Sunday, 21st September, 2025
Bloody Sunday … again. They don’t stop, do they? A bit like the rain in Manchester and Wales. Anyway, this morning is glorious with clear, blue skies and strong sunshine, warm and wonderful. Unlike in the 1950s, Sundays no longer represent slower times for most people. For the Retired, most days are slower times. In fact, the problem is challenging lethargy by moving around at all.
This article features in the morning’s Sunday Times. I must say it is years since I had a speeding fine. I’ve had two in my driving lifetime. Most young men are in a hurry to get there. With age, we learn to take our time and enjoy the ride.
If anything, the most significant element of driving back and forth across the Pennines each day, back and forth across Europe each year, always in a hurry to get to the next stage for work or pleasure, my eyes were always on alert for police and camera surveillance. I had a couple of speeding camera captures in the North of England and I was once stopped at a Toll Barrier by police as I was leaving France to enter Switzerland. They asked me if I realised I was doing 180km/h on a 130km/h motorway. I told them I was desperate to meet a ferry in Ancona and handed over 70 Euros for their Lunch which seemed to do the trick.
There has been a general toning down of speed limits here in UK as the density of vehicles on the roads has increased. You would be hard put to do the speed limit in many major cities now anyway and it would almost be quicker to walk. Even the little lane I drove up and down every week day for years near my school is going 20 mph. The increased housing and consequent car driving access has to be legislated for.
I no longer speed or even try to speed. I drive almost permanently on the setting of Adaptive Cruise Control set to the speed limit and adjusted to the car in front. With Lane Keep Assist on as well and Automatic Breaking, the only reason I hold the steering wheel at all is because it bleeps and flashes me if I let go for more than 30 secs. Driving is a much more relaxing activity. The roads around us are 20mph limits. The car just reads the signs and sets the speed. I know the Welsh have had a problem adjusting to that principle but, with all that rain, they must be very sad people anyway.
Rain cuts the place we tread,
A sparkling fountain for us
With no fountain boy but me
To balance on my palms
The water from a street of clouds.
Dylan Thomas - 1931
Soggy, Welsh and sad. No wonder Dylan Thomas turned to drink although I don’t think he could drive anyway.
Monday, 22nd September, 2025
The Autumn Equinox was ushered with magnificent skies last evening. The sea and sky across Littlehampton Beach were on fire.
Coincidentally, that Wordsworthian theme of Trailing clouds of glory do we come … was echoed in a photograph from 55 years ago that was sent to me by a friend yesterday. Certainly trailing lots of hair, anyway.
Almost cut my hair
It happened just the other day
It’s gettin’ kinda long
I coulda said it wasn’t in my way…
Well, I didn’t need to cut my hair in the end. It just fell out of its own accord. Trailing clouds of hairy did I come …. On this day in 2009 when I was just 58 years old I was recording the night sky from my Greek house:
Distinct change in overnight temperature is what the garden will be feeling. Although we’ve now got a completely dry and quite warm week ahead, the nights are cooler and the trees, plants, and animals will react and start to turn down, prepare for shut down, look to ensure their survival through the months of Winter. The one thing we are lucky with down here is that the extremes are far less than the further North one goes.
Tuesday, 23rd September, 2025
Another glorious morning – a bit cool but bright, clear blue skies and strong sunshine. It is our long term friend, Little Viv’s Birthday today and we wish her a happy day. She might be tiny but she’s 71 today. Unbelievable!
A big day today. Going to valet the car myself. Lovely day for doing it and I need the exercise. Every new Honda comes with an elaborate canvas bag full of maintenance products – leather polish for the seats, wax shampoo for the paintwork outside and another for the inside, glass cleaner for the windows and mirrors, vinyl & rubber care, wheel cleaner and tyre dresser. You have to be retired just to have the time or inclination to use them all.
I bought my first new Honda – an Accord – in 1984. I found my bag of maintenance products in the boot and my wife had a bouquet of flowers on the back seat. Little has changed with each successive new car but attitudes have. Back then just over 40 years ago, I was busy working, occasionally took my car in for cleaning but had no time to do it myself and, when I took the car in for its first service, I knew it was going to be given a full, inclusive valet by Honda anyway so I didn’t bother myself. The Service Manager actually reprimanded me for bringing in a dirty car. It was bad for Honda’s image he said. He wouldn’t dare do that now.
Down at the beach this morning, Life was busy. No stone unturned. Mackerel cloud was starting to filter over from France. I will take it back with me when I go over shortly.
Wednesday, 24th September, 2025
A grey, overcast and quite chilly start compared with yesterday. It’s not cold but lack of sun makes it feeel so. Of course, living inland makes you far more susceptible to temperature extremes. Living on the coast mitigates those extremes.
