So I’m writing this on the day of my 72nd birthday. I hadn’t intended to write a retirement blog about this day but it seemed destined to be. I have to admit the day made an inauspicious start. First up was my diabetes blood sugar levels and up was the key word. I take them every morning about 6.20. This morning they were up to 9.4. Not good.
Also a little disappointing was that I was no longer on page 1 of Google which I had been for the last few days. I thought, well it will be a nice birthday present if I’m still on page 1. I wasn’t. Never mind things will get better.*
My weight was a little better but again nothing to write home about unless you like to write home about bad news. Then my birthday presents, two books I’d ordered myself from Amazon, wrapped in Christmas paper because as Mrs Summerhouse explained she hadn’t got any birthday wrapping paper.
Two books, as above, one of which when I unwrapped it I had no knowledge of having ordered. The other one I did remember and it took me back to my art college days. I’ll return to this in a moment. The other present which I remembered was a photograph of Loch Skerrow station. I mentioned this station (more properly a halt) in the last retirement blog about being in a bubble.
This wasn’t supposed to arrive until the end of the month but here it was with all my birthday cards, large as life. Except life wasn’t, in this instance, all that large. I had no idea of what size this photo was going to be and I had speculated idly what size frame I would need to buy and where, on our over-crowded walls, I would hang it. True I’d only paid £2.84 for it but the postage was £1 for a second class ‘stamp’. It turned out to be quite small, postcard size in fact. I admit I was a tad disappointed.
No wonder by the time it came to shower time I was in, what you might call, a pensive mood. Being 72 and the world pissing you off will do that. So no surprise that I was ‘thoughtful’. What was slightly surprising perhaps was the nature of my pensiveness.
To say it was varied would be an understatement. For example I found myself wondering at the contradictions inherent in trying to get the small bar of soap to stick to the large one. The old to the new if you like. Why would a person, who quite happily spends £250 on a drum amp, be trying to be economical with the soap?
It’s not as if it’s easy. The new soap, if it’s Pears, then, with its concave surfaces, sticking the small soap to it is easy. If it’s a bar with the more usual convex surface and the old small one also has a convex surface (albeit somewhat reduced with use), which was the case here, then it’s very difficult. Why bother trying to save money on soap when I’m so prolifrigate (that doesn’t seem to be a word) in every other area of my life?
My ponderings moved on and started to think about the book (it’s in the picture above) I remembered ordering entitled, London’s New Scene: Art and culture in the 1960s. I had glanced at it in bed and Chapter 7 was called Art School Revolution – the Hornsey Affair. I haven’t read it yet but I remember when it all happened in 1968. A delegation from Hornsey art college travelled North in the days when north really meant north, to Leeds art college to try and radicalise us as it would be known today. Or to try and persuade us to join them in protesting about something or other. We were too busy getting pissed and playing football and this combined with our natural indolence sent them away disappointed, a bit like me with my postcard only more so, probably. All this while I was showering and I don’t take long showers.
I’m finishing it off the next day. The day improved in a modest kind of way. Daughter and son-in-law came round to celebrate with Chicken Kiev. This was great but the bottle of wine I chose to go with it, a 1983 Pomerol wasn’t. It had, as they say, gone over. A bit like the friend I bought it from. So I can’t pursue him for a refund on account of him being dead. I should be grateful that I’m still around at my age to not enjoy his wine, I suppose. We found a decent bottle of wine, several in fact.
A very late night for us on account of watching The Haunting which arrived in the nick of time as another birthday present. The only slight problem is that I had this film down as our Christmas Eve night horror film (a family tradition) like MR James’s ghost stories, so now I need to start looking for a replacement. Life can be awfully challenging at times. In this case those times were my retirement birthday. As these things go it wasn’t bad at least not entirely.
*By the way the summerhouse years blog is back on page 1 of Google, so that was a nice present after all.