A Pensioner's Morning

Just a typical enough day in the life of a retired person...

1. Walked to town for an appointment at 9.30 with Work and Income. I arrived early, but on Wednesdays they don't open till 9.30 so had to shelter from the light rain with several other people who'd arrived early.  Had to explain to the person I see each time that W&I had got it wrong.  He agreed, and sorted it out (I hope), but still didn't answer my question as to why, if I'm forced to send in an annual review, W&I then chooses to ignore the figures and bases their information on the previous year's figures!  I said someone needed a slap on the hand.  He didn't disagree.  After two months my wife and I still haven't discovered what's going to be deducted each fortnight from our pensions to compensate for the fact that we earned too much money last year over our allowed $100 per week.  That's $100 between us, not each.

2. It hadn't been raining when I walked down.  It was definitely raining when I came out of the office and I had to run (yes, run) from verandah to verandah, and finally popped into a two-dollar shop where I bought a $6.90 umbrella.  Apparently inflation now means that a $2 shop is actually a $6.90 shop.  Still, it kept me drier, and at $6.90 some poor person somewhere in the world is getting a fraction more income per day than if the umbrellas were $2.

3. Caught the bus home again.  Fortunately the timetables have changed and so the Kenmure bus that would normally precede my own Balaclava bus by a couple of minutes, preceded it by ten, and I was able to get home earlier. As it happened there were two Kenmure buses at the stop at the same time.  Don't ask. 

4. Came home, had a coffee, and then straight into a practice for the up and coming National Brass Band Competitions to be held in New Plymouth in a couple of weeks.  The cornet player is shouting me the trip to New Plymouth (as he shouted me a trip to Australia last year).  Plainly I'm still capable of playing a few notes on the piano in the right order.

5. The cornet player and his wife, after the practice, dropped me back down to town, this time with my old umbrella, which is about twice as big as the $6.90 one I bought earlier, and actually keeps the rain off more than just my head.  (Not that I was ungrateful for the smaller umbrella.)  I then went to a meeting with the group of people who were on the CAIRA Supervision course with me a couple of years ago.  We meet roughly once a month for about an hour to catch up on how we're doing in our pastoral supervision of various people.  Ate a savoury scone and drank coffee.  Discussed re-registering (which is due) and Interactive Drawing Therapy, which one of our group had learned about at a course.  Sounds like an interesting approach, and he's going to give us a chance to experiment with it next time we meet.

6. Had some time to spare (you know, that spare time retired people have oodles of) and so went and had a coffee with another member of the group.  Realised this was the third coffee in a row.  We are former work collegues, so caught up a bit on who's now doing what, and on our respective families. 

7. Sorted out various books on the Kindle into folders while travelling home on the bus (again).  This time a Balaclava, which picked me up outside the coffee shop and dropped me outside my house.  So convenient! 

8. Home.  Perhaps time for a short kip once I've posted this....

Curiosities of Buses

Three buses leave from just near where my son currently works, down by Greggs factory.   One is the Balaclava, which drops me right outside my door, another is the Kenmure, which I can get as far as Elgin Rd, and then walk home; a third, I now discover, is the Bradford.   Having been thinking about going on a Bradford bus for some time to see where it actually goes, I asked the driver what stop was the closest to my place.  He thought the stop near the roundabout at Stone St would be closest, before the bus heads off into Kaikorai Valley.

So I got on the Bradford bus.  Talk about a roundabout route, but interesting.  It heads along George and Princes Sts in the same direction as the Balaclava and Kenmure, like them turns into Rattray St, but then at Harvey Norman's corner goes straight up McClaggen St, up Serpentine Ave, turns sharp right into Canongate, up Russell, along Arthur, up Rattray, up Ross, into Highgate, which then becomes Kenmure Rd, down Rosebery (I think) into Beaumont, up Napier, into Jubilee, and onto Mailer, where it climbs up to reach the Stone St roundabout.   I got off in Jubilee St, just before Mailer, courtesy of the friendly driver.

