My retirement sometimes feels akin (nice word) to riding, sans saddle, on the back of a bucking bronco. I know that doesn’t fit with the canine ‘bringing to heel’ analogy, but it will have to do. Control the beast, I don’t even understand the ‘c’ word. The harder I try to, the crazier it seems to get and yes, I know this sounds ridiculously dramatic but then that’s how it feels sometimes. True, there are times when I’m bored but there are not many of these. Mostly, the bronco dominates my life. You will have guessed that this is one of those times and that’s why I’m writing about it. Maybe the act of writing might help, maybe make me feel that it’s all a bit more under my control.
The last week my dreams and, worse still, those periods of wakefulness in the wee small hours, have been over-whelmed by thoughts about parking and netting. How ridiculous are these as topics for obsessing about? I guess I need to explain them a bit, if only to myself. I’ll be brief. The parking theme comes about because of problems with parking in the street outside the house of my late mother. It probably shouldn’t bother me but it does mainly because of one neighbour whose three cars fill the available spaces. We’re not there very often but when we are I feel I should be able to park outside my own house as it now is. But I cannot and I worry about it. I need a solution to this problem, as it is to me. I will return to this in a moment.
Netting, now this is a weird one. Again I’ll keep it brief because I intend to write more fully about this in a shortly to be posted blog in our vineyard section. So for now it’s like this. As a result of the hot summer we’ve had (and right now as I write this blog and it’s peeing down outside, it feels like the past tense is most appropriate) we’ve got a lot of grapes and we want to keep them. So despite having promised myself I would have nothing more to do with netting, we’re trying to net pretty much the whole of the vineyard – only half an acre but extremely challenging.
If there is a less-forgiving material than plastic netting, I’ve yet to experience it. So for the last few days up at our vineyard we’ve been struggling big time to make this hostile material do what we want it to do which is – simple enough – cover the grapes. But it won’t stretch when you want it to, it cuts your fingers when you pull it, it’s too small and you’re trying to ‘sew’ bits together, it gets caught on your head, your buttons, your boots, your watch and, in the middle of the night, your brain.
Trying to control events in the vineyard has become an all-consuming trial this last week or so and my dreams / nightmares wholly reflect this in fact netting dreams have taken over from the parking dreams. Which you might call progress I suppose but to return to the bronco analogy, it feels like you think you’ve brought the horse under control but then realise the beast was merely pausing for a short breath before belting off once more. The only way I can see for getting this bit of our lives under control is to finish off the netting. All I can say is we’re getting there but after several days there are still big gaps through which any half-witted bird can get in and eat our grapes. But in time..
And yet we have so little time to make things better. We’re off to Scotland in less than two weeks for three weeks – in a caravan. I know nothing about caravan holidays and very little about the area we are going to. Normally I suppose I would have been engaged in research, but I’m too busy. If the grapes ripen while we’re away, well we have a problem, but I’ll write about this in a later vineyard blog. I’ve temporarily (I hope) postponed my van conversion project, stopped thinking about publishing a book of my blogs, delegated the new summerhouse project to my neighbour up in the dales, stopped trying to write a blog while on the M1 with Mrs Summerhouse driving of course.
Again I’m trying to simplify my retirement. Not so I’m bored of course but just to try and get a better balance between activity and inertia. I recently wrote about having sold our house in Pateley Bridge and now I’ve made the fairly momentous decision to sell the Derbyshire cottage as well. Selling the Pateley house was relatively easy, not the actual selling but the fact we didn’t have very much in the way of emotional attachment to this property. But the family home, that’s a different kettle of fish. All that back to my roots stuff I wrote about, that would be all gone. But, as it stands and intend to call the estate agent today to really set the wheels in motion, that’d what’s going to happen because this means I will be seizing control and reducing the complexity of our retirement lives even more.
It’s a biggie because there will be no going back from this decision. Some decisions can be unmade, but not this one. I, unlike some people I suppose, only have one family home to sell (my grandparents bought it well over a hundred years ago) and once it’s gone it is, as they say, gone. And I’ll probably have to move my mother’s ashes out of the house. She won’t like that. So as I’m writing this I’m trying the idea on for size. How does it feel? A clever solution to one of those middle of the night loops or a sad loss of my family’s roots? Buggered if I know. But I know when the horse sets off I can hang on to it only for so long and then I have to get off. I have room only for so much stress in my retirement life. This is my way of keeping retirement stress under control – to some extent anyway. Has this helped? A bit.