Retiring Minds

Last Easter, which was a week later than this one, we were already into our first national Coronavirus lockdown. What a bizarre twelve months it has proved to be. When I was thinking about what to write about  retirement  on a beautifully sunny Easter Saturday in 2021, as we're all in various stages of readiness to creep cautiously out of our retreats again, long-haired, vaccinated and undoubtedly changed by the experience, it struck me that for people of a certain age (let's be generous and say the over 50s), this has been like a practice-run for 'old age'.

Semi-incarcerated in our homes for months, having to adapt to a more circumscribed and slower pace of life, we've developed strategies to keep bodies and minds fit. Many people signed up to online gym, pilates or yoga classes. When I couldn't go to the gym I eventually cancelled my membership and bought an exercise bike which I ride daily in the conservatory, come rain or shine. When we couldn't meet up for poetry or music events we took them online too, via Zoom or other participatory platforms. When we couldn't go to the cinema we watched way more films, drama series and documentaries on our smart TVs. We've read more (thank you Abe Books and Amazon), done more crosswords and maths puzzles, any and everything to help maintain mental and physical health - use it or lose it - to stop us sliding prematurely into senility. 

keeping mind and body fit in retirement

We may have modified the ways we think, we may have changed the ways we eat, all for the better one hopes, in an attempt to stay healthier longer - becoming more philosophical, eating more cheese, looking to postpone our mental end-date, that fateful future point when our minds start to retire.

Did you know that if you interrogate Google or Wikipedia for a list of French cheeses it will return over six hundred different varieties? That's enough to give Liz 'the Cheese' Truss* nightmares. And an online search for French philosophers generates a list with four hundred and fifty names on it. Combining such random samplings suggests to me the French may be the most philosophical nation on Earth (as well as the biggest cheese-eaters). 

Consequently, when it came to something poetic for the week-end, I thought: do you know what? They deserve a poem, or at least the Existentialists among them do. Here it is then, an imagined narrative about the sunset of retiring minds, in all its Gallic tragi-comic glory...

Strange Days At The Maison D'Etre

Jean-Paul Sartre has been a bit tart lately,

didn't like being told not to smoke his pipe

in bed. "It is not a pipe", he said.

He claims he vapes and what's the harm?

But when the alarm goes off, such chaos.

"These people make me sick", he confided

to Simone, thinking he shouldn't have to

fight the fascists more than once in his life.

And as for Miss de Beauvoir, her behaviour

has been giving the team cause for concern.

The second sex is mentioned in the lounge

she rolls her hips, unzips her skirt and starts 

to flirt like a fishwife with residents, staff, 

even visitors, this once so dutiful daughter

then beautiful siren of Free France. Only

the Outsider is never target for her charms.

Poor Albert Camus is a stranger to himself

these days, a silent man, confused spirit

in a rangy goalkeeper's body, wandering

the grounds, fielding his invisible footballs.

He doesn't know it but he's waiting for the

full-time whistle to blow. Still physically

fit, he dresses himself, polishes his boots

almost religiously, but that's about the limit.

So Jean-Paul, Simone and Albert, comrades

of a great resistance long ago, creators of

their own essential twentieth century selves 

barely exist now, wait hardly philosophical

for reprieve, a happy or a very easy death.

But on sunny afternoons, old Pere Voltaire 

can sometimes be seen digging the garden. 

Funny how he seems to linger timeless on.

*I couldn't sign off without giving you another chance to chuckle at Liz the Cheese, the uncoolest woman ever to hold high office. To watch her making a cringeworthy fool of herself with that speech to the Conservative Party Conference faithful, just click on the link>>> the appalling Liz Truss 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)