One of the knock on effects of the pandemic has been seeing nothing or very little of friends and relatives. If you’re a tad on the anti-social side, as I confess I am, then this can be a blessing. And one or two ‘friends’ I haven’t missed at all. Long may their absence continue.
Of course when you permanently lose a friend you were very fond of you do think maybe I should treasure my friends a bit more but on the whole we’ve (Mrs Summerhouse and I) rubbed along quite well with limited social contact this last 18 months or so.
I’m sure there are one or two friends who we used to get on well with who we now don’t see, one who helped me with my sports psychology aspirations but I manged to upset him by telling him he was arrogant (twice). I regret that especially as it looks as if the rift isn’t going to be repaired.
Then we’ve got some good friends who live in Stafford which is hardly a million miles from Leeds and even less from Derbyshire and we haven’t seen them for years. How much effort would it take to get in touch with them? Too much apparently. Probably carry on in this vein until it’s too late. Does retirement and old age lead to a ‘why bother’ mind-set?
To look on the positive side. We have made contact with two sets of friends in the last couple of weeks whose company we enjoy and that went well, didn’t upset either of them at least as far as I am aware. In that sense maybe the pandemic has been beneficial. It was nice to hook up again and compare experiences.
The focus here is on friends namely because I have very little in the way of relatives. For me, apart from daughter and son, none really. Mrs Summerhouse makes up for my limitations by having sisters and brothers all over the place like a good Catholic family should. She gets on well with all but one of these or maybe it’s me (again) that doesn’t get on with the one. Whatever, they seem to enjoy each other’s company. The recent picnic went OK but it wouldn’t be up there with most enjoyable social events of the year. They’re (2 sisters out of 3) off abroad right now and complaining about the bureaucracy involved.
No hardship for us to stay at home and a much more pleasant BBQ / family gathering took place this last weekend. This was at my daughter’s and son in law’s and included his parents. I like them they’re down to earth and remind me of my own background. We’re all from mining areas, or what were mining areas, back in the day when the country had mines. That’s why I’ve taken the opportunity to include at the beginning and end of this retirement blog a local history book about mining in the area of my birth.
I’ve just finished reading DH Lawrence’s latest biography, Burning Man. As I think I might have mentioned in a previous retirement blog, he was born just up the road from me in Eastwood and ended his days, sort of (there’s some debate about where his ashes are now), in Tahoe (not a million miles from Durango. So I think of us as kind of brothers (as I say I have little in the way of relatives so you grab at straws) and now his reputation seems to be improving somewhat, even better.
Anyway he used to write about miners for obvious reasons but he never said anything in his writing as apposite as the comments of my mother-in-law at the BBQ. She was talking about her father who was a miner. She mentioned that her father, even when the pit he worked in had showers installed, he and his fellow miners refused to use them because they didn’t want to show their unclothed bodies, so they went home covered in coal dust and cleaned up in the traditional tin bath in front of the fire when they got home.
Her dad worked down the pit for 56 years I think it was and when he retired they gave him a letter thanking him for his services which did not have on it one single written / personal word or signature, just typed. He said, this is what they think of me after 56 years and tore it up.
But the best story from my mother-in-law referred to both her mother and father. She, her mother, loved to cook and in an effort to give him something different cooked him risotto*. He didn’t like it at all. Well, my mother in law said, ‘you don’t give a miner risotto do you?’ Priceless and well up to DH Lawrence’s standards.
*At least this was my memory of the story but Mrs SH reckons it was actually his daughter (my Mother in law) that cooked the risotto at school and brought it home and gave it to her dad, same result. You decide which version you prefer.
But, as I say, meeting up with them, after probably two years, reminded me a bit of my own youth in a mining village, Heanor. I was never particularly aware of it being a mining area so I must have been pretty stupid but then, neither my father (who died quite young anyway), or my grandfather, were miners although the chap next door was.
What, you’re asking, has this got to do with friends and relatives? Well truth be told not much but I ran out of things to write about them and sort of transitioned into talking about mining. Not very logical I admit but then it’s my retirement blog and I’ll write about what I please.
And in case you were puzzled by the pictures with this retirement blog, the top one is the cover of a book about mining in Heanor and the one below shows every pit shaft sunk in the area and, if you can see it, you’ll realise there were a lot and how I could have missed them well I can’t explain.
