Pre-retirement and the ghost of Hilda

Saving the pier at Culross from old age etc.

Spent today on a pre-retirement course in Glasgow, a city where, despite all the positive messages and health initiatives a high percentage of those on the street don't really look right or well. It's a curious mixture of tattoos, obesity, strange clothing trapped and moulded onto posturing body shapes topped of with a whining, chiming vocal din shouted into the battered microphone of a mobile phone. That does it I'm afraid and it's on every street corner. All acted out whilst smoking roll ups and drinking ginger, oblivious and lacking any self awareness as bemused tourists look on as they alight their coach bound for freedom. We breed our stereotypes so well, so consistently.

The course was like some precursor for coffee time in Hell or a shopping channel audience audition. Mature, wrinkled people like me, moaning, bald and swollen and wanting out of whatever they were in. I felt like I was trapped in an old people's home but one that, alas and alack, I fitted into perfectly. We were for a brief time a club. Our common purpose apparently being to get some cash, milk some pension funds, have some long and short term investments and then do what we like and "be happy but careful". It all sounds tricky to me but many have ambled down this care worn path before me and lived to be at least 64. There is hope it seems. The best part was the rather confused and well over 60 trainer who used the words "logistics" and "catalyst" to describe major lifetime events when she really meant "arrangements" and "epiphany". I just giggled as I communed with the ghost of Hilda Baker, prostitute on the floor.