All in good time

 My recent blogs seem to harp on about old age so I´ve decided to write something positive for a change...

One thing I´ve learnt with getting older is that things will get done in their own good time. I´m the type of person who always had a mental list of "must do's" niggling away at me. I don´t mean things like regular chores but that occasional stuff which needs seeing to sometime, like clearing out a cupboard, doing some mending or suchlike. Even when I´ve caught up with everything I´ve always managed to find something else to nag myself about.

Being older and wiser (lol) now, I have come to realise there is no need to force myself to tackle the "must do's". At some point I now know I will actually feel like doing them, which means they no longer feel like a chore. Result!

Fingerprints

There are a couple of turnstiles in the reception area of my gym. You have to go through one in order to enter and you do this by having your fingerprint read by a sensor.

There is only one problem with this, as far as I´m concerned - my fingerprints are so faint they appear to be practically unreadable. I don´t know whether they have worn away due to age, a lifetime of housework or my activities as a potter, but they just don´t work!. Instead I have to key in a sequence of 17 numbers which is a bit of a faff to say the least...one wrong and you have to start over. Anyway, without fingerprints maybe I should consider coming out of retirement and become a Pink Panther, or rather a Gray Panther?

Photo by George Prentzas at Unsplash 

Teeth breaking

Unlike Pam Ayres who wishes she´d looked after her teeth, I have looked after mine with brushing and flossing and regular check-ups despite an irrational but very real fear of dentists. Whenever I have an appointment I start getting the heebie-jeebies days beforehand.

Apart from a couple of crowns and caps I still have all my teeth which I believe is not bad for someone of 76. So it is most unfair that I´m suddenly having loads of trouble. In February I broke a bit off a tooth and had to go to the dentist. In April the same thing happened to another tooth. A couple of weeks ago, bingo, another one - and before I had even got around to booking an appointment to get that seen to, yet another one. I have not started chewing rocks so I assume it is part of getting old, but it is still not fair...apart from the stress levels my bank balance is taking a bashing. Coincidentally one of Toby´s teeth dropped out the other day, I found it by his cushion. Old age sucks!

Cyclamen

My cyclamen continues to amaze me. I have had it for nearly a year now and it has never stopped flowering. I bought it very cheaply at the supermarket when they were discounting old stock. It had loads of leaves, four flowers and a couple of buds so I reckoned it would last for a few weeks, as they usually do. 

As the flowers died off more buds kept appearing so it always had three or flowers at a time. After a few months about half of the leaves started yellowing, so I imagined the flowering was over and it was going dormant. I cut of the yellow leaves and expected the rest to follow. Instead it kept flowering! The number of buds slowly increased until now there are about sixteen flowers at any one time!

I am delighted, of course, but somewhat mystified. I have never fed it or done anything other than keep it out of direct sunlight and sit the pot in a bowl of water for twenty minutes every four days. Maybe the current mass of flowers is it´s last hurrah...

Veiled skyscrapers

View from my kitchen window. It is a little difficult to see but the three skyscrapers are covered from top to bottom in some sort of netting, which appeared overnight. I´m sure it is not an artwork but probably something to do with cleaning or building work. Since the buildings are 30 or more stories high I can only imagine the length of the fabric and the difficulty of hanging it in place, especially if it were windy. I wish I´d seen it and had my binoculars to hand!

Dead giveaway

 

There appears to be a current trend for American authors to write books set in the UK, such as Agatha Christie-style mysteries or Regency novels. Some of these books have glaring mistakes which are a dead giveaway of the lack of even basic research into English customs, language and places etc., but some of them are very well written and it is hard to tell the writer is not from the UK.

There is one word, however, which always gives the game away. In England when you are eating you take a mouthful, spoonful or forkful of food whereas in America it is a bite of food, even when no actual biting is involved, such as in the case of scrambled eggs etc. It is only a minor difference and I guess most people wouldn´t notice it, but that is how my mind works (lol). Maybe I should have been a detective?

Photo by James Giddins on Unsplash

Childhood sounds

Today I heard a trilling sound from the street below which I recognized instantly and which took me right back to my childhood - shades of Proust´s madelaine!

The sound is made on some sort of whistle and is the call sign of a knife grinder. It must be over 60 years since I last heard it and I was amazed when I rushed to the the window to see that it was indeed a knife sharpener down on the street touting his services.

They use a disc-shaped whetstone attached to a modified bicycle contraption which they wheel from place to place. When they spin the pedals the whetstone turns. I remember standing in the street gazing in awe at the sparks which flew everywhere.

He didn´t seem to be getting any business today but I had a nostalgic trip down memory lane as his trilling faded away into the distance.