And walked up into Elgin Rd.  And found the Kenmure bus reaching the stop I normally get off at just as I approached it, and then found the Balaclava bus reaching my own home stop just as I approached it a few minutes later.  The latter would have been the most direct route, since it leaves outside my son's work and drops me off outside my own house...literally.

The Kenmure route used to be part of the Balaclava route in the old days, and never went into Stanley St, where I used to live.  Now there's a bus stop outside my old house. 


Furthermore, when I was at school, and had to come up the hill for a music lesson at the convent at St Francis Xavier's, I used to get the Maryhill cable car from Mornington.  It would go down the steep hill at Mornington, up Glenpark Ave, and stop outside my current house.   Where, one day, I fell off the cable car because I presumed it was stopping before it was.

I find all this very interesting.  You may not!

Rambling on about hats

Look at photos from the early twentieth century, and everyone - men, women and children - is wearing a hat. Everyone.

Even up until the fifties, when I was a child, most people wore hats. We wore caps to school, caps that had a little brim out the front made of hard card which was good for flicking someone else with.

And then suddenly this all stopped. It was as if overnight a switch had been reset and hats became invisible. You have to wonder what happened to them all.

We've never quite gone back to the total hat scene, although hats of various sorts are much more visible now than they were a decade ago. A few weeks ago, for a few days in a row, there was a man in a suit, on the bus, wearing a hat that looked like the one on the right - it's the sort of hat very few people wear these days.

Which reminds me that a couple of decades ago some brave soul started up a hat shop here in Dunedin, at a time when hats were practically invisible. A friend of mine bought one that was even more stylish than the one pictured, and wore it briefly - until he realised that just no one was wearing anything like that. And the shop closed within months of opening, as I recall, which was hardly surprising.

Women's hats, of the kind that used to be worn by every woman (with exceedingly extravagant versions available to those in 'society'), appear at weddings, but not much anywhere else. (My wife wore one to my son's wedding.) We seem to have moved on from the age when the hat was a symbol (more than something to protect your head) and when people spent a good deal of time on windy days holding onto their hats - or chasing them along the street. And we've certainly moved on from the time when it was normal to wear a hat,whatever the weather, and whatever the occasion.

In the hotel room we stayed at in Heidelberg four years ago, the only other item in the room was a hatstand - which seemed a bit optimistic.

However, having said that hats are well nigh invisible, that's not quite the truth. Hats of the more formal kind, with a brim all round seem to have gone into hiding, but hats in general (covering a wide range of styles) still appear - if you keep your eyes open.

Men and boys wear the baseball type cap (thankfully the right way round for the most part) and these are particularly useful for wearing as a kind of shade to keep the sun out of your eyes. Consequently I wear one through the summer when I'm walking to work, and even well into the winter - both to keep my head warm and also to act as a shade against the very low winter sun. I even wore a cloth (or flat) cap for a time - someone had given it to me and it just suited the purpose.

And talking of winter, that's when a vast array of hats appear: beanies that fit all around the bonce, (by beanie I mean the NZ version, not the one in the picture) and the occasional balaclava, and those peculiar knitted things full of colour that hang around down the ears and would loop around under the chin if it was stylish to do them up (I've just discovered they're called a 'chullo'). Knitted hats, in fact, are very common in the winter, and certainly in our climate they're great for keeping the heat in (although I've read somewhere recently that we don't actually lose a large percentage of our heat from our heads after all - wish scientists would get their facts right and stick with them).

Wikipedia, of course, has articles on the hat - this one has a great list of them with photos attached - it surprising just what a wide variety there are around the world. You can even buy Wikipedia trucker hats with various sayings on them...rather like the slogans on t-shirts.

Well, there you go. How to ramble about the hat when I could possibly, and probably should be, doing something else. What the heck, I'm nearly retired!