Category: retirement

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Oyster Shell

Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.

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Awake, Alone, Aware

I wake alone, aware…

Sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? Because of the similarities of the words? It would be even better if that was ‘awake’ – how would I work that into it?

‘I lie awake, alone and aware…’ yes, that works, – or, if it’s a poem, even just : ‘Awake, alone, aware…’

What was I aware of? How did that thought continue? Aware that… this is how it is. This is life – my life. And it’s another morning.

Still in bed, I read, via a friend’s Facebook post, an article in the Guardian about women who choose to be single, to live alone and forego marriage and children, defying the outdated concept of spinsterdom. But of course, the lives of today’s single women, even those who’ve never had a live-in relationship or children, are expected to be very different from those of the stereotypical ‘spinster’ – changes in social conditions and mores have utterly transformed that. A spinster in the Victorian (and also most of the twentieth century) mode could be presumed to remain eternally virgin, whereas modern single women are assumed to have (or have had) active sex lives just as single men are.

The article was focussing on women for whom the single, childless life has been a deliberate choice – something else that has massively changed over the last fifty to sixty years, as women’s opportunities for employment and self-determination have improved out of all recognition. But I’d guess that the majority of women living alone are like me – divorced, with marriage or cohabitation in the past, and maybe grown-up children who don’t live with them anymore.

Did I choose the life I’m living now? I don’t want to revisit the territory I explored last Sunday, but – no, not really – or only in part. Fifteen ten, maybe even as recently as five years ago, this was not the kind of life I was hoping for in my sixties, but it is what it is. The longer I am alone, the more I appreciate the advantages, and given my experiences of living in relationships, I think on balance this suits me better than that did. As the song goes: ‘you can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes/you just might find you get what you need’.

So, what is it about waking up alone? What was/am I aware of?

That sometimes we choose our lives, and sometimes they choose us, I suppose. That life is far more complex than we like to think; the future is far more unpredictable than we like to acknowledge, and that our choices are both more circumscribed and yet at the same time more potentially disruptive than we can ever understand. The forces which constrain our choices are not just the physical laws of the universe and chance (which can’t be circumvented) or the man-made laws of behaviour (which can be, but not without consequences) and of interaction with other self-determining beings.

I’ll stop there because I’ve confused myself.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 1 of …?

My Google Drive is permanently full, and has been for years (literally, in the literal sense, years). Every so often I purge some files, photos or emails and somehow it stumbles on, but I opened a new gmail account – I think it was in 2017 – which is what I mostly use for email these days. However, I still have the old one as there are people and organisations who have that as my email address (like the yahoo email which I’ve had for over twenty years to the best of my knowledge and which still gets lots of emails every day, but I don’t want to close because some contacts only have that address).

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

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Listing

I’m still doing my lists – sort of, though I’ve slipped a bit this week.

You may or may not be aware that I have a ‘long list’ (written in a ‘Things to do Today’ notebook that I bought eight years ago, when I was living in the Fens – I know that because I have a distinct memory of buying it in the Wilko in Huntingdon – and have used intermittently since) and a page-a-day (except weekends) A6 sized diary that I bought online last month. The former is where I write things as they occur to me – which may vary in scale and/or importance from ‘Sort out study’ or ‘car insurance’ to ‘Empty dishwasher’ (that one not so much now I have a diary). Items on this list may or may not have a do-by date next to them, and the ‘system’ used to be that when the page was full I copied those which hadn’t been completed on to a new page and threw the old one away – or sometimes, when I was trying to be more organised, I started a new page every Monday, copying things as before – but this always feels like a waste of paper. Now I have a diary, the ‘system’ is that every morning I copy into it items from the long list that need to be completed that day, and/or others that I feel I can tackle that day, and/or carry-overs that didn’t get done the previous day – as well as things not worth putting on the long list, like ‘empty dishwasher’. Plus, of course, appointments and deadlines and things like ‘pay credit card bill’ get written in when the dates are set.

