Are retired people 'much busier than they have ever been?'

Do retired people always say that they are 'busier than they have ever been' just because, poor things, they are so old that they just take much longer to do everything and are more inefficient? Thus getting up in the morning takes them twice as long to get dressed because now, instead of putting on their socks by balancing on one foot and pulling a sock onto the other, they now have to sit on the bed and laboriously lift one foot up and slowly, slowly poke a toe (chiropodised of course) into the sock, wriggle and push it until it fits, and then lift the other foot up (after a brief pause for a little rest) and....well...ditto....

Do they also need more tea and general refreshments because of their low level of energy as retired people? That of course would take longer as they cannot now easily reach the shelf where the cups are and have to get a small stool to stand on, and of course their balance is not so good so it takes a while of holding onto various shelves and counters to get there, and then they decide they had better move everything to make it easier (another three quarters of an hour gone)? Moreover they are more finicky about not filling the kettle more full than the cups of tea they are about to consume and thus spend time finding their reading glasses so that they can see on the indicator on the side of the kettle just how full it is?

Then do they walk slower? Do they find it harder to 'catch on?' so conversations are three times as long as they try to understand what the hell someone means? Partly through bad hearing, but also because the world has moved on and vocabulary with it (what is all this 'dissing' and 'shanking' and usb-ing, downloading, uploading etc)?

Then of course they rant more at the television, the unfairness of the world, taxes, women who push into queues etc which all takes time previously used in writing reports, making business calls or, lets be honest, standing by the coffee machine having a chat. No wonder they have no time to sort out the garden!

Then medicines. All retired people need copious amounts of pills. This entails finding the reading glasses to read the labels on the bottles, counting out the relevant pills, finding the glass to fill with water, contemplating the pill prior to ingesting it, swallowing the water, rinsing out the glass, drying the glass, putting the glass away, putting the pills away, losing the reading glasses, finding them, putting them in a safe place.....All things no working person has time for.

Then what about communications? Retired people by their very definition have far less communications aimed at them (well, they all are either medical, insurance or holidays, but certainly a more limited range) and yet they make more of them - for a start their e-mail keeps on breaking down mysteriously, and then equally mysteriously righting itself, and they are helpless until the magic has occured. Then they have to go through all the business of finding their reading glasses again. Then they always immediately lose whatever they have written on the e-mail (that key on the right is the DELETE button you know, not backspace), and have to do it all over again. Then they get distracted by all the spam since they are unable ever to work out how to just junk it and often believe that you must reply POLITELY to all those young men trying to sell them books on how to age gracefully.

Thus we see that retired people are more busy than they have ever been but that is only because they are slower and more inefficient. But correspondingly look at how happy they are! Why are they happy? They are happy because they are busier than they have ever been! Without anyone breathing down their neck criticising their poor time-keeping, tardiness, rubbish work, inefficient meeting management, and moreover they have the pleasant drip, drip, drip of a pension into their bank account without having to experience any of those unpleasant things!! This is heaven indeed.

Also, let it not be forgotten that all those things that in youth make people unhappy - such as not enough fun/alcohol/sex/money/friends/travel etc - no longer exist for the retired person because every single part of them has either slowed down or lost its tolerance for excess. Look at our famous OAP rock stars (Mick Jagger springs to mind) they no longer classify themselves as hell raisers. They have lost the urge...and the energy..and you can see why......

So ladies and gentleman I say to you - do not fear retirement, except in one respect, if you think you are busy now you will be far, far busier then....and you will have to be in bed by 10.00 to get your beauty sleep and give you the energy to find your reading glasses for the twentieth time. Just make sure your neighbours are old too - you won't want to be woken up by drunken shouts as they return from the pub at 11.30 which will involve you in a whole lot of laborious letter writing to the local council. Mind you, that will keep you busy.

All actions have consequences

This is a lesson for us all. You just cannot get away with anything - a playful nip of your sons ear and what happens - you are treated violently by said son. One moment a tranquil child the next a dastardly strangler! I blame the parents......

