SAT ON A PARK BENCH LIKE BOOKENDS

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I used to have the rather romantic notion that many of the hours of my twilight years might be spent sitting on a park bench with old friends in comfortable companionship, quietly reminiscing about the old days and watching the world drift by whilst amiably and implicitly passing my world onto younger, more worthy and deserving minds for them to nurture and care for as we quietly and unprotestingly slipped away into uselessness. We would quietly chat and remember our good old days with perhaps just a soupçon of regret and the merest hint of a mischievous twinkle playing about our fading eyes, and just enjoy each other’s company as the day slipped into evening, the mist started to gather, the sun set, and we mutually decided that it was a good time to slope off to the pub for a swift pint or two.

I thought, or maybe just hoped, that it would all be terribly civilised and not just a little moving as those wise old heads remembered the good times, and, as the movie camera showing us their lives pulled backwards and further back still, and the soundtrack of their lives faded, it would all be somehow both terribly moving yet also uplifting as the music swelled and we got a sense of their quiet stoic dignity in the face of massive cosmic indifference.

Nowadays, of course, I know that it’s going to be nothing like that at all. Not only is it terribly unlikely that I’ll live long enough to enjoy such a lifestyle, but I’m starting to believe that there’ll be nobody left to give a rat’s kidney, plus I’m starting to imagine that all of my contemporaries are more  likely to be trying so very hard to cling on to their own youth that they won’t want to be up to such passive pastimes but, instead, are more likely to be jumping out of aeroplanes and running marathons than wanting to feed the ducks and listen to the soft clunk of the bowls on the green.

I can’t imagine there’ll be all that many bowling greens left by then anyway, as the councils and corporations will probably have sold them off to build flats for us to lock ourselves into with our own little virtual worlds to explore instead.

If I carry on the way that I am, I can’t imagine that there’ll be too many friends to accompany me, either, but that’s for me to deal with, at least with the ones that manage to survive that is. The ones that are daft enough to throw themselves out of aeroplanes or feel the burn as they hit the wall when they’ve got to an age when they really ought to know better, well, I hope that you make it, I really do, but if you don’t, well… don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As to those who have already gone to a better place, I can’t ever see the air fares ever making many regular trips to sit in your local parks all that likely, especially with all the pension pots going into meltdown like they seem to be, although maybe by then everything will be so interactive that the technology will make it seem like we are able to share our virtual bench, even if we’re half a world away from each other. That might be fun, and would certainly cut down on the required effort to be inputted by a reluctant socialiser like myself, but just in case it never happens, well I’ll be thinking of all of you as I sit wherever I end up sitting, all alone in the darkness waiting for the answers that I suspect are really unlikely to ever actually come.

Mind you, if all of our retirement dates keep getting pushed further and further back, like they seem to be, maybe even that day will never come.

Still, if you’re still out there, we have an appointment on a park bench at some point in the not too distant – or possibly ever so far distant - future. Come that glorious time, I hope that we’ll regularly get the chance to sit down, chew the fat and put the world to rights whilst remembering our adventures from our own less than reckless youth. The strange thing is that right now, we still have the time to add to those future memories if we don’t all get too wrapped up in what we haven’t done, what we used to do, what we really should be doing and what we wish we had – or hadn’t – done.

If we’re not careful, we’ll be sitting there saying “All gone now, all gone…” and we won’t be able to work out quite how it was that we got to there from here. Sometimes I think that it’s already too late, but then I tell myself that I’m just being daft, although, alarmingly, one day I’ll wake up (or not…) and I’ll be right.

I suppose that I’d better get a move on before it’s too late…

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