What to do now..? 2020 10 15 (5) 25 2 11
Well I still have my autobiography to finish off,
the last 15 to 20 years of my working life and thereafter the years of my
retirement.
But it really is no big deal because the end has been
coming so long already that I have begun to accept the inevitability of it. And
if there is anything to recommend old age it is simply that, that you come to
realise that it has been coming so long already, that one begins to accept the
inevitability of it all, like it's not as if one is going to be caught with
one's pants down, one cannot expect to be embarrassed by anything anymore.
Rather I guess there are so many new aspects in
one's life as the aging process gathers momentum that in the end it becomes
another of life's great adventures.
Like one of the things I do in these troubled times
of the Covid-19 pandemic is to confront the possibility head on that I may
never get to visit my home country of England anymore: simply because they are
having so much greater difficulties getting on top of it compared to little
Finland (only population-wise with maybe 1/12th that of UK in a much
bigger area).
And this year for the first time I have started
counting metres climbed in our own town setting myself targets, and yesterday
for the first time during my, what earlier would have taken a full hour to
climb, that is 5 times scaling the Water-Tower and Parish Church hill, set
myself the additional target of doing it at a faster pace, surprising myself with
how much under the hour I achieved for my exertions.
Still another new activity was to list the
off-sickness I have experienced since I sold our yacht in 2012, which had the
effect of releasing me for a second visit to Scotland each year to complete my
remaining hills when to begin with I scaled 24 new peaks, but which through
sickness with stuff like catching virulent chest infections in over-crowded
shared accommodation, I found I had to adjust my life-style to take account of
such considerations: to the extent I was able to eliminate the occurrences after
a number of years and get back to climbing 19 new peaks if not more since
increasingly as I closed on the number remaining hills which became ever more
isolated.
This last activity has also drawn attention to the
fact that for some of the years I am referring to perhaps it wasn’t so much
that my immune system was letting me down, as being due to the fact that there
were problems I hadn’t yet realised in that one of my medications wasn’t being
administered as it should have been…
All in all then my wife and I are living in a very
forgiving environment, with so far very few Corona cases and such cases as we
have had are well documented so we know where and how they arrived to our town
and therefore how to isolate them.
Finally if it transpires that people do stop
visiting my blog in the not-too-distant future it also has to be noted that the
new authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of Nigeria I have recently
discovered, and through her possibly Chinua Achebe for his books “Arrow of Gold”
and “Things Fall Apart” I have yet to read, my horizons in literature are
currently on the ascendency.
Wherever you may be I hope your circumstances go some way to approaching the nicer aspects of the ones moulding my old age, and if you choose to go on visiting or wish to check on some of the more pictorial aspects of where I am at, well I hope you are able to access them!? Have a good day everyone!
Footnote: 25 2 11 former title "What to do when people stop reading my blog?" 2020 10 15 (5)
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