in case she changed her mind, but I did look back and see her lift the boy, tenderly, out of the car and carry him back in to the restaurant. My heart was thumping. I shan't interfere in a hurry, again, you may count on it, except, perhaps, in fantasy. But if you happen to know a lady who is going out with a Libran, perhaps you could warn her of the hidden danger.

Eavesdropping

For a dedicated gossip and want-to-know-all eavesdropping is a marvellous source of satisfaction. There is no need to ask questions, no need to read faces, all you have to do is get quietly on with your crossword if you are in a restaurant or looking out of the window if you are on a 'bus. The material is right there for the taking,or, indeed, for the not avoiding. Yesterday I was treating myself to lunch in a local Chinese restaurant - it has been a stressful week and, credit crunch or not, a girl has to have some light relief - which is normally quite sedate and full of oldies like me, muttering to one another sotto voce. On this occasion I was sitting not far from a group of three ladies all of whom must clearly have been deaf. This was not a masterful piece of deduction: they were enunciating particularly carefully and with considerable volume. In other words, they were shouting, sotto voce being out of the equation. I learnt so much about each of them that I could have filled in a job application form on their behalf. I was not asked to do that. I was invisible to them. But I did have a lovely entertaining time and had to keep reminding myself to fill in the odd clue in the crossword in case one of them, like-minded, noticed me noticing.
It turns out that it was the birthday of one of them. She was 83. I can tell you she doesn't normally eat twice a day and would have to make her husband dinner and watch him eat it having had so much lunch. One of her companions feels much better since she found this marvellous trainer who will come to the house for £45 and bring a table and all she needs with her. She would be willing to pass on her telephone number but, laugh, doesn't want her to get too busy to have time for my narrator. They quite understood. So do I. We have all had the experience of lending someone a cricket bat which they then run away with and hold on to until it becomes their cricket bat. But I was disappointed. I would like to have known more about this miracle worker. Not that I am good enough with numbers to have kept it in my head had she given it, although, I could of course, have disguised it as a clue and noted it on my newspaper. Someone's husband didn't hold with that and, having been such a great sportsman, kept nagging her to exercise out in the open instead of paying good money for a stranger to enter his home.
He is very demanding in other ways, too, and not very warm "except in bed". How I stopped myself asking if she meant thermally or sexually, I don't know, but be assured, Dear Reader, that stop myself Idid. As it happens, I think she must have meant sexually because the talk then went on to how long it was prudent to leave 'you know' without putting the man in the position of looking for 'it' elsewhere. It turns out that one of the ladies was not married but was "seeing someone". She answered 62 when asked how old she was but he thinks she is 55 so please could it be kept between them? This time, I did peek. I think she could pass for, say, 59, but less would be pushing it. One of them had to leave because the husband collecting her wouldn't be able to wait outside. I held my breath to see how the bill would be dealt with. They split it, letting the birthday girl off her share of the tip. I expected the remaining two would discuss the departee and so they did, but not unkindly. She was looking surprisingly well, "after all", but, although I could tell you what each of them and their families will be doing for Easter, I cannot say after what that lady is looking well.
I had had a lovely time. It was quite unlike another recent eavesdrop. This was what I will have to call a conversation between a young woman and a not so young man. We were sitting at a bar in a Japanese restaurant, they, just the two of them, around the corner from me. Picture it? Anyway, their communication was so threaded through with sexuality that I was border-line discomfitted. It is extraordinary how they felt able to behave as if they were alone when that was far from the case. She, on a cold day, was wearing not much leaving acres of stroking possibility for her companion. It seems he was "taken" but she was content to "borrow" him for a little while. They had been an item in the past and she rather regretted that that was no longer the case. Again, under cover of the crossword, I was invisible, but this time it didn't feel like fun and, indeed, a young woman with a little girl aged around 5 who was sitting next to me, asked if the staff could find her somewhere else to sit. I felt better. I was worried I had been ageistly prudish in my discomfiture.
The moral is: beware what you say and do in public. You may be within orbit of a professional noticer, busybody and/or old-fashioned nosey-parker.

