So retirement pleasures. I promised in my last blog, which was a tad miserable, that I would write something more on the cheerful side this time. Well here it is, as cheerful as I can be. It was harder to write and it’s shorter than the miserable one. What does this tell you about my mental health?
It tells me I can be positive but I have to force myself to think in these terms. Interestingly, at least to me, thinking positive turned out to mean thinking of my musical skills. So remember that the next time I think about giving up my musical activities.
I went up to the attic where most of my musical instruments reside (see photo above). On a whim I picked up probably my favourite electric guitar, my Fender Telecaster and dug out my country guitar playing skills in the form of a CD (remember them?) of Merle Haggard. True he’s dead so he’s not a totally great advert for cheerfulness but he hits the spot when I’m in a country mood.
I mostly play lead type guitar on the Telecaster rather than just rhythm strumming as I do when playing with the Folk Fiddle group. This requires a bit of skill and more important (and you’ll see why I say this in a moment), dexterity.
Then I switched to keyboard (what I used to call piano). Keyboard and country go together well and although I haven’t played keyboard and country for quite a while, though I say so myself, I sounded pretty good. As you will know playing keyboard generally requires two hands and, here again, the left hand has quite a bit of work to do. Call it dexterity again.
Hmm, I thought after half an hour or so of alternating between guitar and ‘piano’, this is not too shabby. I had actually come up to the attic to have a practice for Thursday night’s folk fiddle evening with my newly printed sheet music for the gig in a couple of weeks but some obscure thought process had taken me down the country route. And I thought this isn’t too bad a thing.
And then I had an even better thought. I thought how can my left wrist be stiff if I can do all this stuff? Maybe my possible diagnosis of P’s is just bollocks. There’s nothing stiff about my left wrist / hand at all. This thought cheered me immensely, as you might imagine.
I moved on to playing along with John Prine. Back to guitar in a slightly different way. Still no problems, at least not ones of stiffness in my left hand. True John died not so long ago at the age of 73, which just so happens to be my age which puts a slight dent in my positive thinking strategy but no, I’m determined to take the good out of all this musical activity.
And this activity took up most of my morning. True I haven’t got round to my folk fiddle practice but I’m hoping that will be Thursday morning (which happens to be today) after I’ve finished writing this retirement pleasures blog.
So still feeling quite good about myself (which I haven’t been), we turned to TV watching later in the day. And it was as if the programmers had thought, well, if you’re going to make an effort to be cheerful, we’ll meet you half way and the next three programmes where about Derbyshire (Escape to the Country); Ireland (Holding) and New Zealand (Wellington Paranormal).
All places that, in one form or another, bring cheer to my heart. So thanks for that anonymous schedulers. We did a little bit more planning about our soon to be happening Colorado trip. True this was slightly tricky because it brought about the dilemma of whether to let a friend in Illinois know that we were going to be in the country, given that we didn’t have a lot of time to visit with folks, but as problems go this was quite a nice one.
Retirement pleasures summary
It’s a surprise what a person can come up with if they are determined to put on a happy face / sunny outlook. I think for most of us retired folk the good stuff is there if we shine a light on it, it’s just at times the torch batteries seem a little flat and it’s easy to believe that the good things aren’t there as opposed to the dullness is simply a sign the batteries need changing. What do you think?