Yes I was reminded of this literary gem the other evening, when a chap called by at 7.00pm on his way home, frazzled from a long hard day at work.  He related the events of his stressful day and then asked what I had got up to.  It made me think, “do you know Jack” I said “I don’t think I’ve done anything and I have not been bored but enjoyed every minute of my day”.  On uttering those words I knew I had already reached the liberating state that the world’s population strives for.

In saying I had done nothing, I was obviously telling little porkies, because I had showered and dressed myself, had a leisurely breakfast, sauntered through my e-mails and written 1100 words on the ridiculous Irish Government custom of buying communion dresses for little girls.  I followed this up with an equally leisurely and fashionably late lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon reading a very interesting novel cum biography of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.  The book called The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, I can recommend to anybody, it tells of their life in Paris and the gifted people who filled this place  after the Great War and during the liberated 1920s.  People like James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, all megastars of the 20th century.  I did all all this at my own pace and enjoyed myself so much it felt as though I had done nothing.

The beauty of this senile exisatence is that since last February, the Queen of England, her glorious majesty, has given me a few hundred drinking vouchers every week, I get free medical care courtesy of my medical card, costs of which in Ireland, which does not have a National Health Service, can be worth an arm and a leg,  perhaps that is why the government here can give out free communion dresses.  On top of all this from next week I am entitled to a free travel card which allows me to travel anywhere in the British Isles for nix on public transport which includes trains, boats and buses.  I am, as they say, on the pigs back.

In my previous posting on this subject I stressed the need for peace of mind being the epitomy of the retired state and how on retirement you should relax in the beginning and slowly find your way to this peacefulness.  Well I reached it by throwing off the man made psychological shackles that the Catholic Church had bound me in all my working and married life and in my freethinking state exposed the bunkum and downright lies that the Church had told in their bid to keep a lid on the clerical abuse scandal that has shattered most of the western world’s religious ideologies and which is only now coming home to roost in England and Wales.  I really enjoyed jousting with the nincompoops of Safeguarding Commissions that the Church in their fat, mindless state had left in charge of this most important of roles.  As these obsequious and obfuscating hurdles, put in place by the Church, were blown away, the younger and more energetic I became.  I was like a youth again, scared of nothing, roaming the internet, like Spartacus in revolt.

When you are mindful of nobody, peace of mind comes easy and your relaxed state takes care of the boundaries you could easily tip yourself over.  So to come down from this buzz, a well written book, a few hours watching test match cricket and a glass of Malbec act as balm on a totally fulfilled life.  I recommend it to everybody who has been round long enough.

So after a period of thought and preparation I set about writing the memoir of my life, not a great life but one with some interest even to the casual reader, let alone my children for whom the tome was originally prescribed.  I started it in the winter of 2006 and quickly found out that I could write more easily at night time when it was quiet and there was no distraction.  So with a little planning and preparation I set to.  I was amazed; the words tumbled out of my mind onto the page almost quicker than I could write.  In those days and even today with some scripts, I had to put pen to paper first before transferring them onto the typed page.

So as England was trounced by Australia in five Ashes test matches over that deep dark winter, I crafted 130,000 words of my own to describe myself and my forebears.  I wrote it in about four weeks and then asked Helen, my devoted wife of 39 years, to type it out, because her earlier training, before she started on me, was in that direction.  She knocked out about 60 pages in quick time before she tired of the task, or possibly of me, who stood at her shoulder and glowed as she committed my words to the screen and she told me that I would have to finish the job myself.

For me the size of the imposition was gargantuan, never having used a keyboard previously but in true surveyor’s style, I split the work into sections and vowed to complete 20 pages per day, in double line spacing, about 6000 words per session.  I had it done in a little over three weeks and I was a proud man until I started reading and editing which then took me the best part of the next three years before I was happy enough to let others read it.  It was received well by some and not by others.  I could not help being critical of some stages and some characters in my life.  I was brutal but probably factual in parts but I knew I was not quite there yet.

Sometime between 2009 and 2011 my painfully typed memoir disappeared off my computer screen, why or how, I do not know but into the ether it went.  I had made a typed copy but for tinkering purposes I missed it.  I was always adding words or subtracting sentences and it was lovely to play with it.  I am no expert in computers and it probably is in there somewhere that the intrepid expert will  easily extricate.  One day I might give the task to some familial great in the field to find but I have kind of resigned myself to retyping and not without a little pleasure at the thought, because in retrospect some sections need revisiting and rewriting from a different angle.  However that is a promised duty for when I run out of steam and not now when I am so busy with other ideas.

