For obvious reasons iv’e been away from the keyboard for a few weeks while I run back and forth to the hospital with Jackie for her to have her chemotherapy. In this post I reflect on what finishing the workshop project means, or might mean, for me and talk a bit about the crossroad in life that Jackie and I have reached.
The main theme of this post arrived in my head while we were on holiday in Weymouth (Dorset Uk) and it was an observation that the town center is on it’s last legs as a once lively beach holiday venue. That observation mainly came about when we found that a useful food supermarket had closed it’s town branch and moved out to an out of town location just as happened in two other seaside towns and one city ; in a way it’s a kind of Canary in the coalmine or quick litmus test of the health and viability of a town center when this particular chain moves out. In the city in question I was told that the main reason the store (M&S) had moved out was due to the cost of store security and the fact that even with security they still experienced a high level of shoplifting.
With many businesses on the high street already closed it felt that outside of high summer the town is already at the last chance saloon ; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the banks close their local branches as their corporate model seems to be to reduce costs – actual staff being an expensive option and easily disposable – and push every customer towards computer apps and offshore call centers.
With this post I come up hard against the problem of having inadequate language or writing skills : I want to call Weymouth as not middle class – although what it is I can’t say – and nearby Dorchester as very middle class. Psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson would probably say that the use of class in place description as being low resolution at best but it’s been long said that one thing us English people have is an acute sense of class consciousness thus it is what it is because I choose to describe it so.
I should really start another post that takes on the whole idea of class and class consciousness and chews it to the bone but frankly I can’t be bothered : for me the basic idea does have utility even though I can see the holes in any argument either way. For now though it seems reasonable to say what a middle class town center looks like and in comparison to show how Weymouth isn’t but rather it is what it is – whatever that other is.
Take a walk down Weymouth high street and take a note of what is and isn’t there, you’ll find several outlets for industrially made food like product (fast food), a place to get your stolen smartphone unlocked, several charity shops and a place to get your haircut (Turkish barber)…..and several pubs of course. What you won’t find now is somewhere to buy decent food – not even a greengrocer or local butcher – you won’t find a bookshop (Smiths doesn’t count). In the opposite example you will find a high end supermarket and several artisinal deli food stores, there is a chain bookstore and one of the most marginal of high street stores – a specialist kitchen shop. I could describe how the people on the street are different, Weymouth being a good example of the people that have slipped between the cracks and are getting by with alcohol and recreational drugs : that, in my mind is where it becomes very judgemental and that’s Turd Towns territory so i’m not going there.
Anyway…..to continue with the actual blog post……
With the workshop roof done and insulated, the floor done and work table/bench in and finally the sliding barn doors in place I can now shut and seal the workshop against weather. Last week, for the first time, I took my morning coffee out there and spent a while just sitting at the big worktable while taking a deep breath and working out what to do next : my Dutch style carpenters chest is near completion and I don’t have an immediate follow up project in mind.
It was always a given that health is worse after the age of 60 : for example a heart transplant used to have a cut off criterion of 65 or younger. You all know about me with strokes and Jackie with PMR but now she has something that requires chemotherapy and that’s pretty damn serious whichever way you view it. Our situations are different of course and yet in another way strikingly similar. My strokes were, eventually. a huge wake up call to do something positive and radical about my health and our future. In Jackie’s case she wanted to carry on working up until the time that she has to revalidate her registration but is coming round to the knowledge that she might have to knock it on the head early.
It’s more than a year now since I wrote about giving up sailing : my question being had I left it much longer than I should have done ?. Although it seemed the obvious at the time now i’m not so sure. I over did it with the boat I built to be on a trailer at home and quite quickly found that we couldn’t easily manage it so I won’t be going down that route again. That’s just practical talk though but what i’m asking now is whether I should give sailing, and traveling on the sea, another and more certainly final try. For sure it would need something based in a boatyard and something that I could get aboard easily but again, that’s just practical talk.