That’s the system – in theory. I have tried many, many systems down the years – most of which didn’t last long, as you can tell, and also attended many courses on ‘personal organisation’. I have a horror of lists, but I do understand the logic behind them. When I was employed in offices, I suppose I must have organised my workload somehow – even more so when I was doing multiple jobs from home (though my daughter and ex-husband would probably say I just never stopped working). Managing life in retirement – not to mention lockdown – is a different ball game.

As you can probably guess, lots of items from the long list never make it beyond being copied to the new long list when the old page is full – sometimes not even that. There’s a theory that things that have been on the list that long probably don’t need to be done anyway – that’s one thing I learnt from all those courses, and it may be reasonable in a busy work setting where there are lots of priorities to be juggled and, crucially, other people who eventually notice if the whatever-it-was really was important.

There’s a sense that the writing of an item onto a list is an action in itself, and once that’s done, it can safely be forgotten

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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Happy Days

I called my brother yesterday morning. We have this thing of checking in with each other on the first Sunday of the month, which sometimes we forget, but mostly at least one of us remembers and is available. He and his wife, who both turned seventy last year, have had their first vaccinations, and so has their eldest daughter, who has been shielding because of a history of autoimmune problems. I should be in the next cohort, but haven’t heard anything yet.

We talked about the calm of hunkering down in lockdown, and I heard myself saying the words: ‘I’m happy…’, knowing in that moment it was true, and wondering what he would make of it. Looking back, I can see that at any moment of the conversation, with a carelessly chosen phrase he might have completely shattered that sense of wellbeing, but it didn’t happen. He said: ‘…it feels as though this is what retirement should be like…’, which this time last year (when he was planning to leave for Antarctica within the week) would have sounded bizarre, coming from a man who ‘officially’ retired in his fifties, and has spent the years since recreating the bustle and stress of his business life in numerous ways. I reminded him of the plaque our Dad put on the wall when he retired: ‘How good it feels to do nothing and then… rest afterwards’ and we shared a chuckle.

I know this is not a sustainable situation. Every morning I have to get up and do battle with my demons, dragons, bogies, black dogs, gremlins, negative vibes… whatever you want to call them. During the day, as long as I can escape interacting with others, avoid the news (and most of social media), don’t give too much attention to the ambient chaos, focus on doing the things I enjoy and give myself time and space to do the things that make me stressed (including being prepared to abandon them mid-stream and try again tomorrow), life feels okay.

Five minutes ago, while I was pondering that sentence I noticed a single white speck floating past my window. Now they are coming in ones and twos every few seconds. If this is going to be snow, it’s the first I’ve seen in three years. The sky does have that look to it, but we shall see.

I know this situation – the sense of peace, not the possibility of snow – is not sustainable. At some point, the world will start to intrude again.  The madwoman in the attic can only be ignored for so long. But happiness is about les petits bonheurs (and I wish I’d thought to say that to my brother yesterday, a missed opportunity to show that I’m also capable of being pretentious and intellectual), the pleasurable moments. Looking out of a window, whether of a train passing through the Dinaric Alps or counting the snow specks falling on passing cars, knowing I have nowhere to go, except downstairs for breakfast.

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Passing Time

Today I’m looking through my window at grey clouds and black birds (maybe jackdaws- I can’t see them clearly enough, but they’re too big to be blackbirds)  flying across them, and I truly have no idea what to write about.

Struggling to find anything of significance in my life at the moment – and I don’t mean that in a bad way, because I like a peaceful life – I remember about the fair-isle jumper I was knitting, which I think I’ve mentioned before, and may even have posted a picture of. Well, the news on that is that I’ve given up on it – probably temporarily, but who knows – because I tried it on and realised that it is going to be too small to be comfortable (yes, I should have checked earlier, but I was having fun developing the pattern). The best I can do with it is unravel it all the way back to where the sleeves join the body and keep on increasing the stitches for a bit longer , until it will comfortably accommodate my ever-expanding bulk. I can’t remember exactly when I made this discovery, but it was at least ten days ago, because I knew about it before my therapy session last week. In the mean time I have started and abandoned a couple of small things trying out different stitches, and also started a crochet cardigan using some yarn which I bought a couple of years ago for making blankets and never used. Again, I’m making up the pattern as I go along, basically the same as the cardigan I finished just before Christmas, but with brighter colours in a chunky yarn. However, I’m not sure whether that is going to work out either, because the weight of the yarn makes it less flexible, and if not, I might return to the original plan and make a blanket instead.

