Oh for a quiet life
One of the annoying things I find about modern life – well, mine anyway – is that you get so little time to yourself.
I had fondly imagined that by the time I reached my mid-sixties I’d be living in a perfect situation in which, with me bothering nobody and nobody bothering me, I could do whatever I wished.
My kids would have been off my hands and out in the real world. My aged parents wouldn’t be around anymore either because they’d passed on, or else were in residential care and/or being looked after at home.
What would there be not to like?
I wouldn’t necessarily have to do anything but I’d have that ultimate sense of being in complete control and being able to do exactly what took my fancy at any time. I suppose, pared down to the bone, that’s what I really crave – the freedom to do anything, including nothing.
But that’s the difficult part about modern life (and maybe ancient life as well, for all I know or care), isn’t it? You cannot escape getting involved, even if as in my own case it’s the last thing I want, with the lives of others.
When you consider all the annoying things about the 21st Century, the fact that there is just too much – and too many – of everything always remains near the top.
Too many people for a start.
And certainly far too many cars, bicycles, motor bikes, speed cameras and annoying examples of the Great Unwashed out and about in public places.
I’d thank God, if I believed in him, for small mercies. At least my kids are off my hands – that is, to be completely honest about it, I think they are but I don’t really know because we don’t talk much.
I’ve got one parent still alive who, despite making regular promises over the past thirty years that he would never allow this to happen, has become a burden to his descendants. Put bluntly, he long required full time caring assistance before he would even agree to consider, let alone trial, it. Now that he has it, he spends his most of his ‘with it’ waking hours protesting about it and denying he needs it. That’s because – deep down – he wants to be looked after my his family and nobody else. Which, of course, puts a sizable burden on his descendants.
As a result – if you asked me how I’ve spent the last decade of my life – I’d answer that my lot has been to spend 50% of my time as a part-time unpaid carer/companion to my father.
Accordingly, approximately another 15% of my life has been spent travelling in my car either in order to carry out said duty or alternatively to return home afterwards.
And the remaining 35% of my time has been left to conduct what little I can of the rest of my life as I can … that is, of course, after whatever hours of it I’ve been necessarily obliged to allocate either to rest-recovery from my labours and/or sleep.
In the meantime, in parallel, I’ve been able to whittle back how much time I spend with other people because, of course – this was one thing I took on board from my father’s comprehensive range of business advice over the years: “If at all possible, don’t employ people – people mean problems …”.
By personal choice I no longer go out to restaurants, pubs, the theatre, cinema or live concerts.
On the television all I watch are current affairs programmes, sport, the occasional light entertainment quiz show (okay, just Have I Got News For You?) and You’ve Been Framed, plus the very occasional drama (the last being the new series of Line of Duty).
I haven’t sat down and watched a movie on TV in about fifteen years.
That is, apart from the first James Bond outing Dr No (1962).
Well, the truth is, just the bit where Ursula Andress comes out of the turquoise sea onto a sandy Caribbean beach wearing that white bikini with a sheath knife in a scabbard attached to her left hip … which I have had playing on a continuous loop as my computer screensaver since the mid-1990s.
I hate socialising at drinks or dinner parties. Mind you, as a result of not having hosted a dinner party for twenty years and never sending Christmas cards, these days I very rarely get invited to them, a strategy that seem to work for everybody concerned.
That doesn’t, of course, stop other people – friends, acquaintances, family, people I hardly know – ringing up and wanting to spend time with me.
I always find such contact difficult and complicated because I begin from the viewpoint that, if ever I’d wished to see or talk to the individual concerned, I’d have rung them.
This possibility doesn’t seem to occur to those who choose to ring me. They naturally and arrogantly assume – this, I hazard a guess, because they’re social animals like 90% of the human race – that if they should wish to talk to or see me, by definition they’re doing me a favour and/or that I shall also wish to talk to or see them.
Sorry, folks – It Ain’t Necessarily So (as the character Sportin’ Life sang so eloquently in the Gershwin brother’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess).
Recently, rather against my will because I hate petty politics, behind-the-scenes machinations, gossip and time-consuming work, I allowed myself to get roped in on a little corporate coup attempt to oust some incumbents. It worked, but that hasn’t stopped me regretting my stupid decision to get involved ever since.
Now I get twenty to thirty emails per week on various connected topics – all of which I move to a ‘holding file’ in my computer without reading – and twice we’ve met since, on both occasions at my place, apparently ‘because it’s so convenient for everyone else’.
Yeah, right – of course it is.
What it actually means for me is that I have to spend half a day tidying up my home each time, just so that it looks presentable enough to be a venue suitable for my new ‘colleagues’ to hold a meeting in!
There’s nothing else for it.
I’m going off to see a couple of estate agents later this morning to see if I can buy a smallholding upon the island of Orkney or similar. Anywhere where I can get some peace and be left alone …
