Paul Malpas

The various events of June have dried my mind out, it is now a sere mass of grey matter and I have come to a full stop. Every morning for the last two weeks, i have come down the stairs at the crack of sparrow fart, dawn to the unpoetic, sat at the keyboard and nothing, not even a sentence.

It normally takes me about four hours to write a 1000 words, think, edit, rewrite, edit and type out, but these last two weeks nothing, in fact for the most of June, nothing. I might have been bothered about two major areas of research I have set myself, but nothing there either, only indolence, torpor and langour. I cannot set my mind to churn the way it has for the past seven months. So I have decided to rest up until the 1st October, concentrate on the research subjects and hope that I can get them out of the way for the Autumn.

It was not just that the words would not come although that was my Becher’s Brook, but there are so many other fences to jump. The glorious weather, a fascinating series of one day cricket against the Australians, a lake more or less outside the front door which had a 24 hour shimmer in that glorious June, the planning of a continental trip later in the year, the garden and vegetable plot that seems to want care evey five minutes with its burgeoning crop brought to fruition by the finest June on record, the thoughts of the twins thriving in Manchester and thinking of the life in front of them, I am sure and I hope that it will not be as hard as the past 60 years.

So there it is and apologies to all my readers who have been waiting patiently for most of June to pick up the glowing pearls that emanate from my keyboard every morning. A full stop will clear my mind, let me enjoy my enjoyment and stop making me feel guilty about taking time off. All my working life I have felt guilty at taking time off, even when working seven days a week. A weeks holiday, a round of golf made me a nervous wreck, it really was not worth it, but now I am retired, I am master of all I survey. So full stop until October and thank you for having me.

Doesn’t time fly?  It only seems a couple of weeks ago when I was 40 and running around Manchester, at the height of my powers, worried about nothing and scared of no-one.  Happily married with at that time four children and starting to realize that there was still a long way to go in life.  As I said that seems only a couple of weeks ago when I was 40.  This week I am 64, still happily married thank God, but with an extra two children to manage and three and a half grandchildren to consider but not now at the height of my powers, worried about everything and scared of a few and starting to realize that if those 24 years went so quickly, I should probably be dead by the time March comes along, having lived to a very grand 88 years of age.  Doesn’t time fly?  My first 18 years felt as though it was a tortoise propelling me, the next 46 was by Concorde.

I am telling you this because I just wanted to warn all you thrusting 40 year olds out there that you have only just got two weeks to go before retirement, so if there is anything in your life that needs improvement, get out this afternoon and start the process.  The Queen (or possibly King by then) and her £200 per week is nigh, prepare yourself for a humbling experience.  For you people have possibly noticed how the population prostrates themselves before you, in two weeks time they will be spitting at you and kicking your arse.

Here is me making plans for you vibrant ones and what I should be really doing is making plans for myself because that chronological equation tells me that I have only two weeks myself.  So what do I want to happen to the former me in that first week of March.

Well for a start I do not want some hole in some dauby hillside, I want to be as free as a bird, I want to be able to fly like I did in my twenties, I want to be scared of nothing, I want to feel the sun on my back and the wind in my hair.  I want to be cremated.  A much more civilized and a much older way of saying goodbye, than a hole in the ground.  The folk round here were burning their lifeless ones 5000 years ago so it is not a passing fancy.  Also I am remembering the words of the old Tipperary priest, Fr. Denis Maher I think is name was, parish priest of St. Paul’s in Hyde, Cheshire, who speaking after Dr. Harold Shipman’s life sentence was passed in 2000, said that if grieving relatives could see the condition of their loved ones after a year in the ground, nobody would be buried.  Harold Shipman was the good doctor who murdered his patients.  The authorities proved by exhumation and scientific examination that he had killed 218  of these people, with the big possibility that there was another 200  as well.  By a requirement of law Fr. Maher had to attend about half these exhumations and was horrified by the state of decay he witnessed.  Just as a passing thought my Aunty Betty, a stout hearted farming lady, was thrown off her horse when she was about 70 and damaged her hip and eventually had to have a hip replacement. If it was not for her agricultural heritage of trusting her vet, who looked after her both before and after her operation, she might have been dead now as Shipman was her doctor.

So to get back on course and with this in mind it is the crematoriam for me.  Of course I would love a funeral pyre on the top of some high mountain with the gathered multitude singing Nearer My God To Thee, but practicality was always a subject close to my heart therefore some holocaustic oven in a Dublin back street will have to do.  From whence my gathered dust, having first of all been placed in a suitable container, will be taken up onto the Speckled Mountains or the Bricklieves as they call them round here, handily situated in South Sligo and 50% of my remains will be thrown into the air and let wander down the mountain, wafted by a warm westerly breeze in the direction of Lough Arrow and let mingle and blend with the myths and legends of this astounding place.  Our ancestors certainly knew how to let go.