The oceans mitigate global temperature by absorbing large amounts of the Earth’s heat, acting as a massive heat sink that distributes this energy through ocean currents and stabilizes climate. Water’s high heat capacity allows it to store and release heat slowly, preventing rapid temperature swings and moderating coastal climates, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter compared to inland locations.
I haven’t done Geography since O Level in 1967. I knew the basic principle but wasn’t really understanding of the complexities. When you live in the North of England, in general, and on the Pennines, in particular, for decades, you take being cold and miserable in Winter for granted. It is an incentive to move South and to the coast. I was watching people living in Alaska and wondering, Why would you choose to do that? Move to Florida and enjoy your life.
Of course, some people just like the safety of the place they know. Some people live in the same house for most or all of their lives. It is unambitious but safe. I understand that even if I haven’t practised it myself. I belong nowhere. I have my foundations in nothing. I have no home. I am rootless. I have no affinity. I walk alone. It is a lonely, independent journey. Occasionally I regret it but wouldn’t change it at all. We grow through change and ambition, through new experiences and locations, through new ideas and challenging the old. And so it is just like you said it would be …
One of the downsides of living by the sea is that the demographic is much more concentratedly OLD. It is a popular place for people to retire to. Most of the people we come across out during the day are old people. They clog up the shops hunched over trolleys, they clog up the roads peering out for road signs, they clog up the doctors and hospitals desperate for healthcare. They are just there, silver haired and slow. Yes, I know I’m old as well but … not that old.
I love Data and Economics much more than Geography. I listen to a wonderful radio programme that combines the two – More or Less. It is a fact checking data analysis programme which is exactly what I like.
This morning it was examining a statement made by the Governor of the Bank of England about the viability of pensions as the proportion of elderly increased in the UK and across the world. What I found out was that by 2040, almost a quarter of the adult population will be over 65. What pensioners need to remember is that publically funded pensions, health services and social care are not funded out of some already established pot of savings. It is funded by current workers through their taxes. The Faragists who live long enough will suddenly realise why they need immigrants here working and paying taxes or the population pyramid will be so inverted , their very existence will be challenged. Assisted dying will be compulsory.
Thursday, 25th September, 2025
It’s funny how Nature knows the date. How does it know that the ‘official’ start of Autumn has begun? But it does. Suddenly, the nights have got a bit cooler. The skies are clearer. The stars are brighter and the morning’s blue skies are sharper. The trees have suddenly picked up on this and their leaves are beginning to turn from green to yellow with brown edges. One or two are falling and helicoptering down onto the grass below which is growing more slowly now. Even the squirrels are coming out in sympathy and streaking across the road.
The monthly village magazine delivered free to our door features one on its front cover as a symbol of the season. The national psyche still harbours cultural undertones of the harder times in the past when food had to be stored up in the good times for leaner times to come … squirreling it away to get through the Winter.
I live in a community and I have a conscience, I care for people less well off than myself but I’m really not a communitarian. I’ve always had a natural affinity with people who shied away from that style of living, who value their independence and separateness. The Germans have a phrase for it – Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft – Community and (Association) Society. It is a dichotomy developed from Thomas Hobbes through Ferdinand Tonnes and then Max Weber. The village magazine continues to promulgate the traditional Gemeinschaft concept of cooperation. I am still firmly in the atomised Gesellschaft movement. I support in my own way on my own terms. I am not a natural joiner.
I suppose with old age, we see the need more for community and support. We anticipate our infirmity. There could be a time when we need people around us to care. In fact, I see my aging as a a juggler keeping the plates spinning by taking remedial action immediately on my material world maintaining the house and car and on my physical self by addressing health issues as they arise. Keeping at bay deterioration
Eating well, trying to keep fit, having regular health checks just like servicing the car and maintaining house services are all part of the plan. Currently, and I hate to admit it even to myself but, I have a bit of a hearing problem in my left ear. It has always been a little suspect but over the past three months has got seriously worse.
The one thing that my area has is great services for the elderly. Many of them are featured and advertised in our monthly magazine. Hearing deterioration is certainly a feature of aging. Looks like I may be visiting the Sussex Audiology Centre. I’m just happy that this day deep into September has reached 22C/70F with gorgeous sunshine. Reunification is at hand. The world is getting better. Time is cyclical as Einstein would tell you.
Friday, 26th September, 2025
Grey and cool start again. Hope the day turns round as it did yesterday. At least I don’t have to drive to the hairdresser’s this morning. Each morning at the moment, while other people are eating mueseli, I go out into the garden to pick tomatoes. I have picked so many cherry tomatoes from plants which accidentally seeded themselves from past plants that the freezer can’t take much more tomato and basil sauce. Still, it is nice to have.
