NOW WE ARE SIXTY...
Many young people I know find it mystifying that so
many women of my age seem so stressed out and exhausted, even though they work
fewer hours and apparently have fewer things to worry about.
The following are just some of the reasons why we
wander around looking weary and confused:
FIRST REASON: When we
aren’t losing, forgetting, dropping or breaking things, we’re muddling things
up. Tasks that were simple and straightforward in our forties suddenly
become apparently insurmountable obstacles in the path to success. My friends
and I are intelligent ex-professional women, but our brains seem to be slowly
transmuting into jelly.
I lost my house keys this week. I didn’t notice they’d
gone until Tuesday. On Monday, I didn’t leave the house at all so had no reason
to look for them. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I was with P all the time and
relied on him to lock the door, so I had no reason to check that my keys were
in my pocket. So it’s difficult to say when they actually went missing.
Our great-nephew visited on Friday evening and after
his visits our house always looks like a localized tornado has spun through it,
so we checked his playboxes and down the back of the settee and behind the
television and under the chairs. We’ve investigated unlikely places like inside
the fridge, the laundry basket, the cupboard where we keep the alcohol, the box
of cleaning products in the downstairs loo. We’ve emptied the bins, even gone
through the horrible contents of the kitchen bin, but we haven’t found the keys.
I’ve taken every single thing out of my handbag,
including the screwed-up tissues, three half-used tubes of hand cream, gloves,
purse, comb, anti-bacterial handwash, leftover face masks, notebook, pencil,
half-eaten sweets I was storing for Great-nephew, several thousand pens (mostly
ones that don’t work) and bits of broken pens, paper clips, safety pins,
plasters, Savlon, packs of paracetamol and ibuprofen, bottle of water, old
receipts and theatre tickets, unnecessarily printed-out Tesco Rewards vouchers,
my Kindle, my mobile phone, two notebook, tape measure, emery board, lip balm,
eye drops, anti-histamine nasal spray, half-read letter from a friend, spare
pair of knickers [you never know]….Not a trace of my house keys, but I do now
know why my handbag feels like it’s packed with house-bricks.
We’ve retraced my movements over the past week. My
pockets have buttons on the flap which I keep fastened, and I’ve checked them
both for holes, so I don’t really think the keys have fallen out, but just in
case, I’ve rung everywhere I can think of to find out whether they’ve been
handed in or found by cleaning staff: the branch of Costa I went to on Friday,
and the much nicer Bird Café in Hathersage we visited on Thursday, The China
Rose restaurant in Bawtry where we had a celebration meal to mark my 60th
birthday on Saturday evening. I’ve gradually worked my way back day-by-day and
contacted increasingly unlikely places – the Slimming World venue, the place I
have my art classes, the tutorial centres where I work….nothing. No one has
seen them. They have apparently vanished off the face of the earth. The only
thing I’ve learned is that we eat out far too often, and I really don’t need to
carry half a pharmacy with me everywhere I go.
Today, my car keys also went missing. They showed up
an hour or so later having gone through a wash cycle while in the pocket of P’s
trousers, but the point is that I’d been primed by this time to immediately
switch into disaster mode.
When you reach my age, everything that
goes wrong seems to go unresolved. Life becomes an ongoing mystery of small losses, trivial mishaps and minor accidents which are not all that important in
themselves but which cumulatively drive you round the bend.
And they leave you with less energy to
cope with the big losses, important mishaps and major accidents.
So, I still have no house-keys but I figure that if I
lost them somewhere away from the house, whoever finds them won’t know where I
live so won’t be able to use them to break into my house. And if I lost them
outside, close to my house, if someone found them and had nefarious designs, my
house would have been ransacked by now.
Experience tells me that they’ll no doubt turn up
again one day – probably half an hour after I’ve had new keys cut and bought a
replacement key-ring.
SECOND REASON: you get to my age and your brain
turns to mush. For example, to take my mind off the missing
house-keys, I decided to fill in the online form to claim my teachers’ pension
now I’m sixty. Yes, I know, this is not the sort of thing normal people do to
relax. But you start making bad decisions when you reach my age, as if you’ve
reverted to being a teenager - though the bad decisions are less entertaining
than when you were fifteen.
I have an ongoing problem with my pension in that
three years of contributions are missing from my records and it is virtually
impossible to prove I paid them. I’m not going to bore you with the never-ending
saga of my interactions with the nice people at the Teachers’ Pension Scheme,
the less nice people at the Inland Revenue, and the unhelpful bell ends at my
former place of employment. Suffice it to say that I’ve already been through a
lot of pain and aggravation in my attempt to claim a relatively small amount of
money to which I am legally entitled. I am already primed to start trembling
when I hear the word ‘Teachers’ or ‘Pension’, and I long ago developed a
nervous tic at even the thought of the HMRC website.
So when I reached page two of the TPS’s online claim
form and discovered a series of contradictory questions that not only seemed to have been written by
Franz Kafka but which also had no meaningful relevance to my teachers’ pension
as far as I could see, and there was no way to skip them, I found my stress
levels rising like a tsunami.
By the end of the day I was convinced I would die homeless,
having spent my retirement wandering the streets wearing a patched-up fleece
night-gown tied in the middle by a length of washing line and a pair of
flip-flops, skip-surfing and muttering about how I used to be a teacher but they
wouldn’t give me my pension…
THIRD REASON: everything feels more difficult
once you hit your late fifties. I went to London on Thursday
with two friends to see ‘The King and I’, but I woke up with migraine-nausea
and disturbed vision, so spent the first hour of our journey southwards feeling
dreadful. Fortunately, a pleasant woman from Grantham sat next to me and talked
virtually non-stop for the last hour of the journey and that actually made me
feel substantially better, so thanks, unknown lady from Grantham.
