Retirement and all that effort to buy a bass guitar

I’m almost nervous about writing this retirement blog. As is always the case, when I start I have no idea how it will end. I don’t know how much of what happened to me last Friday I will feel able to reveal. At the risk of repeating myself I sometimes wonder as the deadlines for either Tuesdays or Friday’s blog approach what am I going to write about and yet, without fail, at least so far, something has always turned up.  For example, I could be writing this blog about waking up on Monday morning to find water over the kitchen floor from a leaking washing machine or one of the cars not starting later in the day, but I won’t because I know I should write about Friday, painful though it might be. Who knows it might prove therapeutic.

Last Friday we went to one of the regular auctions featuring the sale of musical instruments. I had decided to buy a bass guitar. Why I decided to buy a bass guitar is a topic for another blog, suffice it to say this was my simple goal. I was pretty confident that this trip would, in some way, provide me with a blog topic. I could not have anticipated just what the nature of the topic would be. Let’s see how this comes out for me.

First, the most straightforward part of the day. I bought my bass guitar for very little money and I only bought one more guitar I didn’t need for quite a bit more money. Not quite the disciplined approach I needed but two guitars, not too bad for me where auctions are concerned. That’s the simple bit, now it gets a bit more complicated. At the same auction were a father and son that we know a bit from our time in Pateley. I won’t name them and if I told you why I won’t you would accuse me of being melodramatic. All I will say, and this will I think become clearer later, their physical health might be at stake. Scary? Well, yes actually.

As we arrived we met the son and chatted in an amicable fashion about what we were there to buy. All perfectly normal. Both trying to buy bass guitars, or so it seemed. All very chummy – at this stage. Later on in the day as I was leaving the auction room with my two purchases I saw him leaning on the wall across the corridor. I suppose I should have given weight to his changed demeanour. He no longer looked jolly but pale and drawn. Instead I went across to him and asked, as you might, whether he had bought anything. He blanked me, when I looked puzzled he practically hissed at me, not now. I left him alone, mighty puzzled.

Later in the day I went back to the auction room to see if a couple of other items – books and CDs, might be bought cheaply. On my way into the room I saw both father and son standing by the door. I’ll try again, I thought, particularly as the dad had previously bought a very nice guitar that I would have bought myself if it had sold for ten times less than the £1500 he had paid for it. This time they both completely blanked me. Right, I thought, blank me once I’ll try again, blank me twice and that’s you done. I vowed never to speak to them again, you think this was childish, well let me tell you, I’m not done yet with childish. For example, later when I was sitting in the café with Mrs Summerhouse and her chum, the father came across to us and apologised. But I wasn’t having any of it, I was still cross and not in the mood for accepting any apologies. Yes, I know.

I tell you all this partly to set the scene for what happened the next day and partly as a prelude to what happened in the afternoon. I’ll keep the afternoon part of the saga brief because I’m not in any way proud of what happened. The short version is I got involved in an ugly scene with an antique shop owner over the price of two books. It was precisely the sort of altercation (in my head about a matter of principle and not backing down, not letting it go and not just about the books) that I have told myself time and time again not to get involved in now I’m both retired and elderly and, not to put too fine a point on it – weak, i.e. in no shape for physical argy bargy. I have little doubt that had he chosen to he could have kicked the proverbial out of moi. Will I ever learn? But I was already off-balance from my morning interaction at the auction so I made a bad choice in getting involved in a lot of still more childish behaviour (they say you revert to your inner child as you get older). Sometimes retirement seems the perfect time to revert to the complete child. And that’s all I’m going to say on this part of the adventure except that the messiness played on my mind and next morning, as is often the case with these episodes, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself – until I met up with the chap I told you about at the auction.

I can’t tell you how I met him that would give too much away but now, less grumpy, when we met, I let him explain what had been happening the day before. In short some kind of sting was going down which involved, the bad man, the police, Inland Revenue and other agencies. I had arrived at just the wrong moment. By the time he had finished telling me about being defrauded and nearly made bankrupt, threatened by a very bad man indeed, his family also threatened, told he would be killed if he testified against this man. I can’t begin to tell you the whole tale or of the crimes the bad man had and still was committing. He talked at me for more than 45 minutes and by the end of his amazing tale I no longer felt sorry for myself. His troubles made mine seem very small indeed.

This is a very shortened version of my Friday at the auction. They say the devil makes work for idle hands and last Friday was a case in point. If I wasn’t retired and hence with the time to engage in foolish behaviour, none of the above would have crossed my path although this poor chap’s troubles would still have been causing him and his family sleepless nights. I just know there’s a moral here for me as a retired person. Something like keep out of trouble, you’re in no shape to be throwing your weight around at 68 and a bit. A simple retirement message? Maybe.