You might wonder what is the point of going into such detail about this, but I’ve already pointed out that I can’t think of anything interesting to write, and also I was trying to draw a lesson from it – that when you enjoy the process of doing something, it doesn’t really matter so much if you’re not happy with the end result and either abandon it or go back and try again – well, at least, not if you’re in the happy position of having an abundance of materials (especially if they can be re-used) and time, as I am. I don’t get stressed over crochet and knitting projects – even when they don’t work out – as I did with the bookshelves, for example.

Also, I’ve brought my accounts up to date till the end of December, and in checking my Lulu (self-publishing) account, I’ve found that I sold three copies of my books last year that I didn’t know about (four in total, but I knew about the first one). The money hasn’t appeared in my account yet because the total hasn’t reached the magic $5 required.

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Maybe

Some mornings I feel as though I’m balanced on a knife-edge. Maybe walking along a cliff edge is a better metaphor, since, clearly, no one can balance on a knife-edge. Maybe a tight-rope. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe I am digressing into choosing the right words because I’m evading the concept. And maybe the use of ‘some’ suggests that this experience is rare, which is not the case – or maybe that’s just an extreme version of an average morning.

I’ve just remembered trying to explain it once to a counsellor – the one I was seeing in 2006-7, which dates it – that I felt I was walking along a very narrow ridge running through a bog, and at any moment I could slip, and potentially disappear without a trace. That describes the feeling, better than a knife-edge (which is a cliché anyway, as well as being impossible) or a cliff edge. There are no degrees of falling off a cliff edge – unless you land in a tree or on a mattress or something else which breaks your fall. Falling into a bog can be fatal, but my perception is that there’s a better chance of being pulled back, providing there’s someone around to do the pulling, or a handy branch or edge or something to grasp onto and pull yourself.

Which is a complicated way of saying that my morning routine is my branch. Not always easy to drag myself away from the night and that ‘oh shit, I’m still here’ feeling that descends on waking, but I know what I’ve got to do, and I do it. And by the time I’ve posted my blog, and am downstairs with my porridge and su doku, I usually feel somewhat better.

I don’t know why I’ve written that this morning, which doesn’t feel any worse or better than any other day. I guess if I was trying to learn a lesson from it, I could say – do something so you know what you’re doing; try things and push yourself a little bit, but not too hard; give yourself time and be ready to stop when it starts to get to you; come back when you’re ready, it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or in five years time unless there’s some external commitment or deadline.

It strikes me now how different that is from the usual sort of advice about setting goals and getting things done. Maybe those things are really not so important in a life like mine (retired, living alone). If I find myself struggling with things (like the bookshelves, or the housework) maybe I can live without them for a bit longer. If I carry on struggling, I might come to hate whatever it is, and swear it’s impossible, I’m useless and incompetent and should never have started in the first place and I’ll never try it again. But if I stop, walk away, do something else, maybe I’ll be more inclined to try again later.

Lots of ‘maybes’ today.

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On Purpose

Am I, as was recently suggested, ‘looking for a purpose’?

First, let me freely acknowledge that I don’t feel I have ‘…a purpose…’ in any profound sense. But how much does that matter?  

This is a time of year when there can be a lot of pressure to set goals, make resolutions, plan new habits and behaviours, and generally beat yourself up and set yourself up for failure and disappointment. Well, that’s how I’ve always found it. I don’t want to detract from anyone else’s desire to do those things, but for me – hey, I’m retired, I live alone, and the joy of both those states is the peace not to feel obliged to follow anyone’s expectations but your own.

