Despise not a man in his old age; for we also shall become old.
Ecclesiasticus/Sirach, Chapter 8, Verse 7
Two years have now gone past. How am I coping with being retired? If you asked me in the street, as people do, I’d tell you that I was enjoying it. And to the inevitable follow-up, did I miss work?, I’d answer, I miss the people. While, I suppose, these answers are accurate, they fall far from a strict truth. Without work to structure my life around I spend most of my time doing nothing very much. Other pensioners are constantly wittering on about retirement unleashing a, new phase of my life and saying how busy they are. What are they doing that I’m missing? Why amn’t I busy? Why do I remain leashed?
I often see them, these other pensioners, the unleashed, what we’ll call the younger of our old-adults, battering around. They’re gregarious, they flock, they chatter. I see them along the canal, walking, running, wheezing along in great chains of bikes. They go to the gym, they do pilates, they join night classes, I see them taking art lessons in the wee shop down the road from me, heads bald, gray, or both, bowed to their work; restaurants and cafés are stuffed full of them, watching the world smugly, having a chat. What is it with them? This fitness and self-improvement? Isn’t the time well passed for that? Perhaps they think that they’ll escape dementia? Live longer lives? A glance at the older of our old adults, you see these as well, should give them pause, you want to live longer like that? I do none of these things. Even if I was interested the thought of mixing with other young old-adults would put me right off.
I don’t watch TV anymore, but my wife does, so sometimes I hear the adverts. I don’t know what she’s watching but it’s clearly younger old-adult stuff, the adverts are all directed at people of our age, who have some money and can still move about a bit. Paying for your own funeral (it costs nearly £4000 and they want the money right away an old woman whines, well that’s your problem, I’ll be dead) and holidays feature heavily. The trip of your life, accompanied by others of your seniority. Cruises seem to be popular, I can think of nothing worse. You might have trouble fleshing out the full details of your own personal hell, I have no trouble with mine, it involves being on a cruise ship. Banged up in a pathogen filled metal box, on a wobbly ocean, unable to escape from people, with tour guided day-trips around tourist-trap ghettos thrown in as an extra. Ballard should have written about a cruise ship, instead of a High Rise, it would have been more realistic, almost not fiction at all. No, no holidays for me thank you.
What do I do? Well I paint a bit, I’ve taken up oil painting, I play online chess and Magic, and I write this. I read a lot. I had intended to spend more time playing with my toy soldiers but having the money for a decent collection rather spoiled that. When I had no money I had hours of fun planning my next purchase, dreaming about my perfect army, doing my best job with what I could get. Now that I can buy more-or-less what I want I’ve lost interest. It might even have always been a work thing; I did most of my painting at school when I was on overtime; and all the games I played I played after school with the young adults. I do still think about getting back into it, especially after I’ve read a history book about some long-ago war. But for now it’s got lost.
Mostly I spend my time on the computer. I programme a bit, I might find an itch to scratch soon and get more into that. But the bulk of my time is spent surfing news sites and despairing about the state of the world. I don’t do social media, not for me the cesspits of x, and the other echo-chambers of bile, or the body parts of snaptwat, so I might miss some of the worst things. Still what I read seems bad enough. The poor old four horsemen are well overworked. They should complain to their maker (is that god or the other guy?) about their unsustainable workload; we need at least two more anyway — one for AI and one for environmental disaster. Everywhere you look there’s suffering, all the old favourites and spanking brand-new man-made cruelties and ills. It’s hard not to believe that some end is near, that finally, we’re going to kill ourselves off. And perhaps we deserve it? Surely the world is in a worse place than it’s ever been before?
In general I don’t think that we live in an especially difficult age. There’s a tendency to see today’s problems as of a different order from the past; that current times are changing particularly fast and are peculiarly tough. That we face new, more complex, existential problems unknown to the past. People in the past had it easier — those were simpler times, where things moved slowly and any dangers were minor and mostly far off. I doubt it.
I remember my grampa telling me that when he was born mankind couldn’t fly and well before the end of his life we’d been to the Moon. Rapid technological change has been with us since the start of the industrial revolution. But rapid change has always had a part in our lives anyway, I’ll bet Hezekiah thought that the world was moving quite fast enough when Sennacherib’s army pitched their tents in the Valley of the Cheesemakers. So, sure, just now we don’t want for problems, it’s how we rise to the challenge that matters. We’re clever Monkeys, surely we can come up with some decent plans?
When you think of Victorians you probably think fussy prudes. They’re much maligned I think. They faced huge problems too — cities full of slums and disease, poisoned water, poisoned air, a working class, poor, without education, overworked, who died young without hope. An owner class who felt that a load of dead proles was just a normal cost of doing business. They had the courage to face up these problems, they didn’t always succeed but they did at least try. And they had a lot of success — they passed laws, they built houses, infrastructure, they created parks and gardens. If you look around today’s towns you’ll still see their works everywhere. Our shit still flows away through the sewers they built. My own working life was mostly spent working in Victorian schools, over a hundred years old, still in use. Even when they stop being schools the buildings get used, they’re still good buildings. The Victorians did things, they didn’t throw their hands up and say, nothing can be done! They tried to make their world a better place for everyone.
The people driving these changes didn’t have to do this, they often had a lot to lose, they were doing very nicely out of the way things were. So why did they do it? Fear of revolution will have played its part, but I suspect that religion was the main driver. They committed unspeakable crimes in their god’s name but they did do a fair lot of good. We can’t expect religion to help us out too much these days. The loud, white, righteous men who make all the noise and have influence seem to favour the unspeakable crimes.