Retirement 1

It surprised me so perhaps it will surprise you, too: to-day is the first day I have actually felt retired. Although I stopped work just before Christmas, so much has been going on that I have managed to avoid the feel, the essence, of the reality. What happened was that I found myself thinking about a book I first read when I was thirteen or fourteen, "Frenchman's Creek" by Daphne du Maurier. I know that it was my 'best book' for a long time and I have, I confess, read it again, several times, but not for what my Mother would have called 'donkey's ears'. (Cockney rhyming slang for lots of years - get it? No: she was Welsh). Anyway, there I was thinking about "Frenchman's Creek" when I suddenly realised that, now, there was nothing to stop me reading it yet again. For one thing, there was no longer a menacing queue of professional publications which I knew, from decades of experience, I would not get round to reading. Of course, the energy I had to find to ward off the guilt that I was not doing the required reading could have been better spent in picking the damn publications up and getting on with it, but such is human nature, as you will have noticed, yourselves, that truculence, defiance and laziness always won and the pile grew until it was clear, retirement aside, I was not even going to live long enough to get through it. The result was that I read neither the educative stuff nor, because of the guilt, anything else of any consequence. Nor, come to that, anything of no consequence, neither, because, as those of you whose middle name is also Guilt will know, that would have been out of the question, totally disallowed until one had done one's duty. Thank Goodness for hairdressers; at least one could read a magazine out of sight of the pile and out of mind of the guilt.

There is another problem. Since I retired people close to me, all of them erudite, worthy, intelligent people, have been giving me books saying "now you've retired, you'll have time to read this. I didn't give it to you before because I realised you wouldn't have time to read it". Unfortunately, the books are all erudite, worthy and intelligent, too, and to-day, it came to me that they were stamped with the same caveat as the professional stuff: read me or you risk being labelled as unerudite, unworthy ,unintelligent and not up even to a standard dinner-table discussion. I have had a go at a few of them. One is "The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford. There is a dichotomy here; the outside of the book annoys me because I want it to be called "The LIE of the Land" and the inside, a fifth of the way in, seems to me so obscure, that I still don't really know what it is trying to draw me into. I trust the judgement of he-who-gave-it-to- me and, more,as you have guessed, would be ashamed to admit it was beyond me, so I shall persevere eventually, but you can, surely, understand how I have succombed to the cry of the user-friendlier, well-written, lovely, lovely other-era romance that is "Frenchman's Creek" and b.....r the 'literature' piling up where the professional works used to be.

Looking back, it is clear that that book had a great influence on me. (In case it is not on your shelves, briefly, it concerns a well-born, well-married 18th century lady who is tired of the louche life she has been leading in London's top echelon, behaving, out-of-century, like one of the lads, crossing boundaries and playing with fire, who flees to the country with her small children, to escape that self. Of course, she meets a man who has made a similar escape, a Frenchman, also well-born, who has taken to piracy as an escape. Not unlike the character in "The Thomas Crown Affair" which may be more familiar to you. Each becomes the love of the other's life, but, as you would expect, the call of her children and the impossibilty of them being together without creating more children and, thus, inevitable separation, intervenes and they part. Hurray for birth control you may say. I would find that a touch cynical.) Anyway, I do see that I was in love with the Frenchman, who had the confidence to wear his own hair and not the usual curly wig, and I wanted to be the Lady Dona, not only for the Frenchman but for her awareness of the disparity between her inner and her outer lives and her search for her real self. I'm having a wonderful time reading it and not even a squidgen of guilt. I'm retired. I can read what I like. So there, another dark secret in the life of Liz. I wonder if re-reading "Frenchman's Creek" qualifies as decadent. What do you think? Comment?

Overload

There is a problem: one of my greatest delights, as you may well have picked up, is listening to music. Now, one can do that at any time at home. It must be control-freak Heaven. You select the recording, you choose the volume, the time of day, stop for a call of nature or a cup of whatever. There is something quite different, however, about actually going to a concert Hall and hearing a live performance. And there is the problem. I have, as we speak, been going to concerts for 69 years. This means I have heard a very great deal of music and a very large number of musicians. I don't set out to be critical but, inevitably, the critical faculty is pretty well honed and, without formally setting out to compare and contrast, I find that that process occurs automatically. The result is that I am, too often, underwhelmed and, thus, faintly surprised and even embarrassed by the enthusiasm in the audience around me for a performance that has struck me as being two cheers, not three . Not only embarrassed: ashamed, too. What gives me the right to be that judgemental? I am not a professional musician nor a professional music critic, come to that, but there it is; a feeling of been-there - done-that has come over me and swept away my innocence and wonder at more than a handful of the concerts I attend. I shall have to challenge the inner 40 year old to rediscover the miraculous joy that comes with the exquisite liaison of art and artist.

