Letter from Croydon 3 - The end of July 2024
"What the hell do I do now?" - The Retirement Question
I am sitting in the pleasantly informal Station Cafe outside Selhurst Station, being efficiently refuelled by a double macchiato. The owner informs me that macchiato means stain in Italian as the strength of the coffee is merely supposed to be stained with the comforting milky froth. This is undoubtedly one of the joys and privileges of my retirement, being able to meet up with friends in cafes or pubs, or merely to use a suitable caffeine or bitter station to work on my laptop, or simply gaze out of the window, pondering the dress state of strangers or the state of the world. How lucky I am to be able to get up when I want and do whatever I want to do without at present having to worry too much about rising prices and utility bills. I appreciate that many retirees are not in such a fortunate position.
Yet what should I do? How can I prioritise my desires and ambitions when it is difficult to know how many years are left to me. The recent cruel irony of Michael Mosely, the friendly TV and Radio Doctor, who helped so many people to live healthier, longer lives yet whose own life was cut unjustly short, reveals the wisdom of taking nothing for granted. Indeed, perhaps if I could plagiarise the title of his recent radio series, I have my own ‘just one thing’, that I will do my best to remember. Every morning I wake up I should try and be grateful to still be breathing, for no matter what trials and tribulations lie in store, I am lucky to live in a time when the average lifespan has been consistently rising; also lucky to live at a time when medicine had advanced enough to give me a triple heart bypass at the ridiculously young age of 50, which has definitely prolonged my life.
Yes, I have much to be thankful for, and hopefully I have made so many mistakes throughout my life, that I may even have learned from some of them. So, having woken up with gratitude, I can then try my best to breathe through my nose (not always quite so easy with my perennial rhinitis), brush my teeth standing on one leg and work out ways of including more turmeric into my diet. These are all tips from Michael Mosely that might help improve my health and prolong my life. Easy to incorporate within my daily routine, and I shall try to do so, but they hardly answer the question of what I should do with the rest of my life.
Retirement offers an excellent opportunity to do many of the things that one didn;t get round to doing or pursuing as much as one wanted in one’s busy working life. Sometimes, it even throws up the odd bonus - Although I had often daydreamed about having a home abroad, in the foothills of the mountains, not that far away from the Meditterranean, I never really believed it would come to pass. I have my wife and daughter to thank for the courage and commitment needed to ensure that we now have a small property in a village in the foothills of the Appenines about a 45 minute drive away from the coast. On top of my already crowded senior citizen schedule, this has added a few more interesting and exciting challenges to my life plan - to continue learning Italian, to learn more about gardening in Tuscany and the flora and fauna of the Tuscan landscape, to at least walk the Tuscan section of the Via Francigena, the old pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome and to try to understand as much as possible about the history, culture and society of the ancient kingdom of Lunigiana, and perhaps even to dare to try and write about it.
Yet, much as I look forward to these challenges and appreciate my good fortune in having them, most of my year will still be spent within the borough of Croydon, this rather downtrodden, much neglected and widely maligned and mocked southern part of Greater London. Here I already have a few commitments, a local park and community garden to maintain and develop and to attempt to help set up a community owned garden centre and cafe that employs people with learning difficulties. I have games of tennis to play, a Book Club and Green Party meetings to attend and family and friends to keep up with. Even it seems in dear downtrodden Croydon, if one isn’t scrabbling around to find enough money to put food on the table or pay the latest utility bill, one can live a full and rewarding life. Hopefully, though I can still find the time to read the ever increasing mountain of books that I seem to be assembling, and even write the odd poem, story and letter from Croydon. Hopefully in my small way, I can try to make this borough that I’ve become oddly attached to, a little bit better.
PS Ashamed to say that I forgot to stand on one leg, while brushing my teeth this morning - Must do better tomorrow!.