Waiting for the bus

Waiting for the Bus 

Listen, I know we are all going to die. Obviously.

What that does not automatically mean is that once you pass into old age that you have to stand in line and wait for death to find you. 

This little outburst stems from this mornings regular visit to a pretty tea shop in Arundel where we meet with a fellow club member and have a jolly good old chin wag as relaxation after a challenging 10km run and a bit of a stretch of our ageing muscles.

 

So, as the conversation went, sure we all have to die of something. To square this off, my friend had asked me when I was going to retire. I haven’t actually thought about retiring from my sport, I will wait for my sport to retire me. As to our little family antiques transport and packing business, I have backed off the manual work I did for about thirty years. I did much of the wrapping and packing, working pretty much every day and doing the office work in our packing warehouse. As years passed, I suffered more with colds and coughs and my asthma playing up every winter working in a cold warehouse. This coincided with my mother in law’s failing health, and at that time we both decided that I would move the office work to home, so that Steve’s mum would not be worried by being left alone, since she was concerned about the various failing aspects of her health. I took care of her for some considerable time on my own until as she started to suffer from more and more health problems we began to have a carer come in each morning for an hour or so, to bath and dress her etc.  

The reason I am harping back to this time is that my husband’s mother was the complete contradiction of how to maintain good health. She drank spirits all her life in generous home measures. She never did any exercise at all since she was quite young. Left to her own devices she ate whatever she fancied and I can tell you that that means it was mainly unhealthy. My husband is an excellent cook and she was not really very happy when she had to allow him to start making all her meals, because they were far too healthy for her tastes. She would get her carer ladies to smuggle in anything that we did not buy to include in her diet.  

This morning my parting shot after the ‘We are all going to die talk’ was that having observed and experienced mothers life style since she moved in with us twenty five years ago, I would be livid if I didn’t survive until at least the ninety four years Caroline Mary Belt lasted whilst breaking every rule in the book her entire life. 

My own hard working parents both suffered a horrible two year downward spiral until their deaths too, horrible to watch, horrible. 

As we walked back to our respective vehicles this morning, I said that ideally, popping off my perch at the end of a happy day at a triathlon would be THE way to go, but otherwise, I would rather be killed by a bus racing through the rush hour traffic, though of course that would be a dreadful thing to happen to the poor old bus driver. 

I had the wonderful good fortune of visiting Japan in 1998 as a member of the Great Britain long distance triathlon team. Marvellous experience, wonderful trip, great race and I took home a gold medal. During that trip we were taken on by our guide on really fun Karaoke bus tours here and there and at one point we were told that there were shrines in parts of Japan, where people would go, to with the purpose of praying for a quick death. I am totally with them on that thought.