That said… my purpose last week was to complete and submit my tax return, which I did on Saturday. Now it’s to bring my accounts up to date, which I haven’t touched for the last two months, even though it’s a task I quite enjoy. Moving data between spreadsheets, checking totals and hunting for errors when things don’t tally – to me, it’s fun, it’s satisfying, there’s always a ‘right’ answer, and if it doesn’t work out, there’s always a reason which can be found – it’s like a puzzle, a more complicated version of killer su doku, but one which has a ‘purpose’ beyond just filling the time. Sometimes I think: I could have been happier as a book-keeper rather than as a failed book-writer, and maybe that’s a path I should have chosen years ago, but too late now, I don’t have the right qualifications – (and no, I have no intention of studying for the qualifications now – given my experiences of retraining in new skills during my fifties – creative writing, web design, graphic design, TEFL etc – and knowing where that got me).

Another potential ‘purpose’ would be to put together the book case which I bought from Argos in the Black Friday sales and which has now spent almost two months in two large cardboard boxes in my narrow hall. At one time I considered making it a post-Christmas project, but I decided to start knitting myself a jumper instead (which is coming along nicely, by the way). I’ve been walking past the boxes for long enough now, I don’t notice them any more, and a further disincentive from putting together the bookcase is that I might then feel obliged to put something on it, which might lead me to think about sorting out the stuff in the study, which could very well precipitate a complete emotional breakdown, so probably best not to go there.

So my plan for the day after I’ve posted this is: brush teeth; dry hair; get dressed; eat breakfast; mess around with my spreadsheets for a couple of hours (depending how much time is left after I’ve finished the aforementioned); spend the afternoon in my chair knitting and listening to the radio; get dinner; do bins (mustn’t forget); watch telly. ‘Purpose’ settled – job done.

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Leaving the Attic

I found a picture the other day of the attic room the last time I saw it, empty of furniture and with the cat sitting on the shelf in the alcove peeping out – I suspect I was hoovering , and that was why she’d climbed up out of the way. I was to be the last to leave the house – to go out of the front door and close it firmly behind me, with the cat in her basket and all her paraphernalia (food bowl, water bowl, litter tray) and drive her to Ex Hubby’s new house. She’d been shut in the empty attic room while the removal men took everything from the rest of the house and loaded the van. E-H (let’s call him that for short) had been waiting for the call from the solicitors to say the money had been transferred and he could go into the office to drop off the keys and pick up the ones for the new house. Weirdly, in our previous house move I’d also been the one left behind to close up while he and the children went to collect the keys. So I was last to enter and last to leave this place, though I’d first left it over seven years earlier. I had to give him time to get to the office, exchange the keys and then drive to the new place – I may even have been waiting for him to call me to confirm he was in there, I can’t remember, in fact I’d forgotten about that day until I saw the photo.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis started when I began my PhD at 38, and never finished. But looking back from this perspective, I think it ended sometime in the year following that last day in the attic, after the final upheaval of moving the last of my stuff deposited that day in E-H’s new garage down to this house, somewhere in the trauma of chemo, maybe the dawning of the year after that – a quarter of a century of crises, depositing me at last on the shores of the third age, the Age (supposedly) of Wisdom.

Through my forties, I had the sense that my life-path was not going in the way I would have chosen, but that time was running out to find anything different. I’d pinned my hopes on being able to continue with an academic career, but that ground into the sand of endless, fruitless job applications, a succession of part-time, temporary admin jobs and a failing marriage. My fifties ultimately brought a new sense of hope, of the potential for doing things differently – it would take courage and persistence that I’d previously dismissed as impossible, and a willingness to walk away from a tarnished dream in search of a shiny new one.

I miss that hope now, as I sit here, on my captain’s chair at my leather-topped desk, watching the gulls fly calling past my window.