So what can we expect from the other leaders of today? What are our billionaires doing with their cash? They’re building spaceships! Now if the plan is something like the Golgafrinchan B Ark, but an A Ark, for the important people — the billionaires, the bankers, the hedge fund managers, the internet influencers, the CEOs of large companies. The people who get stuff done. If they’re all going to relocate to Mars, leaving us useless mouths behind, I can get on board with that. They seem to be stupid enough to fall for it, a lot of them went to Epstein island without noticing all those teenage girls. What did they think was going on? Did they think he was running some kind of finishing school? Alas, apart from Musk I doubt if they’re that stupid. No, we can expect no help from them. In fact what they want is to make things much, much worse. What are we to do then?
When I was at university we spent many long nights coming up with plans to make the world a better place. Many of these involved a working class uprising (we were mostly lower middle class). A general strike would bring down the government and usher in… we weren’t very sure. But it was going to be much better! This was at the beginning of the Thatcher years — inflation and unemployment were rampant, factories were closing down, it seemed like everybody was heading for the dole. Even astrologers could predict the coming miners’ strike. When I got thrown out of university, got a job in the Post Office and met a section of the working class I began to see some issues with these plans. Unions were for getting better wages, they weren’t there to change the world.
I remember going on strike once. It was in support of a Nurses’ strike, in those days secondary action was still quasi-legal, other unions had been asked to come out for a couple of hours and join the picket line (that would be against the law now). Only Iain and I were willing to do it, management tried to stop us, but the real pressure came from the union. We went anyway, and because we worked on the counter, and nobody would scab by taking our places, our strike was noticed. The queues were out the door apparently, when people found out the reason threats were made against our lives. For a while Iain and I were marked out as Trots. This wasn’t too much of a problem — the Post Office was a family place in those days. That the youngsters might kick against the system was expected, they’d grow up soon. I remember a postman coming over to us in the canteen to say that he was, proud of you young lads. Still, it made me realize that working class solidarity was a fiction, I could dump any syndicalist plans.
For a while there was hope in Labour. Michael Foot was leader, the party said all the right things, and did all the wrong ones. Then came the Falklands and a miners’ strike, unions looked out-of-control again; the economy got a wee bit better, Charles and Di tied the knot, the country could be proud again, we’d won a war and Di looked like an angel in her dress. The Tories romped the next election. We’d need some other plan if we wanted to change the world.
After I started working as a janny, which could be loosely described as working in education, I decided that education was the answer. (This is an example of me finding a good reason for doing something after I’d done it.) After all it makes sense — bring up the next generation to avoid our mistakes, be better people, build a better future. I was being a wee bit optimistic, education must be part the plan, but it’s going to take more than that to solve our problems. Still, working as a janny, I could pretend to myself that, in a small way, I was doing something to build a better world. Now that I’ve retired what am I doing to improve the world?
That, I think, is the root of my dissatisfaction with myself — I feel that I’m not doing anything worthwhile. Not that I ever really did. But I must be able to pretend to myself that I’m still working for the revolution. But what am I to do?
Herodotus tells a story about the burial customs of two groups of people, one who bury their parents, the other who eat them once they’re dead. Each are horrified about how the other one disrespects their parents in such a disgusting way. Some god or gods will be involved somewhere I suspect, but they can’t both be right. A prophet wasn’t listening properly when god was laying down his rules, or some auger misread the sacrificial tripes. I’ve always felt that this, probably made-up, tale has a lot to say about the human condition.
If these groups lived within marching distance of one another it’s not hard to predict what’s going to happen. The local big men, spying a chance, will whip up the hatred; the priests will avow that the gods are onside. Pretty soon the blood will be flowing, spears will be flung, atrocities will occur, fires will be set. Nobody will win, they’ll just weaken themselves so that the group over the other hill, who throw their parents out for the Vultures, can sweep in and enslave what’s left of them.
Now on the whole I’d prefer not to be eaten by my in-laws, but I don’t believe that there’s going to be anything left of me after I’ve died to care. If they were going to kill me so that they could have me with two veg for their dinner that would be a different matter. But if I’m already dead? I think that I could cope.
Few things are as sensitive to humans as what we do with the corpses after what once moved them has gone. Even christians have problems with it. It’s always be a bone of contention as to what, exactly, is going on in the mass. So it wasn’t too unexpected that the Romans suspected that it was some form of cannibalism. Which lead to the christians getting eaten by Lions. Which wasn’t in the scriptures at all. In the end though it doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t eat my dad go ahead.
I think the main problem was that these groups didn’t know each other, they were strangers, false tales could be told. Here in Scotland we once had two groups of protestants who believed much the same things, whose rituals were very similar. The only difference is that one sect had bishops, which the other didn’t like. Lots of people died because of that difference. These sects lived in different districts, once they started mixing, and got to know one another they agreed that you were allowed to differ. The lord’s prayer that I recited every morning in primary came from a hymnbook that caused a riot (and war) in Scotland when Charles I tried to introduce it. Now it was safe for the kids. Time and familiarity make molehills out of mountains.
So what would happen to these groups if they grew up together? Shared a village, worked together, played together, got bevvied together down at the inn. That ‘er next door buried her mother might be seen as just a wee foible.
——Mummy, can I go round to Jimmy’s? They’re having a party.
——Alright. But whatever you do don’t touch the pie.
So, there you have it, some bits of my life, some thoughts from my mind.