The other 50% of my clinker I want taken to another calm place, the graveyard of Eastersnow, high up on the plains of Boyle and etched on my memory by John McGahern’s book Amongst Women.  It is to this place he brought his mother in this work of fiction walking her coffin from Cootehall Church to this graveyard.  His real mother was buried in Aughawillan in Leitrim but he must have found something beautiful about the name and place of this quiet graveyard with it’s centuries old ruined chuch.  After this second scattering my life’s purpose will be over and condemned to distant memory.

By the way before you do any of the above give me a kick, if I flinch you will know that I am not quite ready for the oven.

The approach to retirement often fills people’s minds with terror, as they think what will they do with all their time.  For most having worked eight or nine hours a day for 45-50 years, they wonder how all this time is going to be filled and they panic themselves into planning certain tasks, joining certain clubs, looking for part-time or voluntary work, all very worthwhile and possibly pleasant diversions but often these pastimes are chosen too quickly and might not be exactly what is required for peace of mind.  For after all in your working life you have had to persevere with fools, listen to idiots, be talked down to by so called authority, who mostly know nothing and generally take a battering from the gobshites that inhabit this land.  What you need in retirement is peace of mind.  You do not need to do anything to achieve this nirvana, all you need is time.  Time to blow away all the crap that you have been force fed by companies, governments, newspapers, television, protocols, religious institutions and friends.

So my advice, and many will say take no heed, my advice is to do nothing.  Sit there and empty your head of all its drivel, throw away your mobile phones straightaway, (mine is at the bottom of the Irish Sea, commissioned there by myself on that fateful journey by HSS when I finally cut the bonds that held me in 2005) try not to have a need for the media, go for a pint, have the crack and generally cleanse yourself.

When this state is reached and it might take a few weeks, a few months, perhaps years even,  some might never come out of this eschewment of wordly matters and what harm, but when this state is reached, sit back and relax, you are nearly there.  With me it probably took a year but I had a lot more mullock to dispose of than most.

I spent a year watching the tranquil Boyle River flow gently past my front door and this certainly acted as an emetic to swill away God’s own mountain of shite that I had picked up during my working life in England.  A year watching this water and letting it baptize my mind for ventures new, a year when I did nothing, only antagonize my wife for doing nothing, who thought I should do something if only picking my nose.  In this comatose state I kept all positivity and released all negativity.  I espoused the institutions I thought I might benefit from and rejected anything from which I received bad vibrations. In fact I am still doing that after four years so this period of release is not hard and fast and these periods of renewal may overlap.

I remember one position I took up which gave me a certain responsibility and which I  first of all enjoyed, but I treated it like work and tried to impose the bunkum I had been taught years before.  I fell out with my nearest and dearest whilst imposing this clap-trap and then quickly realized that this position was not for me because I was again taking up my past and because falling out with your nearest and dearest is not one of the requisites of retirement.  So what I do not want is responsibility, what I do want is freedom and time, time I might or might not have.

After some while in this torpor, my mind started to recover, it became foolhardy, it became brave.  I can well understand those old codgers who want to climb mountains or jump out of aeroplanes, but that kind of buffoonery is not for me.  I am more contemplative, more composed, more laid back really.  Possibly my ideal type of life would be like Columcille’s monks in the Western church, one of the culdees, who devoted their lives to writing, having bad thoughts, knowing good women, supping a glass or two and generally enjoying themselves.  Which they did for four or five hundred years before the Pope got a grip on himself and he often did, and said no more of that and sent in the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Premonstratensionists, the Benedictines, the Augustinians, the Cistercians and Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, in the guise of child molesters and other sexual perverts whose duty it was to stop anyone enjoying themselves and to put a lot more darkness in everybody’s day.

So I realized my dream, I started writing, moulding unjointed letters into words and words into meaning and clarity.  Improving the quality and seeing the improvement.  Making a passage interesting when at the beginning of it there were no words, ideas or even thoughts.  In fact making something out of nothing like I have just done with this piece.

If in retirement we can make something out of nothing everyday we would all surely be replete and it will not eat into your pension as it costs nothing to do.  So think hard and long and do not rush into anything, but remember peace of mind is the aim of all.

Jim Crehan spent 35 years of his adult working life shovelling coal into the gas retorts, firing the coal and clearing out the resulting coke from those long steel tubes.  Back-breaking work, which by its nature, engendered habits which followed him home and into retirement.  Those of course who had retirement.  In 1958 my father contacted the North Western Gas Board, the organization that had taken over The Manchester Gas Company in 1948, to tell them to cancel the pension payment of my recently dead grandfather.  They told him that Jim Crehan was the last Gas Company employee on their books, all the others having died long before.  The dust, the heat and the fumes quickly slicing through the ranks of the recently retired and in fact the ranks of the employed.

