Pickleball or pubs?

It has struck me before that I might be turning into my mother. I think I could write a whole novel on this subject, or perhaps a trilogy, but I’ll try to be succinct. My mother is admirable in many ways, but she has her faults and I can’t imagine there are many children over the age of 8 who really want to grow up to be just like their parents. I am grateful to have had her for so long, she is 91, but I really don’t like the idea that I might be slowly turning into her. I am forced to admit, however, that our lives have distinct similarities. I won’t dwell on adult sons living at home…

My mother was 38 when she emigrated to Canada from England and I was 28 when I emigrated back again. She was 63 when she and my father moved back to England, buying a house in an unfamiliar town and starting her whole life afresh. I say her life because my father would have been happy to spend all his time seeing his grandchildren, smoking, reading and drinking coffee. My mother was having none of it. “We have retired from work, Alan, not from life,” she told him in no uncertain terms. So she set about joining everything that looked interesting (and some things that didn’t), dragging my father along with her. They ended up with an enormous social circle and my poor father found his reading time severely curtailed.

So here I am at the age of 63, buying a house in a town I barely know, intent on joining anything that looks interesting. I have no grandchildren and don’t smoke, so I have a fair bit of time on my hands. Decades ago my parents joined the local wine circle and the U3A. I don’t think there is a wine circle here – people don’t seem to go in for that sort of thing anymore – perhaps they just drink it rather than meet to talk about it? The U3A, however, is alive and well. It stands for the University of the Third Age, but it’s mostly a social club for retired people as far as I can tell. They have lofty goals about self-improvement, but I think that all those meetings about classical musical appreciation and military history might just be a cover for socialising and coffee-drinking. And then there’s pickleball.

Pickleball, since you ask, seems to be an odd hybrid of tennis, badminton and table tennis, played on a court, but with paddles. A pickleball enthusiast was telling me all about it, but it seems to consist of small bursts of activity interspersed with a lot of chatting. Although that does sound quite appealing, I don’t think it’s for me. Fortunately, there are numerous groups to choose from and I have found the perfect one: pub walks. All the walks begin or end in a pub. It’s not as lofty as a wine circle, but it does sound like fun and I think my mother will approve.