My friend B spent several hours later in the day with a migraine, and my other friend T has a bad back so struggled all day but particularly with the rush-hour tube. Although all three of us could obviously be mistaken by bystanders for young supermodels, a few moments close observation would reveal our real ages. We all start feeling and looking tired and achy roughly five minutes into any activity. An Away Day to the capital feels like Frodo’s trip to Mordor. We are losing the will to read tube maps or A-Zs. None of us can see as well as we used to and have to peer closely at signs. Our knes creak when we step onto the pavement from the road,
We have conversations like:
‘Is that the Dominion theatre?’
‘Where?’
‘That big building with the word Dominion on the
front?’
‘Probably. I can only see MacDonalds.’
‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’
‘Oh – wow, those lights are bright! They’ve triggered a
visual disturbance!’
‘Watch out – you’re in the road!’
‘Sorry – My hot flush made me confused.’
The show was excellent but the theatre was stiflingly
hot and the performance was punctuated by the distant rumble of tube trains rattling
along beneath us, like the vibrations of an underground disco under our seats.
But that’s normal too: being sixty means often feeling like people just out of sight are having a
much better time than you.
There were admittedly a few things that would have been irritating about the London trip at any age. It rained heavily all day. The media's hysterical prediction of a '450 mile wall of snow' about to scrape all living things from the face of the earth [north of Birmingham, any way] in the afternoon caused a slight worry that the train home might be cancelled
(unfounded as it turned out), and I had to pay £21 for a bacon
cheeseburger, small fries and a diet coke from Five Guys.
But the other thing about getting older is that your
sense of humour seems to return to what it was in your teenage years. It has to. You’d be searching
for a multi-storey car park to leap off otherwise [though you’d never be able
to climb over the safety barrier]. Despite her back problems, T dragged me back on board a tube
train on the Piccadilly Line, saving me from being lost forever in the bowels
of the earth, prey to potential kidnap by rogue Albanian people-traffickers. I caused
deep irritation to my dear friends by muttering frequently, throughout the
afternoon, ‘Twenty-one fucking pounds for a burger?! I can’t believe it!’, and
they were kind enough to find it amusing.
Then there was B’s obsession with buying a sandwich
for the journey home from Pret-a-Manger. She was so focused on ‘getting a
sandwich from Pret’ that she almost refused to let us go to the toilets in Kings
Cross first, as we emerged from the underground at the end of our quest. I felt
like my legs were going to give way beneath me when we reached the station, and
I seriously contemplated spending the hour and a half before our train up north
arrived, just sitting on the toilet having a nap.
Instead, we hobbled out across the station concourse,
T with her bad back, me with my Sudden Onset Exhaustion. B, by contrast, was doing what she’d been
doing most of the day, walking energetically ahead like she was blazing a trail
for us to follow. She's like one of those Victorian Pioneers Of The Empire women. I can picture her sitting side-saddle on a camel chatting to Lawrence of Arabia, or climbing Kilimanjaro in a bustle. T suggested we buy her
a dog lead and threw her a tennis ball. Possibly in the spirit of mischief, T
pointed out The Upper Crust as a potential place to buy a sandwich, and B
looked momentarily as if she’d been betrayed by someone she trusted:
‘I thought we could buy a sandwich from Pret,’ she said,
in a slightly hurt voice.
I’m beginning to suspect now that buying a sandwich
from Pret was actually her main incentive for suggesting and organizing this day-trip to
London…
So we gave in.
Guess what she actually bought from
Pret? Yes, a salad.
We found some seats on the station concourse, near the
doors so the damp cool air refreshed us, and we listened to a man who must
surely have won first prize in a competition to find the world’s worst busker,
working hard to hit some of the right notes to several popular songs. B became
my BFF after she bought me a flat white and that sweet, sweet caffeine filled
my veins, enabling me to once again stand without support and move my legs like
a normal human woman.
All three of us are sixty now. To be fair, I don't feel much different - I've felt pretty dreadful for at least the past two decades!
I'm clinging to my diet like a drowning sailor clings to a buoy - desperately trying to stay floating while the sea of fat and sugar threatens to drag me under. I have one more session at the art class, and my sister bought me some oil paints and a mini easel for my Sixtieth so I'll be able to complete the half-finished paintings I've done, at home. I have several Rock Choir events and several theatre trips in the pipeline. Who knows, I might even finish painting the bathroom before 2025, if I make a massive effort...
Here are my partially completed still life paintings:
Thanks for the entertaining blog Lou. I can identify with it so it made me giggle all the way through. Hope you persevere with your painting, as it's impressive. xxxx
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading this, DD. I like doing the painting but it is very time-consuming and actually quite tiring. But my sketching has improved due to the course and I've experienced oil paints for the first time. I'm going to have to make these Mid-Month Musings shorter, I think, and focus on one topic in future, because they do go on and on, don't they? Also, every time I re-read them I can see things that would be funnier or snappier! Still, on we go...
ReplyDeleteThey are very entertaining Lou, but I can see why you would want to shorten them as it takes a lot of energy. xxxx
ReplyDelete