On retirement each employee was given the option of a lump sum, which was the equivalent of ten years pension or a weekly payment for life.  Most wisely went for the lump sum, my grandfather decided on the weekly payment.  Once he passed 75, he used to have a laugh every day – for nine years in fact, at the way he had beaten the system.

My grandfather was once a tall man, 6′ 4” my mother always used to say, but when I knew and understood him, he had a bit of a stoop, which brought him down to normal size.  On my parent’s wedding photographs at the age of 67 he was head and shoulders above everyone else, looking remarkably like Kevin, my brother.  He always wore a cap and  full length grey flannel long johns, summer and winter.  During the day he wore a coller-less striped shirt and a knotted thin scarf.  The rest was finished off with a pair of woollen socks, the holes in which, he used to darn himself and after a time there was more darning than original sock, a pair of black boots, moleskin trousers and a waistcoat that was many years passed its best, in which he kept his chewing tobacco and knife for cutting plugs of baccy off the solid block, his smoking tobacco and pipe and his stub of a pencil, which he used for working out his system on the football pools and for writing out bets on the horses.  The whole was finished off with a long black overcoat he wore when stepping out to the pub.

I only knew him in his retired state and taking things easy, he had a chair, grandad’s chair, to the left of the fireplace, on which he used to sit for most of the day, resting, reading the sporting papers, smoking and above all singing.  The cap he wore both inside and outside the house, as he was as bald as a coot and could feel even the whisper of a draught on his head.  In his attempt to get his chin to match his scalp he shaved meticulously every day, taking great care around his small walrus moustache.

The shaving operation was a performance, all done without the use of water.  He would hang his strop up on a hook on the back of the kitchen door, open up his cut-throat razor, which was always kept on the mantlepiece above the fire, and with a gentle up and down motion he sharpened an already sharp  razor.  Sometimes if he thought the razor had been abused somehow the previous day, he would spend ten or fifteen minutes on the whetstone, first of all spitting on the stone and then rubbing his blade in a circular movement on the liquid produced and then reverting to the strop on the back of the door.  As a sign that the razor had reached its keenness, he would pull a hair from my mother’s hairbrush and holding one end of the hair between finger and thumb, he would slice the strand in two without bending it.  This operation gave as much credence to the strength of my mother’s jet black hair as it did to the sharpness of the razor.

He was now ready.  He lathered his face with a soapy foam from a cup, the recipe for which only he knew and without mirror or guidance he performed this death defying feat, leaving his face and chin as shiny and smooth as a baby’s bottom.  However as the years caught up, the razor, with its care and attention, did not lose its sharpness, but his reaction and flexibility certainly did and he started to take lumps out of his flesh.  The ensuing bleeding was staunched by little twists of The Sporting Chronicle, the newspaper of choice for the horse racing aficionado, which gave each day’s horses, their breeding and their form.  These twists he stuck on the wounds which soaked up the blood and stopped the bleeding.  He was a sight to behold, going out to the Anson Hotel for his nightly couple of pints, sprouting newsprint of runners and riders from various cuts.  Later on in life even this butchery failed him and my mother was given the job.  Scared of the cut-throat, she used a safety razor, but my grandfather was never happy as the finished product was never as good.  So the daily sharpening continued just in case his joints freed themselves and he was able to shave himself again.

Another favourite pastime of his was clearing the wax out of his ears with a needle.  I used to wince thinking the needle would disappear into his head and never come out.  Also he would only drink his tea out of a saucer, pouring the tea from a cup so that it cooled quickly,  Never once did I see him drink from a cup.

He loved his couple of pints of an evening, funnily enough I have always been the same, and on his way home he would call at the off-licence attached to the pub and bring home with him two pint bottles of Guiness.  These he stood next to the fire and settled down into his chair and after five minutes or so chat, he would stand and stick the poker into the heart of the burning coals and leave it some time until it was red hot.  Meanwhile he poured out three quarters of the warmed first bottle into a glass and when the poker was ready, he pulled it from the heat, tapped it on the grate to remove any surplus ash and plunged it into the glass of Guiness, with much hissing and steam.  The poker was returned to the fire and the process was repeated as he sat back and enjoyed his hot nightcap.

I did not know I could write so much about this wonderful man but I was young and taking all these remarkable feats in and storing them for posterity.  I have promised myself and Helen that I will limit myself to no more than a thousand words a day so has to improve quality and also and most importantly to enable me to carry out all the household tasks that are set me on a daily basis by my loving spouse.  So I will finish here and continue apace tomorrow with My Grandad  Part3.  I am already 200 words over my rations.