Upside-down bucket list

Somewhere, possibly, there's an administration officer of a retirement village making use of a senior housing software program which will enable him or her to decide how much it will cost to house me in the year 2000 and whatever, and whether I'm going to be worth it to them to take in and care for.

There have been a few things in my life that I've said I really don't want to do, an kind of upside-down bucket list. One of them I talk about in my prostate book, which hopefully will be appearing by May/June this year; you'll have to wait and buy the book to find out what that was, because somehow it managed to take itself off my upside-down bucket list and put itself on my bucket list, where it didn't belong.

One of the other things is I don't want to do is go into a retirement home. I've had some experience of these: my wife worked in one for a number of years, and I've seen people who seemed lively and full of beans go into them and wind up sitting in a chair ground down by the general depression of the place.

Yes, I know that's not how they're advertised. But like it or not, retirement homes are the one of the last stages before departing the earth entirely, and if none of get out of this life alive, then a retirement home is where that not-getting-out starts for many.

Yes, they advertise swimming pools, with jaunty silver-haired people diving and rollicking about; they show the same silver-haired people enjoying the privacy of their own home or the social club atmosphere of the communal area. They show the extensive library, the gym, the whatever else is fashionable.

They don't show the hospital area, or the constant roll call of missing faces - turnover is high in retirement homes.

I realise I may not have a choice about going into one of these places - or worse, into a rest home. Circumstances may decide things for me. Perhaps if I take it off my upside-down bucket list and put it on my bucket list, fate will get fooled and let me depart in my own bed in my own home.

Time will tell.

In the eye of the beholder

While we were on the Continent, we had the experience of seeing many luxury homes; mostly from the outside. On the bus tour we took in Hamburg, we went around streets where the homes had once had gardens rolling down to the water. In Barcelona we stayed in what was basically a luxury apartment – we were scared to touch anything much in case we broke something.

And in Luxembourg we stayed in what I would class as a luxury home – except that the people living there don’t see it as such.

Up to a point, luxury is in the eye of the beholder. The homes that the National Trust now administer in England are certainly luxurious, but where’s the luxury in having to have dozens of servants to keep the place clean? Even if you do pay them a pittance.

It’s the same with the house in Luxembourg: it’s so large it’s too much for the owners, and they have to get someone in to clean.

It rather takes the edge off the luxury, to my way of thinking, if you have to employ someone to clean up after you. Think I’ll stick with the home I’ve got - which we can manage to keep up by ourselves.

Saving Your Life

Finished another book the other day, while tenting around the UK.

It’s This Book Will Save Your Life, by A M Homes. An odd book, there’s no doubt, and the saving side of it relates to a man called Richard finding his way from a life which is nothing to a life that’s worth something. The book is full of quirky characters, and even more quirky behaviour. This may be in part because it’s set in California, but not entirely. Homes has a way of making even fairly ordinary people seem extraordinary.

I’m not sure that I entirely enjoyed the book, and I found the ending came suddenly out of nowhere. (I was expecting several more pages, and then discovered they were filled with advertising for Homes’ other books.) The book doesn’t seem to move forward very fast, and there’s certainly nothing that could be called a plot. Some characters that are shown as difficult and unpleasant turn out to have a soft side, a side that’s almost unreal, and other characters are too unreal altogether.

And the book is full of loose ends – at least in my reading of it. I’d like to know a bit more about how some things turned out, but Homes leaves a lot of stuff unfinished as far as the reader is concerned. You could say that they’re ‘finished’ in literary terms, but this isn’t entirely satisfactory.

Anyway, it was worth reading generally speaking, and certainly I wanted to finish it. That’s a plus!

And there's a very good and sensible review of it by Frank Cottrell Boyce on the Guardian Unlimited site.