Les moules

So, it is August. There is no 'r' in the month and so we can have 'les moules'. This is France. This is a hot day. This is lunch. This is a carafe of rose. This is a glass of rose beside the carafe. This is 'les moules' in a saucepan. What more could be desired? (Perhaps not a drip upon ones person, but c'est la vie. This is France. This is a hot day. This is a saucepan of moules with a dripping lid.)

The artists sacrifice.......

So, there is no sacrifice that the artist will not make to get the photo he desires............the public, endless jumping, the relying on the little brother to take the perfect pic (was it achieved? see above), the mum secretly videoing.....

Modernity benefits an old city.

Ahhhh beautiful Siena! Why does anyone go there? They go for the history, for the old buildings, for the beautiful Mosaics, the duomo, the Duccio gallery, the Piazza del Campo, the beautiful views, the icecream, the harmonious layout of the town. Now, you may add, the escalator! Yes. Siena now boasts an escalator which takes you from a car park at the bottom of the hill which the town in all its beauty crowns (a little bit of poetic language never goes amiss) all the way up to just below the Duomo! And we were expecting a long and sweaty walk with many sighs and curses from all members of the family, and possibly some sort of sit down strike half way up (probably by me, I am not renowned for my stamina, just my delightful personality), and then we had air conditioned escalators (their are several, just think about it, it couldn't be a single one) all the way up to the top. Moreover, before you embark upon them there are clean lavatories! Sadly I cannot remember the name of the car park but I imagine it is signposted with a picture of an escalator, but let me recommend it to all. Of course once you are at the top, once you have woven through the streets to the Duomo (about 5 minutes of picturesque curly highwalled passages) it is too hot to stand in a queue for the Duomo (all that marble is like a mirror, you feel like a turkey being basted) but the point is you arrive in a decent condition of coolness and dryness and without a pink face. You may then visit other places in the shade and go back to Siena in the cooler, less busy months for the visit to the Duomo (which will be there for you to see for more years than we are all alive, so don't worry.

Oh, the mysterious Chinese comments on the first clip refer to the legendary 'Stairway to Heaven' in Hong Kong where many more escalators take you from the bottom of the city up to the top - but at the top there is simply a busy road (sorry to disappoint) so, although a shorter escalatory experience in Siena, that experience would be more accurately named as the 'Stairway to Heaven'. I mean - look at what is at the top there!!!

A mysterious presence

The strange and unexplained disappearance of the budgie woman put me in mind of another mystical disappearance that I experienced many years ago, whilst still a young, slender and vulnerable young woman.

This is the scene. Me and my partner (were we married at that point, I can't remember and it doesn't matter) went for a long walk amongst the marshes at Wells next the Sea. We walked out and out, until finally we could see the sea lapping at a small distance - it looked shallow and with only a gentle wave system going for it. We meditated a while on the stillness and beauty (coming from London its always a bit of a shock how quiet and empty the country can be - the space with no human habitation! the space with no human!). We then, realising that the light was beginning to fail turned back, retracing our steps. However, what we didn't know was that the tide had turned and the sea was coming back in and at Wells next the Sea, when the sea comes in it comes in fast. Really fast. So we are threading our way through the hummocks of the sea grass in the rather mushy land, jumping over the creeks which are many and intersect the land unexpectedly, and as we walked we began to realise that these creeks were getting very full, very quickly and indeed the one that we had just come up to was like a small torrent. In fact, to our alarm we realised that it was uncrossable where we were. We started walking alongside it, hoping to find some kind of bridge or a low point, but instead it seemed to get deeper and more malignant in its attempt to cut us off from the rest of the land! I began to feel worried. In all the three hours we had been walking we had not come across a single soul, and there was no real path, just a myriad of tracks through the gorse bushes which appeared and disappeared with no explanation.

