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If you are female and around retirement age you are well aware that your shape is very different from when you were younger, but generally you can forget this unwelcome fact – except when shopping for clothes.  You may start off your shopping trip feeling cheerful and positive but there’s a good chance when you’ve finished shopping and are walking back to your car all you will be carrying will be a new oven glove, a 2011 calendar of border collies ( much reduced), three pairs of tights and something for supper.  You will also be close to tears and feeling ugly because everything you tried on, however beautiful it looked on the rail, made you look either too fat, too short, too thin, too shapeless or too old… and those unforgiving lights and the cruel three-way mirrors in the changing rooms so helpfully highlighted all your worst features.

There must be more to retirement than wandering listlessly around garden centres.  It’s difficult to find plants for a start, you first have to run the gauntlet of all the things these places sell that have nothing to do with gardening: cakes, cushions, furniture, gifts, cards and unpleasantly coloured fleeces… by the time I have got through all this merchandise I have lost the will to live and am feeling queasy from all the scented candles and potpourri.  When I finally find the plants it’s a real relief to be outside and I spend what I consider to be an outrageous amount on a variety of flowers and plants imagining they will instantly transform my garden.  However, back home when they are all in my garden (at least a week later, I’m not a keen gardener) they don’t look that amazing, just a few plants looking rather lost in a large flower bed – so then it’s back to the Garden Centre again for chipped bark to spread in the vast wasteland in between the plants to discourage the weeds, which of course always grow more vigorously than anything I plant.

There I was, enjoying a chat with a couple of friends in a coffee shop when an acquaintance, who I had not seen for many years, stopped briefly to speak to us. She knew my two friends well, but clearly did not recognise me because after a while she smiled in my direction and asked one of my friends: “Is this your mother?”  I was so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say at first, none of us could.  Then eventually we said “No” and realising her error she said “Oh you look so alike, are you sisters?”  Oh the damage had been done, dear reader, it was no use talking about sisters when she had just mistaken me for the mother of a 56 year old.  This was especially painful when I had gone to quite a lot of trouble with my appearance that day: I even wore a high necked sweater to conceal my lined neck. When she had gone my two friends did a valiant job of trying to reassure me that I did not look that old.  Knowing how miserable I felt, they sent cheering emails and phoned me the following day and gradually I could laugh about it (just).  I may not be very lucky in the youthful looks department, but I’m very lucky in my friends.

Dustbin day, the arrival of the postman and the gold crest in the yew tree never interested me at all when I was working.  But since I’ve retired I’m in danger of becoming obsessed by all these things because often very little else is filling my day.  Most many people claim they are really busy when they retire, but what are they so busy doing? Well I suspect they are reading through plant catalogues delivered by the postman (who will talk so), writing complaining letters about the non-collection of their household rubbish and researching the habits of the gold crest on the internet.

When you were young you watched TV quite silently: you may have laughed or cried but you never talked at it – that comes when you are older.  Older people can’t let anything pass on the TV without a comment and generally in disagreement.  The temptation to go on and on about what they think is irresistible.  I know what you’re thinking: “Well, I certainly don’t do that” – all I can say is wait until you’re settled in front of the TV (all the better if you are with someone else so you can observe them as well) and then see what happens.  In no time at all you’ll be  criticising someone’s facial hair, disagreeing with the item on speed cameras and protesting during the interview on electoral reform.  In fact your opinions were so loudly expressed that you completely missed the bit about frost in the weather forecast so now you don’t know whether to put a cloche over your verbena seedlings or not.