a birthday party

Today was another non-gardening day, because we were invited to my first cousin once removed's eighty fifth birthday party.  I was rather touched to be there as the sole family representative, along with the Systems Administrator as the sole in-law.  We had lunch in an hotel overlooking the sea at Aldeburgh.

My cousin (I had to look up the once removed versus second cousin bit on Google, not being into genealogy, but it's an awful mouthful) is a thoroughly entertaining chap.  He is a keen geologist, still leading study groups on field trips every year, and the other lunch guests were friends acquired through walking, skiing and geology groups over about the past forty years, while one had just won a gold medal for ballroom dancing at Blackpool.  Conversation ranged widely across subjects including geology (a specialist subject for approximately half the table), strange food eaten on foreign trips (to places far more exotic than I've ever been), learning to drive in Rhodesia, maps, the history of railway gauges, great and not so great train trips, the under-representation of science in popular culture and women in science, the earliest known recording of the human voice (1790, but having recorded it they didn't have the technology to play it back, so that didn't happen for another two hundred years), and the Essex textile industry.  Apparently there is going to be an exhibition of Kaffe Fasset designs in Braintree next year, so if there is and I remember to go I'll remind you about it then.

It was a lively (though abstemious) party, demonstrating how part of the art of growing old gracefully is to remain interested in ideas and people.  And it was liberating to our inner geeks to be among equally geeky companions, people for example who thought that a full set of the entire Ordnance Survey maps of the UK was an entirely reasonable and natural thing thing to possess.  Indeed, while the Systems Administrator has it in digital form, which doesn't even take up any space, they had all two hundred and eighty something maps in hard copy, in a specially built book case (you put the maps in sideways then the shelves don't have to be so far apart).

I once mentioned to a friend that I hadn't seen for some months that I'd joined the committee of a music society.  His response was that he supposed they were all over seventy, which I thought was gratuitously unkind, but made allowances because he was going through a bad patch at the time.  In fact I don't think any of them are, but if they were it wouldn't matter.  The great and gracious lady gardener who gave some of us from work lunch this summer, after coming to my house in the spring, makes no secret of the fact that she is in her seventies, but says cheerfully that age doesn't matter, the main thing being to have interests in common with people and find them sympathetic.  Her advice to her friends of a similar age who grumble how difficult it is to make new friends at their age is that they should make friends with some younger people.

The saying goes that nobody on their death bed ever wishes that they had spent more time in the office.  Certainly today's cheerful lunch demonstrated that a life spent collecting interesting people that you like can go on paying dividends, long after the office would have spat you out and forgotten all about you.