I finished yesterday’s Blog acknowledging the great Health Services down here on the South Coast. It was ironic because yesterday marked the 60th year since my Dad died in hospital of a heart attack in 1965. He was in hospital in the first place for investigations on his heart. I have always been struck by the irony and angry that systems weren’t in place to save him.
Of course, now a simple stent would have solved the problem of blocked arteries so maybe there just wasn’t the knowledge and/or technology to save him. I’ve found that the first stent was not patented until 7 years after Dad died. Whatever, his death had a resounding effect on our lives, on Mum’s life for years afterwards and on my life in terms of career choice.
It was expected that I would go into the family Building firm – Sanders & Son and I was sent off to evening classes in the local Training College to do a Architect and Estimator module while, at the same time, also doing my O Levels at Grammar School. The original business was started in the 1880s and expanded from coffin-making to general carpentry and then to general building work. It was re-registered when my Grandfather bought out his father’s, my Great Grandfather’s partner and formally registered it as Builders & Contractors. When Dad died he was building numbers of houses and employed about 20 permanent skilled men along with many more from the ‘Lump’ – a form of labour-only subcontracting where workers are paid a lump sum of money for a job, often in cash-in-hand, rather than through PAYE.
As it was, when Dad died I was just 14 years old and although Grandad stepped back in to keep the business going, it was only until it could be sold to a house building concern in Derby.
I would have been a rubbish Builder anyway although I would have been a good, Man-Manager. I would have been terrible as an Architect and a Constructor but I would have been good as an Estimator and Data Manager. It wouldn’t have been enough although I often thought that combining my brother, Bob’s skills with my own might have made a winning team. Still, it wasn’t to be. I turned to my Mother’s profession as a teacher.
I found that I was a natural educator. I was good at it and enjoyed my ability. I felt utterly at home in Education and in making reluctant kids want to learn. I loved to innovate and bring the age old process of teaching and learning into the modern world of the internet although in the final years I was becoming a bit disenchanted and ready to go. Even so, for many years in my dreams I walked the corridors of my history and continued to talk to and advise former pupils and staff still needing support.
In the past few days, I have been watching the Emmy winning, British psychological crime drama, Adolescence about a teeage boy who murders a girl in his school as he struggles to come to terms with personality development and his developing sexuality. Adolescence illustrates a classic dilemma that one saw time and time again over the years in school. It took me back to my early years of teaching and moved me greatly.
The drama was a slice-of-life style and the school scenes gave me the shivers they were so close to actuality. The poor, caring parents, uneducated but loving, thoughtful, caring people who had obviously worked hard at being good parents but were feeling blamed by the world for their son’s crime. They searched themselves in vain. How often did schools in working class areas constantly under the Oftsted cosh, search their consciences for the source of failure when the system built it in from the outset.
Saturday, 27th September, 2025
The rule is that, as the pips sound for the 7 o’clock News, I have to spring out of bed and get going. Just as I do, I ask Alexa, What’s on the calendar today? She will announce, John, you have four entries on your calendar today and then she will go on to list them and place in text scrolling across the screen. Great, I know how to plan out my day.
This morning, I got a glum, John, there is nothing on your calendar for today. When I was working, I would have rejoiced in having a free Saturday. Now not so.
It is a lovely day. After a warm night we have sunny skies. Might drive down to the beach. Might pick tomatoes. Might check the back garden for jobs. Might …. I hate drift.
I’ve visited Sifnos, Thessaloniki and Athens this morning by webcam. It is overcast and distinctly grey. That is what happens in the dog days of September. I recorded that on this day 16 years ago we lit the log fire for the first time and put on the underfloor heating in our Greek home. The next day, we were swimming across the bay in 30C/85F of sunshine. We had one more week before we left for the drive back to UK and I recorded that I was being forced to eat pork chops twice that week and Bolognese Sauce twice as well as we had to eat down the freezer prior to turning it off for six months.
Anyway, in the here and now, I’ve done a lovely 2hr walk in gorgeously warm sunshine and I’m going in the Gym to move while I watch the football rather than sit as a couch potato and vegetate. I looked at myself in the shower last night and I need to get a grip and work harder. Aging is a terrible thing. If the football is rubbish and it hasn’t been great recently, I’m watching a fantastic dramatisation of the phone hacking scandal that cost Murdoch so dearly. It is called The Hack and is brilliantly carried by Toby Jones as the famed editor, Alan Rusbridger and David Tennant as the intrepid Investigator/Reporter, Nick Davies.
The storyline is cleverly interwoven with Murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator who was found dead in a South London carpark with an axe in his head 38 years ago. Officially, the murder is still unsolved although police corruption and phone hacking seem to have been involved as well. The connection between the two stories is that both were linked to the now defunct Murdoch newspaper – The News of the World. It is a story that involves Journalism, Politics and Espionage and History. I am in heaven.