Thursday 15th July 2020 Day 113
6.30 My alarm rings, I need to be up early today. Any other day I would be awake by now but of course when I actually need to get up, I go straight off to sleep again and wake at seven. I am meeting my friend at Selsey at half past eleven and I need to walk Audrey before I go.
8.35 We are out and walking, the field is full of the largest healthiest looking wild rabbits I’ve ever seen, Audrey has long stopped bothering to chase them and frankly they don’t seem to be fazed by her at all and carry on with their breakfasts.
In the wood I just catch sight of someone up ahead and I think they have one or two dogs possibly on leads so I call Audrey to me, it is a woman with two quite large dogs crossing ahead of us and she calls thank you when she hears me call Audrey, at which point the dogs
start barking and snarling and sounding quite scary, we walk quickly off the other way, I’m glad those dogs are on leads but maybe they would have been less aggressive if they weren’t.
9.45 I set off for the coast, the coast road west is always nose to tail so I am setting off a bit early and sure enough I soon come to stop start traffic. The volume of traffic is just as it used to be pre Covid which I do find a bit surprising. Where are all these people going?
12.00 It’s funny, obviously the sea at Selsey is the same English Channel that comes to shore in Pevensey and Normans Bay and yet as you go west it seems to get bluer and prettier. There is sand here and not so many people, I am quite tempted to swim but am put off by the cool breeze coming off the sea so I paddle instead and it really isn’t that cold. We sit on the beach and get up to date with each other’s lives which doesn’t take too long as there isn’t too much to say about being at home mostly but it is a very pleasant hour or two.
On the way home I remember I have a form to fill in and get posted off. It’s just general personal details and includes ‘occupation’. I am reminded of when I was at work and new patients to the surgery would fill forms in with their details. The majority of over 65’s would just write ‘Retired’ in the occupation box. I always thought that was quite sad, for one thing there must have been a reason for the question, maybe a robber or a body snatcher wasn’t quite the sort of person we needed as a patient and for another thing, to cast away whatever you had been doing to earn a living over the past thirty or forty years with such a banal word as Retired, seems a shame. Retired what? I think I might write ‘Living’ in that box.