Mid-Month Musings: February 2024

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 60^th 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:

fruit [oil paints] - unfinished

Another attempt at the fruit on a different day [oil paints] - unfinished

jug, vase, cake stand [charcoal, water-colour, acrylic] - unfinished

 

Abstract hill and sea scene done at home to use up remaining paint on pallette [acrylic]

Flowers [watercolour]