Retirement Diary

 It might sometimes seem as if not much is happening. I'm sure the ageing process is gathering pace and I couldn't claim to be 'middle-aged' any more even if I wanted to.

Some years ago I'd get home from work and the elderly man from three doors up the road would be talking to the lady opposite on her doorstep, I think on the pre-text of passing on the day before's Portsmouth News. Possibly the highlight of his, or both of theirs, day.

That is the future, or something like it. But when I've had such thoughts before I've realized that, no, the future is already here. But as August Kleinzahler asks in Snow in North Jersey, 

and what did you expect from this life 

 

It might not be a fair question as it came as a bit of a surprise to be born and it was a bit late for expectations by then.

But it would have been unreasonable to have hoped to be born into the family I was born into at the time I was in the country I was. That puts me into the top few per cent luckiest people ever, to begin with. Could one be disappointed at not having been Frank Sinatra, Princess Margaret, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Taylor or... provide your own examples of lives thought to have been 'well-lived'. St. Cuthbert, perhaps.

What happened today?

I re-lived a few more of Pushkin's adventures, however vicariously from the page at third or fourth hand. I shared some old records with Bob Harris on Sounds of the 70's, none of which impressed as much as a first hearing of this, chosen by Peter Purves on Private Passions, 

and there's still Eartha Kitt from last night's The Good Old Days to come, from the mid-1970's though it may be. And maybe that's the least of it, having contacted a few friends vis a vis this and that of passing importance because 'the meaning of life', according to such authorities as Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne and maybe Terry Eagleton, is much to do with friendship. Although I might have to return to Derrida's The Politics of Friendship, once given to me by a friend, because it might de-construct the idea to the extent of making it more elusive than I'm sure the gift was meant to express.   

And so, as most days are, it wasn't bad. 

Perhaps it is essential to the overly-indulged, spoilt way some of us live that when we are busy we look forward to indolence and then when we get it we want to be busy again. 

All this in the context of a world order being re-set by the most overblown vanity projects so that the days of hearing the News in order to be concerned about a downturn in the balance of paymenys reported by Anthony Barber are like halcyon days become deja-vu. We should be so lucky.