There’s nowhere else I’d rather be – discuss. 
Complacency or contentment? Does retirement produce more of one than the other? Depends a bit what you bring to the party – what kind of person were you before you retired? These idle, indeed trivial, thoughts run through my head lying in bed early Saturday morning. I recommend getting up early by the way in retirement, gets the old self esteem up and running. Somebody once said be out of the house by 10 when you retire, same thing maybe.
Saturday still retains some cache, strangely. I suppose when you’ve had a life time of Saturday mornings being mostly a great joy, there’s bound to be a bit of a legacy I suppose. So here we were. Mrs Summerhouse had climbed back in bed, the pups are asleep (as above) on the bed. I haven’t told you much about the pups recently, they’re doing well and I include in this blog this photo to prove it. Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis is playing gently on the radio. We’re all lying here with our eyes shut, each in our own person or puppy world, quite content. Only that annoying single magpie flying past the window disturbs my tranquility when I briefly open my eyes. You’re supposed to blink I believe to make it seem like two magpies – then it’s lucky – get it? No moment is ever totally without concern in my world so it’s a relief to have it identified and dealt with – by blinking.
You’ll have to take my word for it, moments like this are rare for me and have to be grasped. Writing about them is one way of grasping them, even if you do destroy the very moment you’re trying to preserve. It’s a bit like spending all your time in a beautiful place taking photos so you can recapture the moment at a later date, but, in doing so, you miss the moment anyway. I know from experience that this moment won’t last long anyway because moments never do but they need to be recognised and valued when they do occur. I’m starting to sound like Mrs SH with her Buddhist leanings.
But the moment has lasted a while. Last night we did quite a rare thing, put the pups in their cage at 5 o’clock and went out for a drink and a curry. Don’t worry we were back for 7. The pups seem fine with this and now they’re getting a bit older we feel like we’ve got some of our freedom back that we comprehensively lost when we took on the pups. Our son thinks our restaurant of choice is pretentious, we think of it as special, not typical of curry restaurants in Leeds (apparently, according to the owner, the food is actually based on Indian recipes his father handed down, rather than Pakistani or Bangladeshi) and not for everyday eating but on special occasions which as a result of its rarity, this was, it’s the place to go.
The restaurant used to have a pub right next to it and it was BYO, so a form of perfection. The pub is now a Tesco Express, shame, although I have to say, customer care and consistency were not in the mission statement of this particular pub. I think it was called The Queens. Once when I tried to buy a bottle of wine (the choice wasn’t huge) to take to the restaurant over the road (you could take your beer across if you hadn’t finished it –sophisticated days) they sold me a bottle that was a third empty. I looked at it and said, this bottle has some wine missing. The somewhat under-trained guy behind the bar said – no it hasn’t. I said, yes it has, look, and showed him the bottle and more importantly the gap between surface of the wine and the cap. No it hasn’t he said. You know how sometimes you work out quite quickly that a conversation is pointless well this was one of those times. OK, I said I don’t want it. Suit yourself, he said and replaced the bottle on the shelf behind the bar. I know some people regard drinking wine with curry as heretical but we like it, so a meal without wine was a bit of a misery but it’s the principle of the thing, when you buy a bottle of wine you expect a full bottle I think. There really is no market for a pre-used bottle of wine these days. So yes, the pub closed, can’t think why.
But back to this morning moment. It’s now nearly 8 o’clock and Mrs SH is saying she really should get up. No stopping her when she gets these ideas. I’m pretty sure that when she goes the pups will go and that just leaves me. My self-esteem won’t allow me to languish any longer. So yes, the moment has gone, but it’s captured on film as they say.
Some people think the net is full of trivial nonsense. Well obviously this blog disproves that idea although this blog may just be a candidate for most pointless blog of all time. But back to my main thesis. What was it now? Oh yes. About seizing the moment and whether retirement allows more or less opportunity for a person to do this. Sorry but I’ve no idea, maybe it’s just Saturday mornings that encourage this kind of louche thinking and absolutely nothing to do with retirement. But I am going to do something I’ve never done before and, in a small way, it’s quite brave of me. I’ve written this blog and now I’m going to publish it, photo included, all within the space of about an hour. I’m that kind of guy.