Family Shades of Grey

Here’s the lovely Shades of Grey family – I’ve been getting round to this for ages and finally finished them. Lots of work to restore the woodwork – thanks to my wonderful Reuben who did it all and we now have the whole family ready to rock off to someone else’s house. This is an original mid-century suite manufactured in New Zealand -  and is so comfortable, they just don’t make them like this any more. If you want to buy it, you can, just message me and it’s yours – for a price of course.

I hope you have all been wallowing in this gorgeous weather like me. There are quite a few things to like about being retired it seems. This is probably the first summer in my whole adult life that I have not had to work. It seems incredible to think of that after all these years, and especially since I originally trained as a school teacher and one of the attractions was the summer holidays- what a fool I was to give that up.

Life in Foxta del Sol is idyllic in this weather – swimming in the tepid sea every day and wandering along the wide hot beach.  I feel lucky but wonder sometimes what happens next. Do we all just faff round in our gardens and go for walks and swims til one day the hip cracks up or something and then we retreat to the couch and the crossword? I don’t know. Living alone, I have this horrible fear as well about having a stroke or something and no one finding me till it’s far too late. I have spoken to other people about this and it is a real fear really, after all, it actually happened to my mother.

There are so many old people (do I call myself an old person? I guess I might have to) who live alone and for us all, this is a possibility. I know there are all those strategies like calling your children each morning or curtain pulling to alert the neighbours but maybe we need to look at other ways to live. More communal and connected. I know that the huge “Granny Prisons” of retirement villages attract some people but there are lots of us for whom the sameness and curtain twitching doesn’t seem so attractive. What’s to be done?

When property prices were really cheap in Foxton I used to think maybe I could buy my whole street and then get all my friends to move in. We could block off the ends and have our own little community but sadly, now it’s harder to buy here.  I think maybe  we need to all get ourselves into some big kind of loose boarding schools where someone comes to clean, someone comes to cook and we all drink gin in the afternoon. Everybody alone in their too big house seems so silly but how to keep a bit of your own old life without getting tied down and ripped off by those massive gated “villages”??

Anyone got any good ideas??