A Retirement Blog by Caree Risover

  With all this glorious Spring weather, I certainly feel grateful to be back at home. The joys of pottering in the garden and listening to the birds singing are mine once more. Everything has burst into flower, especially the apple blossom and, so long as we do get rain before too long, it looks as though it could be an impressive crop.       Mind it's not the only plant that's proudly strutting its flowers at the moment. I have a cactus that's over 30 years old and can usually be relied on for a delightful display of colour at this time of year. Last year, in exile, however, it didn't bother. I know how it felt! This year, it's clearly glad to be home, just like me. In retirement we've reached an age where hopefully we feel comfortable in our own skin, our slippers and  our hearth-side. I don't actually have a fireplace, but I get the meaning. After a whole year adrift off foreign shores, finally I feel content once again. The bags or should I say plethora...

  I think it's well understood that as we get older we can find it harder to recall information and easier to misplace items. Just like the rest of the body, the brain begins to show its age too. I'm fortunate in that, to date, I have always had a good memory but, like everyone, I can and do mislay things. Experience over the years has suggested, however, that most things I lose are invariably found in the first place I look, although rarely on the first occasion that I look there. Commonsense suggests, of course, that they would hardly be mislaid if I immediately found them where I thought they were. Historically the main items that go walk about in my particular case are keys and spectacles. Recently I was unable to find my house keys. I was certain that I had them when we moved and the first place I searched was my gym bag after a hunch that I'd put them there on my first gym visit after our move. Despite emptying the bag of its contents, they were not there and searchin...

  After my last blogpost, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd dashed off for a sabbatical on a desert island thus explaining my apparent absence from this platform. Sadly, and much as I might wish otherwise, I've instead been maintaining the huge effort required to re-establish our home. I'm not sure if it's age that's catching up with me but I'm certainly not finding it as easy as I might have imagined. There again being forced to knuckle down in retirement and tackle work that I would not have chosen, if it weren't for the circumstances, is a strange phenomenon after the carefully orchestrated freedom of the past decade. That said, I did manage to squeeze 6 nights in London when I helped out with Grandotty's childcare. I'm unsure what the expectations of me were but, for some bizarre reason, the Eldest and Dilly seemed to think I was the ideal person to  sort potty training. Perhaps they assumed that my memory would extend back 30 plus years to ...