I’m starting to think that the name of this blog might be misleading. Am I really letting myself go? How disorderly is my retirement? Maybe I’m deluding myself and this latest phase of my life, far from being a retirement of wild and reckless abandon, is really no different from any other except that I’m not in gainful employment. The cat still needs feeding and the boiler still needs servicing.
One thing I am doing is letting myself go abroad. Despite guilt about flying, I’m visiting some of the many places that I’ve always wanted to see. Including remote and unusual ones such as the Pushkar Camel Fair in India and my upcoming trip to Oaxaca in Mexico to experience the Day of the Dead celebrations. And I’m sure that most people I know are still wondering what the attraction of Uzbekistan was. (Fabulous Islamic buildings richly decorated with mosaics, and cities that look like they’ve come straight from the Arabian Nights, in case you were wondering. And friendly people who are so intrigued by foreign visitors that they clamour to have their photo taken with you.)
But what about in other ways? If I were truly letting myself go, surely I’d be eating anything I felt like, drinking to excess, sleeping half the day and carousing through the night. Or maybe I’m getting it confused with my teenage years. Either way, it’s not happening. Neither has my personal hygiene fallen to unacceptable levels – at least I don’t think so. I don’t appear to have become noticeably ruder either, although I was hoping that I’d turn into an acerbic old lady of the Maggie-Smith-in-Downton-Abbey variety. Obviously I need a better script writer.
My only real claim to letting myself go is that I’ve resolved to stop dyeing my hair and let my natural colour grow out. There are many good reasons for this – taking a stand against the pressure that women feel to appear as youthful as possible, concerns about how those chemicals are damaging the environment and, of course, the fact that you save a lot of money. I had thought that this was an original and brave thing to do, then I thought “Brave? we’re talking about hair dye here, not marching into battle”. Anyway, according to my hairdresser this is a bit of a trend, which just goes to show that we’re rarely original and are more likely to be influenced by the subtle changes in mood and opinion taking place around us, whether we realise it or not.
A few months of growth have revealed that my natural hair colour, rather than being a beautiful glinting shade of silver, is in fact still mostly a very dull brown, which reminds me why I’ve been dyeing it all these years. Pink highlights might be the next step. Now that would be letting myself go.