The Joy of Hitting 62?
By Steve Sharp
I don’t have to pretend to like the theatre or foreign holidays and I can spend all afternoon in the pub with my pals.
So says Marcus Berkmann in his book - Still a Bit of Snap in The Celery (or K.B.O*) - published Thursday this week.
It caught my eye because Marcus makes great play of being retired at 62, which is precisely the average age a client joins us at Chancery Lane.
He makes some brilliant and funny observations. Here are a couple on the aforementioned theatre and holidays:
I used to go to the theatre quite a lot, well, four or five times a year. This felt like a hell of a lot when you have to sit through all those plays, and no one can ever agree on whether to eat before or after. And then there's all the travelling time and the incredible cost of even quite poor seats and the glass of mediocre red wine in the interval, the dull middle-aged and elderly people in the audience who make you feel like you've gone to a Conservative Party Conference by mistake, and the desperate, almost fevered wait for the end of the play so you can escape.
Travel can be an awful faff. The sheer boredom of booking all your various connections, of packing most of your belongings into a tiny suitcase. Of getting to the airport in time for your 7:00 AM flight, of being bodily squeezed into a tiny seat. Of having to drink yourself silly to overcome your fear of flying. Of the sheer, brutal heat of wherever you land, hitting you like a frying pan in the face, of horrible little concrete hotel rooms. Of the sour din of air conditioners. Of the profusion of man-eating insects. Of the price of a miniscule bottle of beer. Of the creeping dread of returning home. Of the even more depressing journey home, not to mention the credit card bill that assails you a couple of weeks later when you have quite forgotten you had been on holiday at all.
His idea of the perfect holiday now it seems, is a cottage with low ceilings in an out-of-the-way Dorset village.
When he is not being an old curmudgeon, he points towards the pleasure of letting go of the drudgery of the past, suggesting that the purging of ambition is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to a human being.
All that scurrying around for personal advantage and to what end? What seemed compulsory in your 20s and an act of increasing desperation in your 40s now starts to look like a symptom of mental illness. If you are still attempting to climb the greasy pole in your 60s, you will have noticed that there is more grease on it than ever.
As Primo Levi once apparently wrote. “When does thankless toil end and the pleasure begin? If not now, when?”
He discusses the issue of a common concern, that men in particular can find that they have few or no friends in retirement.
He has made a point of working on that recently with a group he calls five, not-quite-as-employed-as-they-used-to-be friends, with whom he formed a club called WALLS: the Wednesday Afternoon Long Lunch Club.
We meet once a month in a pub at about 1:00 PM. We eat, we drink, we talk drivel and if it's summer and we are outdoors, we stare at passing girls. After five or six hours of this, we stagger to our various homes, pass out and snore like lawnmowers.
It is as utterly and straightforwardly enjoyable as anything you can imagine. The pleasures of The Long Lunch are grievously underrated by modern capitalist society, which generally favours a sandwich at your desk and maybe a Cadbury's Twirl for afters. What joyless lives people lead.
Long lunches with friends can only be a good thing, even if we talk endlessly about our aches and pains and demented parents. And rolling home feeling merry at 5:30 is definitely an improvement on going back to work and snoozing at your desk. My feeling is that for all the fears of the future. These are, in some ways, the best years of our lives. Ambition gone, children grown up, pubs and restaurants open, absolutely no need to go to the theatre if you don't want to. I'm not sure I see any downsides, except those that are undoubtedly to come.
There should be only one item on the bucket list, which is ‘tear up the bucket list.’
Oh, come on Marcus, that’s enough!
You’re 62 for goodness’ sake. Positively middle-aged.
Surely, having given up the daily grind, there is so much to do and see that clocking on and off didn’t give you space for.
Get out there and live a little! Keep your body and mind in the best shape you can, and, with a bit of luck, you will still be able to spend enough time sitting around listening to Beethoven through your ear trumpet, with your tongue still firmly planted in your cheek.
Steve
*Keep Buggering On