I don’t often write stuff on holidays, but this recent one deserves entirely personnal comment.
I retired back at the end of November, and knew that I would have to do something to replace the human contact the job gave me. As much as I disliked meetings, and I only had a few of them, I know the human to human communication they gave had an important effect psychologically. I knew I had to do something else to fulfil that need.
This is why I organised my holiday around meeting old friends and new. I would refresh my contact with Cambridge poets. I would refresh my mostly lost contact with old political friends. I would renew contact with friends from my old poly. I would revisit family members.
3 things expanded this. The trip was timed for an old political friend’s sixtieth. My old political party organised a conference for the week after. A long running friend from Cambridge unfortunately died, which changed my plans there: I went in celebration of her, rather than in celebration with her. And my old school got in touch with me, completely out of the blue, in such a way as to allow me to meet some fellow pupils, who, like me, have rather grown up in the 50 years since we last met.
My emotional swirl meter has been in and out of red. The last ten days have given me an overdose of human contact, so much so that it contributed a lot to my reaction in London’s national gallery. (I know now to never view great paintings on an empty stomach.) I still have to emotionally process a lot of what I experienced, especially the new contacts, and especially the distressing life experience. As I write, I feel like I’m whirling around in my reaction to seeing many old, and creating some new, political friends.
I’ve already got some poems out of this, and I suspect I’ll get some more.