Now I come to think of it, there may be a hidden advantage in the dilemma: at least the inner and the outer age seem to be in the same place in this regard. I have been talking to a clinical psychologist/analyst about what she sees as the problems of the "last stage" of life. In some ways it was quite chilling to think of myself in those terms, but also very interesting. While my intellect was enjoying the discussion my inner self was listening from its own perspective.(Cloud Cuckoo Land?) I am very used to my usual conflict between the self that is as it was at 40 and the deteriorating external 75 year old shell - as you will know only too well if you have been keeping up - but to hear a woman in her fifties talk about it as a recognisable phenomenon in the psychological world was quite a complacency stopper. After a while, it seemed to me that a good way to resolve it, anyway for me, would be to go along with the instincts, the wishes of the inner me, which cannot be identified particularly by chronological age,( although, I do go on about 40, that's true). The lady was not concerned, really, with solutions, anyway not then, and it wasn't until I got home that I noticed neither of us talked about What To Do About It. The answer, if there is one, must be simply to accept the physical realities of age and carve them in to one's way of being in the world.

Anyway, physical or not, I must not let usage get in the way of simple pleasure in what has brought me joy and solace all my life. It is a bizarre thought, though. At your age, do you have any idea that it is possible you will come to be bored by your erstwhile most intense experiences? No, nor did I. Any more than I foresaw that I wouldn't be able to hire a car, apply for most jobs, run down an incapacitated escalator or do the splits when I reached my current age. But I didn't foresee the new joys, neither: a delightful freedom, and a sense of the ridiculous that I was much too po-faced to acknowledge when I was younger. (There are more, but I can't rush through them all just now.) Heigh Ho. I've taken to re-reading some books,too, silly when you think there can't be all that time left and there are so many books I haven't read even once, yet. But I think I must see it as the same as listening to music; one certainly listens to some pieces times without number so why shouldn't one treat books in the same way? What do you think? Is there a time when there just isn't room to take in anything new? No.

Domesticity

Recently, I have stopped working. It may surprise you that I was still working, but I was in the kind of job where you could go on as long as your marbles permitted. Now, I am the last person to leave you with the impression that my marbles are no longer working: far too arrogant. Clearly, there will be other reasons why one may want to stop even if fully marbled. But first, it may make more sense if I confess what it is I have been doing. I was/am a therapist. Perhaps I should'nt have simply been dropping hints as to what I did. But there it is; you get used to a level of confidentiality, or even secrecy,and, on auto-pilot, I just did'nt spell it out. In a way, that was part of the reason for stopping. There is only so long you can go on living within a very tight framework, keeping to a rigid timetable where there is not much flexibilty to go to weddings, funerals, christenings and so on that don't take place at the weekend, because part of the therapeutic effect will lie in consistency and reliability. In the years that I worked from home I would, sometimes, have loved to answer the phone when I was aware it was ringing during a session. I never wore red to work: too intrusive. Now my red jumpers are on my back most of the time and I am enjoying a different kind of freedom. But, don't get me wrong, I also miss the work, and, particularly the people I was working with, very much. It is quite limiting to interfere with the lives only of ones friends. Stop. That was unnecessarily ironic and capable of misunderstanding. Therapy is not an interference. It is a contract freely entered into by both, with the explicit - or should be - understanding that the more you can discover about yourself the more effectual will be your way of being in the world. Anyway, the point of telling you this is that I have re-discovered domesticity.



Honestly, I have been baking. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. First, you have to find what you need, the mixing bowl, the baking tin, the whisk and so on and so on. Having found them, packed away for 19 years, you then have to do some serious scrubbing to bring them up to standard. Then , the challenging part: find a suitable recipe for a birthday cake for the Guru and translate the measures for the ingredients in to metric from imperial. Those of you who are more or less my age and brought up in the UK, do you know how many grams make 8 ounces? 8 ounces of currants, 8 ounces or raisins, 3 of mixed peel. (That's enough measures if you, yourselves, are not currently in the act of baking). The 'Home Baking' shelves were packed - not so much packed, as interspersed - with grams of the things I needed; it seems most cakes are bought these days. But I did collect all the gram/ounces I needed in the end and set off in to the past with much enthusiasm. (That should read "naive enthusiasm" I think) The last time I creamed butter and sugar with a wooden spoon and a whisk I was in my fifties with fifty year old wrists. It soon came clear that there would be no cream in time for the birthday nor, even, mine, which is in September. It transpires that there are now electric gadgets to do the creaming for you, so off out to buy such a thing. Three quarters of an hour after getting home, there it was, assembled and I set to work. Once mixed and the debate about brandy or whisky, not called for in the recipe, settled - no: there will be alcohol in plenty at any gathering at which this cake may be eaten - put in to a square tin, the only one I had found, and bake for an hour or so.

