Premature retirement

This is mostly a "holding pattern" type post. Yesterday I retired. I am 61 years old next week, so it was premature, and risky in this current financial climate.

However, last week I underwent a heart procedure (thank God it went well) and I am living with the unknowns of brain tumour. So, I made the decision to step back and let my body and brain have a break. I don't know what the future holds and honestly, that makes me grip bits of furniture a bit too tightly when I think about it. 

I am a great believer in making space for opportunities. My "space" comes with fish hooks, as I have some physical limitations, but that isn't going to stop me waiting to see what opportunities present themselves.

A case of watch this space. Meanwhile, I think I might take to baking a bit more.

My first kitchen

We are half way through having our kitchen painted, by a professional. I learned early in our marriage that DIY was not my husband's strong point, and that because we both had quite strong views on how things should be done, it would be better to leave it to professionals than to be shouting at each other for days.

Thankfully, we are in agreement about colours and styles, which is interesting given there is a 12 year age difference.

Our kitchen has a very sunny aspect - it's a bit like being in a greenhouse in the summer. This has governed our colour choice for the walls, which needed to absorb light as much as possible. A dark dove grey has been chosen which will be a lovely contrast to the white of all the woodwork.

So different to my first kitchen. In 1988 I bought a Victorian terrace house and the priority when I moved in was to paint the kitchen. Actually it was to strip the wood first, as it had been marinaded in curry  smells and a thin layer of ghee for many years. My dad and I took to it with a blow lamp - no sandpaper would shift the coating. It took ages and the kitchen was only 4' x 8'.

I had set my heart on the colours of the Italian flag for the kitchen: white paintwork with green accents for the doors and red accessories. It was the tomato coloured iron trivet that dictated the palate - and hey, it was the '80s.  When it came to choosing the green, I had a temporary, wine induced "wobble" and went for a green more akin to Granny Smiths apples. It turned out to be an inspired choice, as anyone who ventured into the kitchen (sideways, comme un crabe) laughed at the shade. Laughter from a the kitchen is always a good sign.

Today it wasn't the colours that slammed me in reverse back to the 1980's, it was the smell. As soon as the paint was dry in my little Victorian house, I invited a friend for dinner. I had fallen deeply in love and I couldn't believe he would want to spend time with me eating my food. I served an exotic 3 cheese flan, and he gave me a bouquet of flowers which thankfully covered up the smell of the paint.

It was a relationship that didn't last sadly. It was years before I fell out of love, but he cheated on me and that smell of the paint yesterday made me cry; 34 years vanished and I was stood in the kitchen and felt abandonment all over again. 

What a difference 24 hours makes. Sat in the study with my faithful and wonderful husband of 18 years we eat pasta (the kitchen is still smelly) and that lost love in the apple green kitchen is but a memory, put to rest for good.

Parlez vous Francais?

I follow a trader on a local online auction site who sells vintage books (now there's a surprise). This morning I was sent a link to a book which immediately threw my senses back almost half a century. It was a small book to teach French to young people. 

I remember clearly my first week at secondary school seeing on my timetable the word "French" followed by "Language labs." I was beside myself with excitement that first week, putting on headphones and learning how to say "Breakfast is ready." Useful stuff! I still recall the smells and sounds of thirty eleven year olds rewinding the practice tapes and repeating over and over "Je m'appelle....." We were all given a French name; mine was Claudette. I was disappointed, I so wanted to be called Marie-Noelle or Romilly or something a bit more romantic. Claudette sounded to me like she would be a scullery maid with bad knees.

For three years I continued to learn French three periods a week and still recall that excitement of donning huge plastic headphones and imitating the accent of our French assistant Madamoiselle Rumney.

I discovered quickly that language learning wasn't my strong point, and unlike many of my school friends I didn't go to France on holiday each summer so had no opportunity to practice. I found grammar perplexing and difficult. I swopped to learning Spanish (supposedly easier). I learned that for 5 years - or at least I tried to. Then there was the language assistant challenge in my final 2 years of Spanish -  we didn't have one. There were only two of us left studying it by that point and the other girl was very talented. She danced flamenco in Spanish. I dragged my language skills behind me like a satchel with a broken strap. The lack of a language assistant meant that every Wednesday after school we caught a bus to the next city to meet up with a Spanish assistant from another school. We sat in the bus station cafe and spoke to her in Spanish, or at least my friend did. I just coughed - Maria chain smoked Gitanes cigarettes.

Not willing to admit my inadequacy at linguistics I went on to have embarrassing and inaccurate conversations in Afrikaans (lived in S. Africa), German (lived in Austria), and Arabic (lived in the Middle East). 

But here's the thing - I understood conversations in every country I have ever lived in. I pick up vocabulary quickly and can usually get the general drift of a conversation. I even did it this in Hebrew after a few weeks. But the moment I open my mouth, my memory cells paralyse, my teeth glue together and grammar tumbles like a badly constructed scaffold outside a dodgy building. I'm wondering if there isn't a name for this kind of handicap? But this morning when I opened my email, I felt like that 11 year old again and wanted to repeat to myself "Le petit dejeuner et pret."