More retirement tales of derring do. Kind of. Last Friday I missed the train. This has of late been a very rare event. Given that, prior to retiring, one of my goals was to take trains on a regular basis, to visit cathedrals as you ask, this rarity is a bit of a surprise not to say disappointment.
I can’t blame the pandemic for this as it hadn’t really happened in the 5 or 6 years before the pandemic struck. I could blame the dogs especially Archie. When we did try them on a train Archie would start barking every time the train went through a tunnel or worse still, in the sense that they were more frequent, every time the train went over points. Quite disturbing if you didn’t know he was there as most of our fellow passengers did not.
Anyway this might be a bit of an irrelevance. I say might be because, at this point, I really have no idea what aspect of retirement this retirement blog will be about. But don’t worry because I frequently don’t and it usually works out OK, at least to my way of thinking.
So back to the train I missed, as I say a rare event and even rarer given that it was actually a steam train. The Ecclesbourne Valley Heritage railway for those of you who are interested in such things. It runs between Duffield and Wirksworth in Derbyshire where we were visiting. Mostly it runs DMUs so the steam train was indeed rare. We heard the unmistakeable noise in the distance while we were walking the dogs after lunch in The Spotted Cow. By the time we got to the station the train had left platform one which is in fact the only platform. (that’s it above with me on it)
So in my retirement my love of trains, and steam trains especially, has grown in direct proportion to how frequently we travel on them. It’s yet another example of those activities I had anticipated would form my retirement – golf, photography, long distance travel being a number of others – and haven’t. Whereas blog writing, vineyard tending and short-distance travel (pandemic permitting) have. Just goes to show although what exactly I’m not sure, a bit like this blog.
We spent three nights in the Derbyshire cottage, aka the ancestral pile also aka my late mother’s terraced house and we enjoyed it. We even had a bit of a conversation about renting out the main house and living in this much smaller property. Yet another possible scheme to keep boredom at bay.
One that has acquired a bit more substance since we told the children we were dropping out of the financial side of the Colorado cabin. If we did rent out the main house we could get a pretty fair rental income which might, in turn, re-invent the cabin contribution side of things. So everything about this visit had that vague context of a possible future life change.
One criteria for it being an acceptable place to live being attractions like heritage railways (check) and newly-opened Silk Mill museum (yet to be visited) , nice pubs (see above).places to walk the dogs (definite check); places to shop – antique shops, book shops (check) and bizarrely clothes shops.
I say bizarrely because a) I have little interest in clothes only being pressured into their purchase by Mrs Summerhouse. I’m not quite sure what this tells me about her view of my current clothing stock and b) the shop in question was Asda. From where we bought me two pair of jeans (very cheap); a shirt and two T shirts and Mrs SH, one pair of jeans that were more expensive than my two pairs. Go figure.
Much more rewarding, at least from my side of the picture, was the book-buying side of things. Three ghost / crime books from Scarthin book shop in Cromford; two from the local pub, The Queen’s Head for free. I asked the landlord how much they were and he said they were free you just replaced them at a later date with two you didn’t want of your own. I told him there was no chance of me actually giving away any of my books but he said take them anyway. That was nice.
Then back to the railway station at Duffield and in the little shop in the station I bought three more railway books to add to my collection. So I missed the train but not the books about trains. We plan to return to the station to make the trip on a steam train (just me – Mrs SH, Millie and of course Archie, will drive to meet me at the terminus station) at a later date. That makes 8 books acquired on this trip. More engaging for a retired person than two pairs of, albeit cheap, jeans. Happy days.
So, as a location, this area checks a lot of boxes. I do have to say though that, being a terraced house, on this trip unusually we got a bit of noise through the walls. I was reading my newly-purchased ghost book (actually an MR. James short story) and, not having had this noise before, it frightened the living daylights out of me. It sounded like a dead body being dragged across the floor boards. It turned out to be next door’s vacuum cleaner but that’s not the point. Just at that moment with my Mother’s ashes still in her urn downstairs I questioned whether I really wanted to live in this house.
All this for another time. Who knows what adventures we might get into as our retirement grows ever greater. Which is a nice way of saying as we get older and yet keep actively engaged and consistently curious. Which I think you’ll agree is the right way to live ones retirement life. Or maybe you don’t see it that way?