Dear Reader, it emerged TOO THIN. What to do? I went to bed to get over the shock and got up next morning determined to start again. Off to the shops to buy a round tin and some more grams of this and that and off to go. Confession: I hadn't been able to dislodge the whiskers (cats'?) in washing up the night before, so now I had to scrape off the dried mixture and wash the instruments without wetting the apparatus. But, practice makes perfect and I was soon back in business. The shorter version of ths tale is that I ended up with two delectable cakes, one thin and square and one round and fat enough. The latter I decorated, but only on top because I had to wedge it back in to the tin in which it was baked to send it off in such a way that it wouldn't rattle, and that left no room for decorated sides. Since the Guru, when last here, saw packets for the making of choclate cake, (destined for fail-safe in case I lost my domestic nerve), I have grave doubts that he will believe the Dundee cake wedged in to its sticky round tin, arriving in a parcel marked FRAGILE in fourteen places, was actually made at home and by me. Such is life.

Frustration

I know: it has been a while. While I do have certain computer skills, I have not yet mastered the art of writing the blog when I am away from home. If it would involve taking the lap-top with me, then that would be one more thing to carry and another reason to rent a young man for help around the airports or train stations or wherever. (See previous posts if the reference eludes

you,) and the thought of going in to an internet cafe or the business centre of an hotel scares the life out of me. How would I even get on to the site? ( That question was rhetorical but if you are really moved to tell me, then, please do.)

But to get on with what has been frustrating me. Writing this post is a case in point. I have no idea how it will look when I click on " publish post", but as it stands at this moment there is half a sentence lounging in the middle of the page. This has been going on since I started and I have got round it by typing busily on so that the words slide obligingly to the left. However, that ceases to work when I need a new paragraph. At last, it occured to me to 'align left' but how the h... did it get centralised in the first place?. Hey Ho. As the Guru says, I must have done SOMETHING (No, I did'nt. It was the wizard of cyberspace, but the Guru is never going to believe me).

To get on with frustration: while I was away I sent a text to my travel agent asking him to pay a premium for a 'leg room' space on the return journey. Five and a half hours on a charter flight in an ordinary seat is not good news if you are any bigger than, say, 4'11''. (Can't do the metres) I used to be 5'7'': seven and a half, actually, but I can't find a half sign on the keyboard. I am quite a bit less than that, now, but even so, it was seriously cramped. The agent sent an email to the manager of the hotel saying that I could not have such a seat "because of her age". Apart from the fact that it took three days for the email to filter down to me, I was incandescent with rage at the ageism of it. I can sprint with the best of them when life is in danger, if that's the concern, and, given that it may be a concern, at least take each case on its merits. Anyway, what do you think about using a company that feels able actually to print the words "because of her age"?

I have been applying for work as a Mystery Shopper. This means you go in to various commercial projects and find out if they are really offering what it says they do on the tin. You are employed by the Head Offices of these concerns via an intermediary who is the one who 'sources' you. I am an excellent spy, having been a nosey parker all my life, and earned my living by it for 43 years. I am also an acutely trained observer and reporter for the same reason. Ideal, wouldn't you say? The jobs offered so far - all done via the internet - have had an upper age limit of 65. What's a girl to do when she is only 40 on the inside and can't get used to the world's view of her as too old for leg room and too old for espionage?

Further more, I can no longer hire a car from the two companies that operate in my home town. 74 is cut-off point. That means I have to drive 200 miles, which is tedious, and robs me of a nice read on the train, because it would be hard to manage without transport when I got there. This post IS called frustration, it's true, but that's enough of it for now, we are all thinking.

Talking of transport, we were beside a river, the Nile, actually, so a lot of movement was by boat. Now, those of you who have been keeping up, will know that I have had to do quite a lot of Scottish island boats and could be said to have got away with it, nicely, but getting away with it from a narrow strip of rocky bank, via a plank, if you please, on to a small rocking boat is frustratingly difficult if your legs are not as obedient as they used to be. My inside person so much wanted to go, I had to give myself a few good talkings-to to overcome my terror and, Dear Reader, overcome it I did

But one good old-age thing: I have no hesitation in speaking to strangers any more, as I had when I was 40, and, thus, met some very nice people on my week's break. Twice I guessed correctly the occupation of fellow guests and gave the Guru further evidence I am a white witch. I suppose that would entitle me to agelessness. Witches surely don't have ages. But it doesn't do a lot for the frustration age seems to incur in the world of Muggles!