A Somerset Lad

Two significant things have been learned in the past week. One was that the Church of Ireland Pension Fund has recovered to the point where it would be possible to retire before the normal retirement age of 68 and take a reduced pension.  The second is that the normal age for being considered ‘old’ is 65.

The Irish state pension becomes available for me in October next year at the age of 66 (it brings with it free public transport, a real boon), so with the reduced church pension and the state pension I could retire in eighteen months’ time.

Retirement was something to which my former wife and I had looked forward. It was going to bring opportunities to avoid the grey and wet Irish weather by wintering in the French midi.

Of course, that aspiration disappeared with everything else in my life, but more recently I had wondered about the possibility of a final chapter different from those that had gone before.

I have been working on my French every day and even identified a town in which I would like to live. Orthez seems ideal. I could rent an apartment, be able to pay my bills, and pass my time in a place of history and beauty. A train ride from Bayonne, to which I would travel for rugby, it is convenient to Biarritz airport to which one might fly from Dublin.

The bubble was burst by my son as we sat eating our tea in a Dublin pub yesterday.  I was enjoying my Guinness beef stew when he said, ‘but Dad, what would you do all day?’

It was a reasonable question: what would I do?

I always defined myself by what I did, like the members of the Somerset farming family from which I came, doing nothing never seemed a very attractive option.

I have no hobbies. I have always worked as many hours as possible.

Apart from my son, I have no family members whom I would regularly see (I have a two year old grandson whom I have never seen, my daughter considering me unworthy of any contact whatsoever).

Orthez is a beautiful place, but how would I pass my time there?

Certainly, by October 2026, I would officially be old, and living in south-west France, I would definitely be lonely.

My uncles on the home farm in Pibsbury outide of Langport are 78 and 80. When they stop altogether, I shall consider the age they have reached as an appropriate age for retirement.

It’s five years since we bade farewell to my old dad.

To be honest, neither he nor we expected him to reach the age of eighty-three.  A self-proclaimed grumpy old bugger, he was old Labour, anti-Royalist and fiercely patriotic.

There were times when he and I had fierce disagreements. Having Trotskyite tendencies in teenage years, I drifted steadily toward the centre, paying for a public school education for my children and having a subscription to the Financial Times.

It was odd. We were never closer than in those final couple of years. Conversations were had that should have taken place a long time previously. Sadly, it was too late to do much about most of those things that had continued to cause hurt.

One of his great disappointments was that I had been ordained.  We were blue collar people and my university education had demanded sacrifice on part of my family. A bigger disappointment was that I had left Somerset to live in Northern Ireland, a place he hated for its bigotry and hypocrisy.

For years, I only managed to get to Somerset once or twice a year. When our children were born, my former wife tolerated a visit to my parents once a year, and that for no more than two or three days. I complied with her insistence. The year before I left, she told me that she hated visiting my parents, perhaps our working class family had never met with her approval.

I didn’t mind any backlash that came in my direction, I thoroughly deserved it. I had begun a relationship with another woman and any hostility I received was entirely merited.

What most saddened me was the attitude of my daughter, a twenty-four year old doctor when I left, who decided to cause as much hurt as possible to my old dad. My parents were never told by her that she was getting married and when they sent her a cheque for £100 in September 2019 as a wedding present, she never lodged it nor wrote a word of thanks. Dad was hurt, he couldn’t understand what he and my mother had done.

The morning Dad was dying, five years ago today, I tried to phone my daughter to ask that she speak to reassure my mother, she refused to take the call, nor on a single moment since has she spoken to my mother who expresses bewilderment that her only granddaughter will not speak to her and has never sent her as much as a single photograph of her great grandson who was two years old before Christmas.

Looking back five years, I realize that the guilt lies with myself. Inaction is as much a failing as wrong action. I should have stood my ground. I should have said that people deserved respect.

Dad said to me a few months before he died that he realised how things had gone and that what mattered was that I had come back. It was scant consolation for the three decades that had been lost.

It must be five, six, possibly more years since Bob Mortimer taught me a lesson which has more than once been important in the business of getting through the days.

In an episode of Gone Fishing, Bob Mortimer reflected on the ways of his mother, on the importance of routines, on how daily habits played a part in sustaining good emotional health. He talked about how his mother might go to the shop each day to buy three tomatoes.

Three tomatoes seemed an appropriate symbol of the vital place of ordinariness in daily life. Bob Mortimer’s mum has become someone remembered each day as, each evening, I make my lunch box for the next day at school. Two slices of brown bread with butter, a tin of sardines or mackerel, two apples a pear, and three tomatoes.

Were the tomatoes sold in threes, I might buy them in threes. In recent years, I have developed a liking for the Sunstream variety, which are probably more like cherries than the large tomatoes that would need to be sliced. The tomatoes are a daily reminder of the goodness of the routine things of life, of how precious can be the dull and the mundane. This morning, I opened my lunchbox and was filled with disappointment, I had forgotten the tomatoes.

An aunt, now eighty-five years of age, would endorse the wisdom of Bob Mortimer’s mum. There are others on the farm who might easily pick up a newspaper for her on their daily journeys, but each morning she gets into her car and drives into our little home town to buy her copy of the Daily Mirror. To be out, to go with a purpose, to do the same thing at the same time each day, to fulfil her objective, these are things important to my aunt, these are things that are sustaining.

As someone who sets the alarm for 6.00 on weekdays and who gets stressed if the ignition key in the car is turned after 6.45. As someone whose work is regulated by bells, by the coming and going of groups of students, my routine is both structure and reassurance. The three tomatoes at lunchtime are a declaration that all is well with the world.

Returning to school last week was a moment of relief, the greatest challenge presented by school holidays is that they disrups routine. There is no need for a lunchbox and no counting of tomatoes.