Retirement and the Women’s Institute, do they go hand in hand?

I’m inclined to the view that retirement is a funny old business. A time of change, of reinvention, of doing things you wouldn’t have thought possible before you retired, like joining groups of other retired people (now abandoned) or learning how to play jazz guitar (new term starting today) when you’ve shown zero interest in this form of guitar playing for the last 50 years or so. Of taking dogs for a walk and actually speaking to other people, of restricting our holidays to somewhere we can drive to (with pups), we’re going back to Ireland in a couple of weeks, of camping (only one night admittedly, at least so far), of going out for breakfast on a Friday every couple of weeks, of pursuing an on-line garden design course (Mrs Summerhouse) and so on. Always searching for the magic ingredient that will make our retirement lives so much better. But never in the last two years we’ve been retired, or the previous 60 or so for that matter, have we ever done anything as outright weird as what we did last Friday. Can you guess? The clue is in the picture above and of course the title.

That’s right, don’t bother, you won’t guess in a month of Sundays (another one of my grandma’s strange sayings). Assuming you read this blog and actually want to know what we’re up to, a big assumption I know, then I will tell you. As I say, the clue is in the picture for the more astute of you. Yes, we went to the Women’s Institute’s Centennial in Harrogate. There I’ve said it, I’m not proud, not at all, so let me try and explain how this weirdness came about. If you’ve been reading these blogs you may remember that I wrote recently about writing a blog for Retiresavvy, the Skipton Building Society retirement blog, a blog that responded to a Michael Caine interview – remember? No? oh well, you’ll have to take my word for it or you could  always click on the link. They occasionally ask me to write something. I agree to do so in the seemingly mistaken belief that this will somehow increase my readership figures (also a topic of recent blog). It was they who suggested I might like to go along to the WI Centennial. I could have two free tickets and would I like to say a few words to whatever audience might show up about, I suppose, my retirement experiences.

With that inspirational motto wringing in my head – a person should try everything except incest and Morris dancing, I thought well maybe. In the end I said I would have the tickets (£17.50 each no less) for myself and Mrs Summerhouse but no thank you to saying a few words. They kindly acceded to this request. And so it was that we passed through the portals, as above, to this weirdest of weirdness. I’ve written before in this blog about trying to ‘find my tribe’ in my retirement years. This question about what group do I belong to now? And a short while ago I revisited this question with my blog about going to the theatre and finding the grey-haired ones filling out the place. And bugger me with a fish fork, as a dear friend used to say, here they were again.

The bloody place was full of them and I include photographic evidence of the fact. The only difference here was that 99.9% of them, were women. Well, you tosser, what did you expect it is the Women’s Institute. OK, you’ve got me there but all I can say is I did not expect such a complete in-balance. I mean all the gents toilets had been designated as women’s, we few chaps had to use the handicapped toilets, it’s outright discrimination, that’s what it. All I can say, again, is if you were a single male of a certain age and pre-disposition you could do a lot worse than pop along to Harrogate, lay out your £17.50, surely cheaper than joining a dating agency and you don’t have to rely on a head shot photo, and take your choice of totty possibly or possibly not, on offer. I’m not entirely making this up because ear-wigging into the kind of conversations these women were having, one said, “you see there are some men here (two or three by my reckoning). I didn’t hear her friend’s response but then given her age probably neither did she. I confess I lost a bit of interest in listening to the conversation after “I’ve seen her on Strictly” or “I had a stall once, never again.” This despite telling myself that I needed to take notes to give the blog I thought I might write, a little colour and with the amount of grey around, I needed all the colour I could call up.

So there we were, Mrs SH and myself in the thick of it. Hundreds of stalls all the expected – gardening, cookery, travel and skin lotions like the lady at the lotion stall who called out to Mrs SH as she passed, “I can get rid of your lines and puffiness.” How jolly helpful I thought. Mrs SH wasn’t so sure. Hundreds of stall and thousands of the grey-haired ones. We’d left the collies in the Land Rover for obvious reasons but within ten minutes I was wishing we’d brought them with us. They would have them rounded up and corralled in the tea room in ten minutes flat. With white and grey predominant, the collies would have simply thought of them as big sheep – see example. And rounding up they needed, they just blocked the aisles everywhere and anywhere, group of 5,6, 10 just standing there gassing, I mean talking of course. Well bleating and baaing. I felt like saying get out the fucking way you grey-haired git, this is an aisle not a bloody meeting place (not that I have anything against grey-haired people per se despite whatever impression you’ve got so far, only when they get in my way). After 15 minutes I gave up trying to move around and went and had a coffee and cake. Mrs SH lasted 45 minutes and then, with massive relief, we left. Thank god we hadn’t actually paid.

So chalk off another retirement experience that we won’t be repeating. It’s all very well exposing oneself in this way – now that would have cleared the aisles – I hope, but there are limits. We were emotionally drained by the time we got home, so much so I fell asleep and nearly missed my appointment with my accountant, as I like to call him. Now that was a draining meeting as well, but that’s for another time. Retirement life is grand if you don’t weaken and if you can avoid the WI.