Be careful what you wish for

Have you ever felt compelled, when you get to a certain age, to absolutely make the most of the time ‘you have left’. Sounds a bit dramatic I know but time’s winged chariot and all that. For such a lofty concept my version of it is, shall we say, a little prosaic, banal, ordinary, what you will.

The other week I was musing, as I do, on my retirement and it occurred to me that where we lived was a great location but, and here’s the catch, we are wasting it. We live just two miles from a large city, Leeds, as you ask, but we hardly ever make use of its facilities, if that is the right word. We hardly ever visit the city centre for shopping, eating and or drinking, cultural events (music, art etc.) or just general sight-seeing in a city that has lots of history and interesting architecture. Well you get the idea.

My next thought is what is the point of being in this location when we could be somewhere cheaper with less facilities for us not to use, if you see what I mean? Anyway rather than move to the countryside I decided we really did need to start to make use of where we were and have been for the last 50 years. We might even renew our free bus pass. The one we used to use but not for several years.

Hence our decision to drive into town last Friday and do some shopping and maybe have a coffee and cake or something similar. But, and here’s a question, did you know that last Friday was Black Friday? The now mandatory ‘sale’ day. It seems to me every day, not even Friday, is Black Friday with sales of various kinds. Which might explain why we didn’t know it was said Black Friday when we drove into the city. But how could we not know what every other citizen obviously knew?

Now we may be slow but even we realised something was different. The multi-storey carpark we had carefully chosen was so full of cars trying to get in that it took us 30 minutes from going through the barrier to getting to our eventual parking space on the very top (10^th) floor. If we could have turned round and gone home we would but of course we couldn’t. You can’t do a three-point turn in a multi-storey car park. Just take my word for it.

We did eventually do some shopping, a bizarre combination of coffee pods, next year’s diary and a birthday jumper for Mrs Summerhouse. And we did, or rather the dogs and I did, go for a coffee and cake in this weird little café. Lunch was not to be because we couldn’t find a city centre pub that both allowed dogs in and served food. Not asking a lot I would have thought but apparently it was.

In the end we just settled for the dogs, I mean we could hardly leave them wandering the city could we. We ended up in one of the roughest boozer’s in the city (see quote below)*, a pub we had, in the past, rushed by to avoid the shady clientele who overflowed on to the pavement outside. As it turned out they were fine and loved the dogs. Anyway in this case it was any port in a storm.

And the storm raging around us was that same Black Friday. I honestly didn’t think people went shopping any more. We keep reading that people shop on-line and that proper shops are dying. Well let me tell you this is not the case in this city on this day. And this was the day we had chosen to seize the moment, to make the most of our retirement time. The joke, as they say, is on us. It’s egg on face. Next time I feel I need to make the most of my retirement life, well think on as they say in these parts.

*8 Mar 2024 — A Leeds city centre pub has avoided having its premises licence revoked despite warnings from the police over violent incidents.