What might be the connection between the photo at the top of this retirement blog and one of the ‘headlines’ on the front page of a recent Daily Express. I have to say before I go any further, I did not buy the paper but read the front page on my phone. That’s better now I can continue. I’ll continue by saying that the link between the two is tenuous.
The sub-headline or whatever it’s properly called showed a picture of Prue Leith (I believe she’s a chef or something similar) and she said “I’ve got so much I want to do at the age of 80.” At first sight I thought, well that’s admirable. Still keeping active and challenged right to the end. That’s the way to do it. A recommendation for any retired / elderly person.
But then I thought, hang on, if you’re eighty and you’ve got loads of things to do then why in the name of all that is holy, haven’t you done them before or at least be engaged in doing them right now? Why the heck wait until you’re eighty plus?
It did set me to thinking, is there anything that, if I considered the question, I might find I should be doing that I haven’t done so far? I can honestly say that apart from maybe the odd trip or two there really wasn’t anything very much I thought I should be doing before, you know, it’s too late.
This further set me considering whether I had any regrets in my life generally. And here’s the connection with the photo above. The picture is one Mrs Summerhouse took on our recent trip to Scarborough. This was the first of our stay in a ‘nice hotel with the dogs’ form of travel. The type of travel we indulge in now we can’t do long haul.
We’d met up with some friends. They’d read my retirement blog about friendship and were wondering which of my categories they fit into. Maybe still wondering. Anyway that’s not the point. Well, get on with it you say. So the point is that I used to work in Scarborough as an educational psychologist for North Yorkshire. We still lived in Leeds and so once a week made the trip and stayed in a hotel one or two nights.
I liked Scarborough but, after a few months, not the arrangement of driving from Leeds and hotel staying. At the same time these apartments were being built. They were right on the beach, as you can see, and I’ve always had a hankering for an abode by the sea. So there was some logic to us buying one of these apartments, they were reasonably priced and, as I say, they were by the water.
So every time I see these apartments, as I did when we were walking the dogs next day, I have a small tinge of something verging on regret. How different our lives would have been if we’d gone ahead with this nutty scheme. Nutty in the sense that we would then have had 5 properties. Yes, I know this doesn’t read well in this day and age but there was a logic to it if I’d have continued working in Scarborough. But I didn’t.
So I’m left with a very small bit of regret and then, as my brain ran on in the way it frequently does, a bigger question about our past life regarding the other places we could have stayed after our global excursions. The first of these was our year’s exchange in America. At that time I loved America and was desperate to have been allowed to stay on a permanent basis. American immigration thought otherwise. This was a regret for quite a while.
Then there was New Zealand. We lived here for 16 months and, as it wasn’t an exchange, we could have stayed, the job was there, all we needed was a house. A house by the ocean was a real practical possibility then. We decided we needed to go back to the UK and see how we settled and if we didn’t then we would come back to New Zealand. Alas inertia took over and we stayed.
At least until another exchange opportunity came along a few years later. This time in Australia. Apart from the odd snake we really liked where we lived in a place called the Ferguson Valley. Nice people and burgeoning wine industry. What’s not to like? To cut a long story short, another change-of-life opportunity passed us by.
If I really wanted to reflect on a life well-spent, or otherwise, I could go right back in time as far as 1970 when I left art college and reluctantly accepted that I was going to have to train as an art teacher unless I was going to ‘enjoy’ a life as the starving artist in a garret. An easy decision. I wanted to go to London to study for my teaching diploma. To Goldsmith’s college to be precise. Every young person wanted to go to London in those days particularly those with (or in my case without) artistic flair.
I was not accepted by Goldsmith’s and ended up staying in Leeds who did accept me. And that was 50 years ago and counting (I hope) minus of course the odd break in the colonies. I do occasionally reflect on how different life might have been if I had gone to that London. But here’s the thing, I breathe a sigh of relief because of all the opportunities ‘missed’ as above, this is the one I have no regrets about at all. Other than one or two visits to our capital city I wouldn’t live there for all the tea in China, as they used to say.
So there we are. Coming back to the title of this retirement blog, that’s very few regrets in my life of 70+. I do not place myself in the Prue Leith category of finding that there are loads of things I still want to do. One or two goals still to achieve maybe but then again maybe not even that. Blimey I must be content.