Retirement suggests retreat from life. Can it be a way of finding your own meaning in each day? Saturday 15th June 2024 at the Borders Book Festival at Melrose.
Posted on 16 June 2024 by stevendouglasblog
I am already retired and in many ways feel it easier not to be defined by work situations that are in the main entirely alienating and about knowledge and skills applied without consultation with the development of your own values. It wasn’t always thus. The profession I was involved with: teaching and social work werre both once designed by values into what we called vocations. Today I think people in those professions are too often lead by prescribed process and stands values down into secondary place.
I blog to continue learning and to extract meaning from each day. Of course, It doesn’t always work. I am on a ‘holiday’ break with hubby (I have blogged on why I put scare quotes around the word ‘holiday’ at this link). Yesterday, I contemplated the idea of ‘pretence’ as input to meaning in my day. After typing yesterday’s blog, we walked our dog, Daisy. You see her today below waiting g for today’s adventure:
In fact, she suggested the theme. Daisy was a rescue dog and, though often bold, her usual response to life is fear, And She is on high alert taking pretend threats as nervously real ones, as if imagination always fed back into some trauma we don’t realise. We tried a beautiful walk at the Harestanes park just above the river Tweed north of Jedburgh, where we are staying. Soon after the walk, we met a family with five children who were having fun playing at being wild animals running through the wood. Daisy froze, tucked her tail between her legs, and would walk no further. Hence, we went on to Melrose for a walk higher up on the Tweed and in view of the Eildon Hills, beloved by Walter Scott.
Change of venue worked and after she had done various delirious roly-polys in the park, we walked from the ford on the Tweed at Melrose back on the dyked river path.
We walked the field path to the ‘Orchard’ field of the Book Festival estate, currently hosting some of its marquees and food tents and crammed with people. Daisy seemed overjyed by the crowds, as noisy as the family a Harestanes but not pretending to wildness.
Our aim was to go to the Provincial Book Fairs Association fair at Melrose.
The event was somewhat sad, a few stalls, none with things of interest. So coffee and lunch later we walked back to the river route back to our parked car, bypassing the ‘pretend’ Roman soldiers trying to build up interest in the Roman museum.
And thence back to our cottage mid a thunderstorm.
The best bit of the day was revisiting Melrose for our booked events. First at 7.15, we saw the master of pretend, the impressionist stand-up classic Rory Bremner.
Bremner is the master of pretence. A huge marquee rumbled with laughter – for the tent was full to the gills. We rolled aroind on our seats at his impressions of the figures of the current ‘governments’ of the last 5 years, although before he tried his new Keir Starmer on us, brilliant so that pretence was perhaps straining to the new reality, he asked for fans of the real Starmer to raise their hands of they liked that politician. Out of an audience of, say, 500, not a single hand was raised although it was clear that the hope of a dull government and probably not led by anything at all, let alone principles and values, was preferred after the kids’ play of the present government (more dangerous than ‘wild’ animals).
But Rory’s performance was more than his wonderful pretend impressions of politicians and celebrities past and present. He included Charles III, of course, who appears to be a friend. It was a performance that became personsl. When he spoke of his advocacy for the concept of neurodivergency, he spoke also of his own struggles with a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the absurdities of the label and the need for it. People with the label are not in deficit of attention, he said, but have an over-plus amount of attention to too many things, if not often focused on the things institutions of learning want it focused upon. He spoke of the positives of this kind of less focal system of noticing and interpreting the world that has made people thus labelled preferred in some professions. But there was a kind of dulling of the event I thought as Bremner suddenly ‘did’ no more pretend people and “did’ himself instead as a man who had vulnerabilities and his own capacity foe being emptied of the charisma that never let’s off jumping from one pretence to another. Bremner’s event overran its time limit. There were things to notice here. A wonderful man seemed drained by the rush of his ability to be others. A brilliant evening ended flatly.
After that event, we had supper at the Orchard food tents, standing with our trays as we waited for the event with Juano Diaz. Juano was a delight and not at all the person I expected; the who might be intuited from my blog on his book Slum Boy. See my earlier blog at this link. The photographs below show a person who responded to his interviewer, a delight himself, bending to hear audience questions and responses too, concerned to answer questions for people as they wanted them answered.
His piece became most moving when he spoke of the son, now 8, adopted by him and his partner who also came from the same failed care system that so built an army of barriers to any development that grew from love. This boy must be showered with love now.
I remember Margaret Thatcher and her Section 28. It was a cruel tool used to implement hate and the mass cancellation of real lives
I remember Margaret Thatcher and when I hear of Juano talking about parenting I hate her again. Hate is not a good thing but to attack people you make into the ‘object of policy’ is the most hateful aspect of right wing a-liberal and unloving attempts to control and regulate family diversity.
Juano was shyer than I thought him, more modest than a writer of his quality should be and charming. I loved meeting him and he kindly suggested I be in the picture below with him.
And he signed my book. He is lovely. There is no pretence in the end of my day.
So retirement has to let you think and let you think outside options in the prescribed boxes. Pretence is what the normative world does in order to impose itself on everyone. Children who act as wild animals do it to play at how to empathise with the other, even the thing presented to them as fearful only. As for Daisy, she was damaged, but she is loved. Retirment gives us time to love her.
All my love
Steven xxxxxxx
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