Three score years and fifteen

Yesterday Mary went to Stephen’s first birthday party, and came home laughing at the memory of five one-year-olds and their mums, and the impossibility of getting any kind of overall order for a photo. It should be easier with me. I was born 75 years ago today, at Devonport, and the tribal memory is that my father fled to the top of Mt Victoria to await the all clear. Typical. This evening we have a select dinner here with my sister Marilyn and her husband Lionel, and also David and Alison Grant, friends who live nearby at Algies Bay.

Mary is now fully retired – that is, from medicine – but she threatens to fill up the space with all manner of activism. Perhaps my role is to redress the balance around here. Anyway, I have too many books to read. They form orderly queues in my study. I simply don’t have time for ill health or deteriorating eyesight, or pointless activity, or anything that might render me unable to read and ponder what I want. Last week some time, when I was otherwise occupied, in a manner of speaking, there was a knock at the door downstairs... but no way was I going to rise up and rush downstairs to answer the door. Then on Sunday, Mary came home to report that a certain activistic old humbug at the church, who had made a previous attempt to visit me but had been headed off on that occasion by Mary and by Marilyn, had been the caller on this occasion. He was determined to invite me to a new Men’s Group. This group sounds totally toxic. The agenda for their inaugural meeting is fish and chips, a committee meeting, and indoor bowls. No women! What’s the point of that? No young people. Just all these old blokes. I would rather have teeth pulled. Mary and Marilyn are on the alert to protect me from this elderly zealot.

Last time I lent myself to anything like that was in 1963, in Whitehill, Lanarkshire, Scotland. There was a men’s group on Friday evenings at which they sat around a trestle table and played dominoes. It remains in my memory as an early prototype of hell. On the first evening I couldn’t understand much at all of their dialect, and rapidly discovered that there was no way they could cope with me there anyway – I simply hindered normal conversation among these locals – and I ceased going. It was that same evening that we learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

It is difficult for me to express how fortunate I am. Living here, looking out over the bay, granted this time of leisure and quiet and reasonable health, married to Mary since 1961, two wonderful sons and one lovely daughter, all happily married, five grand children... The disasters of the past gone with the dew and the mist. And this morning Mary gave me a handsome pure merino jersey and a warm shirt, and an autobiography by Barack Obama, all with a card which reminded me that I “deserve” her. You bet.