My wife tells me, and so it must be right, that now that we are retired we must beware of the involution of our habits and interests. It is all too easy for old people to live the petty round, in which a visit to the grocer seems an expedition of some magnitude, and not to change their clothes for weeks on end.
And yet there is something deeply reassuring about the scale of the quotidian, that seems suddenly upon retirement to be so much more important than it seemed before: besides, one cannot always be considering the deepest questions of existence, and not being a cosmologist or an astronomer, the vastness and coldness of the universe frightens me.
I was in a café the other day when two academics, a man and a woman, sat at the table next to me. They started off talking about their important academic research in Moscow, but then they got on to the problem that really exercised them: whether one should score Brussels sprouts in their base before cooking them.
I couldn’t help joining in the discussion after the woman said that her mother used to cook sprouts for what seemed like two days before serving them. This imparted their smell to the whole house, but deprived the sprouts themselves of all taste. I asked whether her mother had been a true British cook of the old school, and served the tasteless mush with a good dollop of the water in which it had been boiled, thus diluting further the thin and miserable gravy?
We spent a happy few minutes discussing together the Brussels sprout problem. I suggested a double blind trial to settle the issue. Somehow, the sheer unimportance of it all gave a lift to my heart.
I maintained my level of pettiness by attending the meeting of the town council in the evening. I had never taken an interest in local affairs before, considering them below me. The unaccustomed presence of members of the public (my neighbour and me) galvanised some of the councillors into asking questions about the budget. Why, for example, were the surveyor’s fees set at 10 per cent of whatever the cost of the work he recommended? This was hardly a recipe for economy and what is known in bureaucratic circles as ‘best value’.
I discovered later that our town council had had scandals before. In the 1970s, the town clerk was sent to prison for arson when he burnt the records of his financial irregularities in a general conflagration. But the question about the surveyor’s fees took me back in my mind to Africa, when I worked as the doctor to a construction project financed by British aid.
The contract was on a cost plus basis: that is to say, the construction company could charge a percentage on top of whatever it cost to complete the vitally unnecessary construction work.
This led to general drunkenness, wastefulness and irresponsibility all round, but when one worker, six and a half feet tall, who looked like a cross between Tyrannosaurus rex and a haystack, wrecked a bulldozer, costing £250,000, because he was still drunk at nine in the morning, this was an irresponsibility too far, and he was sacked. He refused, however, to get in the company light aircraft to take him back to the capital, and he threatened to break off its wings, unless he were given a case of two dozen bottles of beer and a bottle of Drambuie for the three-hour journey.
The company agreed, and since then I have never really been a libertarian, or in favour of foreign aid come to that.
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