Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
(As related by he himself, personal)
I suppose the first mark of my downward slide was the time I decided the time had come for me to stop driving any form of vehicle.
I was well in charge of my faculties at the time – good reactions, good health, well able to read road signs without wearing glasses.
Yet it seemed to me such essentials to safe driving were bound soon to fade. Maybe had already done so, without my realising the fact.
And I did not want to become one of the ‘my faculties are as sharp as they ever were’ bumbly old farties wandering about in those near-ton, hundred mile per hour death dealers I’d encountered so often when cruising my motorbikes.
The lure of free public transport
The decision was made easier for me, I must confess, by the excellent local bus service, my free bus pass, and the fact that the bus stop was situated no more than a couple of hundred metres from my flat
Plus the rather sad fact that my principal reason for going out at all had degenerated into the need to do the weekly shop.
Walking routine
Anyhoo, resigned to my new pedestrian status (but not without wistful glances at all those shiny bikes and motors gliding past) I quickly fell into a routine of walking to the store, loading up and returning by bus.
Thus combining a pleasant and healthy walk with a mission successfully accomplished.
But then a couple of alarming things happened.
First was that, despite my shopping list remaining much the same – indeed perhaps even, over time, shrinking a little – the items I carried home grew steadily heavier.
And at the same time, the easy level stroll from the bus stop grew by imperceptible steps steeper and longer. Turning eventually into what is now a quite daunting slope. A hill even.
Steep enough to force me into a panting, heart thudding pause halfway up. Plus a resolve yet again not to buy so much each time, but instead visit the shop more often.
Great idea backfires
A solution that somehow never works. Usually because the amount of goods I’ve collected looks so pathetically small in the wheel-around trolley, I can’t help just adding an item or two more.
So now, just this week I’ve been forced into the next step down the path. I’ve bought myself a wheeled shopping bag.
It’s one designed precisely for a bloke like me. A bloke fighting desperately against admitting he is no longer a virile, striding along male but instead a shuffling, wander all over the place old codger.
It’s disguised as a rucksack to be carried on the shoulder. The necessary bit of kit for any would-be mountaineer or hill walker.
Yet at the supermarket the awful truth emerges. Its concealed handle unfolds, its unobtrusive wheels come into play and I trundle it home, the shameful tail of a once go-getter who no longer can.
Better things to waste our money on?
Way back in the fifties of the last century, at a time when NOT smoking made you an oddity, a regular feature of the yearly Budget was yet another increase in the duty on cigarettes
And every year, as Budget time loomed, the hope of just about everyone – a hope invariably voiced in newspaper articles – was that perhaps, this year, the Chancellor would have mercy and not increase the price of a packet of twenty.
To which my Father in Law – a non smoker himself – always replied by pointing out that all the while people could find money to waste on burning it away in smoke, there was absolutely no incentive for the Chancellor so to do.
Today of course far fewer of us chuck money at the tobacco barons. Instead we have found something else to waste our cash on.
Mobile telephones.
As with ciggies, all the while me can find several pounds a month to waste on the entirely unnecessary gadgets – as well as constantly ‘up-grading to the newest and ever more expensive replacement’ – there is no incentive for the Chancellor to listen to wails of ‘middle income’ poverty.
Image: southgranvillelive under CC BY 2.0