But then looking ahead I saw a man. A young man in a long coat with a beard (yes!) at some distance and he paused a moment, looked at us and held my gaze briefly, and then stopped by a stick which was at the side of the creek and crossed! We hurried forward. We realised that the stick was not just some arbitrary twig someone had jammed into the mud but a sort of marker (it was quite solid looking). We knew we absolutely had to cross soon or be cut off so we decided to trust this strangers example, and plunged into the strong current of foaming white horses (well, shetland ponies but the current was strong and it was of unknown depth). In fact, as I was unwilling to either take off my trousers or get them wet, my noble partner at this point carried me across (as I say I was young and slender) to safety, getting soaked up to his waist, barely able to stand (I wasn't that slender - no, really, it was the depth and power of the water that was so intimidating, not my hefty form.) Having arrived on the other side, we heaved a sigh of relief and scanned the empty land for a glimpse of our saviour, and anyone who has been to Wells-next-the-Sea knows just how empty and flat those marshes are and guess what there was no sign of the man.!!!!!! Yes he had appeared, saved us by indicating a safe place to cross and then disappeared!!! Amazing or what? And he looked like St Christopher or possibly even Jesus Christ!

That night we asked our next door neighbour, the Colonel, about the safety of the marshes and he told us how dangerous they were when the tide has turned and that the only safe place to cross those creeks is by the markers, of which there are very few. He himself once, on a shooting expedition had been caught by the tide and had to spend four hours on a tussock (seriously, it wouldn't have been funny, I can tell you) whilst the tide lapped about him! No mystical saviour for him then!

So I am all for mysterious presences - they can enrich and even perhaps save your life in my limited experience.

I have also recently had several mystical visions (ok, so its pushing it I admit but you know, when you've got the visionary gift, you've just got to go with the flow, haven't you heard of the ancient Sybil? I could end up like that - obviously many years from now, but still, a career change could occur) but I shall save them for another time............

Budgie woman

As we walked along the South Bank on Friday we passed a small woman seated upon a folding chair, with, in front of her, a tiny table with two budgies -one yellow, one green - perched upon a tiny bird rest with behind them a small tray full of folded differently coloured pieces of paper. The children were attracted by the budgies and I have to admit so was I. My first budgie was green, called Nutmeg, and I have often dreamed of getting another budgie myself, a little boy budgie, to whom I would teach the words of ancient philosophers......Anyway, there was a woman and two budgies so we threaded a way through the crowds, not helped by the large pink balloon my daughter had strapped to her wrist which kept on banging into people (they mostly took it in good part), to enquire what she was selling. It was horoscopes. For a donation (amount unspecified) you could choose one of the budgies to grab one of the papers for you, chuck it on the tray, and that was that. We had to do it of course. First my daughter chose Jenny (the yellow bird) to select, and then my son chose the other one (I thought it was Joan, my daughter thought it was Joel) and he got his horoscope. I crossed the dames hand with silver (actually a pound coin - does any other coin actually have any value in London?) and we stepped away to read the horoscopes. They were amazing! They were hilarious! They were such that I wanted one too, and we turned back to the lady only to find that she had gone!

Yes, but a few minutes passed and she, her chair, her budgies, her table, her horoscopes were all vanished. We searched up and down the South Bank seeking any trace of her but there were none! This was all the more odd as our initial laughing about the horoscopes had attracted attention and surely this had meant more customers for her...but no...like a mysterious, fairy tale creature she had dispensed her wisdom and disappeared into the rather overcast day like a shadow swallowed up in darkness. Was it because I was not destined to recieve my horoscope? Was it because she was an illegal immigrant and undercover police had suddenly appeared, causing her flight? Had her budgies played up and refused to dispense any more horoscopes? Had she simply had enough? Or had she...had she....been an imaginary figure, and had spirited herself away leaving only the horoscopes as an indicator that she had ever existed?

We will never know. But I was sorry that I didn't get my horoscope. It would have been a laugh.

Here is Ben's:

Young Planet

You'll be an extremely lucky person. Soon you'll receive news from a relative to assist you.(When is soon?). You are bon (sic) under the sign of a lucky star. You'll have a long life and you'll be healthy up to the end of your life.
You'll live 90 years.

Here is Camilla's:

Young Lady Planet (how did the budgie know?????)

The heavenly gift for you will be a wealth man. (I mean what woman wouldn't want that kind of heavenly gift?) Your best friends will envy your happiness, but they won't harm you. (Always good to know) Your lucky star says: you'll live in happiness and silence, and you'll be his before marriage. (Hmmmm....a bit too much information there) You'll inherit a great wealth from an uncle . (She's going to be rolling in it). You'll marry Peter and you'll live 86 years. You'll also have babies.(not too soon I hope).