It might be my last chance saloon to have a boat again and do some of the trips I always imagined : just one idea I had was to sail a kind of homage voyage to the late Maurice Griffiths and even that might take several years poking around the rivers and creeks around the Thames estuary. That’s one choice for the end of my 60’s and i’m very engaged by the idea. I can think of a dozen poor reasons why I shouldn’t do any of the above but the one overwhelming reason that I should is that it’s been how I define my life and maybe it’s my last chance to do it. Yes, I know sailors who still do it in their 70’s and 80’s, for example, right now Swedish boat builder and sailor is about to set off on a circumnavigation in a tiny self built boat and he’s in his late 80’s.
The Alternative solutions.
There are solutions to the problems of being a retired middle aged bloke – oh and add the strokes – and they’re the same choices and options that other retired, middle aged and middle class blokes tend to choose. Firstly there’s the garden and I for one have been having a right old fight with ours this month after ignoring the Brambles, Nettles, Budliea and so on : it’s taken six months to bash it into shape for the winter and I have the Bramble scars to show for it.
Then there’s the middle aged, born again biker phenomenon : the one big problem with that is usually that of having more funds than skill or sense and ending up with something too fast and too powerful but then only taking it out on nice days. I did think about, and write about, having a bike to book end my riding days with and i’d mostly settled on a 650 cc Royal Enfield as an Enfield was my first bike and in a few months time I would be able to front up the cash for a 650 : something of that capacity is now regarded as a classic middleweight rather than a high performance track machine. I think that iv’e mostly decided against it as I don’t really have the strength for anything that size and weight but don’t fancy something that would be much less of an A road/motorway capable all rounder.
Perhaps the best reason to not have a bike again is that I can tell from when I drive, I don’t even drive very much or very often, that i’m not doing it very well. I’m safe enough according to Jackie but I don’t feel that i’m driving very confidently or fluidly and I would suggest that even riding a midweight bike nowadays needs a whole load of both. The final update on that for now is that I had a couple of days of super stressful driving (car driving) and the thing I found was that I barely had my shit together enough to drive a car let alone the additional stress and problems that come with bikes.
The final choice of things to do that would engage my mind to the max is my newly finished workshop and it’s one of my long term ideas that could easily turn me into a typical men in sheds kind of bloke.
One of the potential projects in the workshop, and actually for the workshop itself, is to become a railway modeler and have one working layout that I build into the second floor of my workshop dresser and another one at the same scale/gauge combination to be built specifically built with the aim of taking it to exhibitions. The latter already has it’s baseboard built. some of it’s base scenery in progress and it’s main theme already worked out. Pretentious I know to already assume that I could build something worthy of exhibiting but i’m nothing if not pretentious !
While very engaging – iv’e already done the research and made the critical decisions about time and place, and the scale gauge question – it feels very old bloke in a shed-ish to go down that route when I could be out there making new memories by doing the kind of things I always wanted to do with a small sailing boat and didn’t. I know that my mind is already well engaged with the practicalities of buying, modifying and owning a small boat again. It’s possibly true that this might be the last chance saloon kind of time to do that.
So, there they are mostly all laid out and I feel that I have to make a positive choice now about which way to go – that or just drift through this stage of life somewhat aimlessly. Right now of course my mid is fully engaged with Jackie’s treatment and nothing happens until that’s complete and she’s in clinical remission. In the real world i’m paying a lot more attention to what we eat and how I cook so I might even be trying to be a better cook.
With a bike largely out of the frame now and that whole side of life also very much behind me i’m getting more end more into the idea of having another boat that we can both do trips on and use as as a travelling home. Iv’e already been sizing up Liberty’s again but am aware that slightly larger would be better for space and slightly wider and heavier would be better for stability. Any shed based project could be going on in the slow background – in a way it already is – but i’m very aware of keeping most of the money set aside for a potential boat
Be well…..Best wishes Y’awl.