So come the winter of 2009 I was in a writing desert, wanting to write but trying to find a medium, finding a way for others to read my thoughts.  The urge to write is an amazing need in one so struck.  You are impelled by some intangible force to get words on paper, not particularly to earn money, though that would be nice, but that others could benefit from or be critical of your fine turn of phrase and laugh or at least smirk at the humour of your thoughts.

It was then I was struck by an idea mooted by my son-in-law, although he was referring to it in a business sense.  Blogging and how it could help people in business.  I signed myself up as a non-paying customer of a symposium he was about to give on the subject and after 10 hours of education, I realised this idea was for me.  It also taught me a few insider tricks in how to make the blog more available to others.

Within a couple of days my daughter and husband had set me up with a vehicle to put my words on and after a very shy and tentative start I was into my stride very quickly, helped by the antics of the Catholic Church and the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse in Dublin, which gave me an ocean to trawl through for ideas from the very start.

I realised  quickly the subjects to steer clear of.  My scrapbook was full of poison pen letters and anonymous phone calls and threats of all descriptions, including three from the local rag here in Boyle, who were considering suing me for defamation.  Funnily enough I also received a threat from a bumbling priest in Manchester who was going to sue me for “deformation”.  My mind has boggled ever since.  Certainly the parish pump is a no go area if you want a quiet life, especially in small town Ireland.  There are still people seething from stuff I wrote regarding the local scene two years ago, it does not matter that it was the truth but for them to be confronted with it, was not quite on.

So my mind and blogging moved to the international arena and away from the small minds stadium.  I wrote about anything and everything, little ideas wormed their way into my head as I lay, a supine insomniac, in my bed at night and the next day these thoughts displayed themselves onto my screen as I nodded off for want of sleep.

What cheered me and what drove me on was the choice of subjects, especially the Catholic church and its works and pomps for which I had a particular dislike, but the real driver was the feedback.  Over the last 27 months I have met thousands of people through this medium with readers from all over the world e-mailing me and posting comments on the site.  So far people from over 150 countries have contacted me to give me their point of view on a particular subject.  That is the real power of the blog, the fact that there are no boundaries, the whole world is your stage.  Once you have written your piece it is there forever, like an over-abundant fruit tree with a never ending crop waiting to be picked off 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by anybody who chances along.  In that time of 27 months, I have written 177 blog postings containing about 300,000 words with hundreds of thousands of people reading what I have to say.  A tool called Google Analytics tells you exactly how many people read my printed words and how much of it they actually read.  Really useful when you are looking for popular topics to write about, not that that bothers me because I write about things that jar my mind and if others agree or even disagree that is where my pleasure lies.

In all that time two people stand out as really influencing my thought process and making me think seriously about my topics but at the same time distracting me in the nicest possible way from my task of delivering words, having to construct and answer a daily crop of e-mails to them.  However their thoughts, ideas, cajolements and humour have turned me into a far better person.

One of this duo contacted me first out of a need to share his experiences with me after a piece I had written.  This single contact turned into an avalanche of daily e-mails, full of wit, innuendo and downright truth about the revelations coming out of the Catholic Church which certainly attracted the main butt of our humour at that time.  His constant hammering on my computer screen made our main construct into a viable cause and hopefully we will be friends for ever, even after this rash of clerical crap is over.

The main problem with my writing is my lack of subtlety.  My scripts are a blunt force, which makes the point to easily.  I needed  assuagement, like a car engine needs lubricating oil.  My problem was that I did not understand the power of the blog.  I did not realise that you could not just tell it as it was but as the blog became popular I knew that this bluntness could not last because I might be over-stepping that thin, hazy, grey line they call legality.

I was eager to learn because my wealth, however small it might be, was destined for Arthur Guinness’ pockets and not some sidewinding litigant hoping to line his breeches with my hard earned.  A person made herself available, a person with more than a little knowledge of the legal code, a person, who at first, had me cowed with the fineness of her mind, she volunteered to turn my rough Longsight ideas and words into things of beauty and awe.  Her deftness of phrasing was a pleasure to read, her subject easily wrought but it was her humour I craved.  In the midst of all this horror and talk of what legal bods could do to you if you only slightly overstepped this indeterminable line, there was a humour so unlike anything from her ilk, that I had to listen to and take in everything she said.

Eventually her tuition turned me into a far better man and a far more circumspect writer and hopefully I taught her a little of the northern spirit she claimed she had in her genes ( her family having moved from a semi-detached mud hut in Jarrow to a twee bijou residence close to Buck House in the 14th century).  So,  having been edited and tutored to distraction, I write now with ease, splaying silken sentences onto a sensuous screen.  I am no longer the man I was but I thank both my amanuenses for turning me from the guttersnipe I obviously was to a person you could take anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.