A Kiss and a Cup of Tea

By Graham Fisher

Sports writer Graham Fisher and his wife Joan get the travel bug. Both undergo cancer scares after planning a round-the-world
trip only after an edge-of-the-seat ordeal do they make it. Five and a half weeks later they are back, exhilarated but broke. They decide to sell their beloved Victorian home to fund more exotic adventures and that too is a roller coaster ride. Graham Fisher recalls the thrills and the pitfalls and adds some sardonic thoughts about modern travel and life after retirement. It is a tale that will strike a chord with those of his generation and inclination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479703173

Book preview

A Kiss and a

Cup of Tea

Graham Fisher

Copyright © 2012 by Graham Fisher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

0800 644 6988

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

[e-mail]

304246

Contents

1. Us

2. Our House

3. Innocents Abroad

4. The Grand Tour

5. Around the World

6. Farewell No. 14

7. Open Skies

8. Antarctica

9. Winding Down

10. Airlines, Airplanes, and Airports

11. Last Thoughts

12. To the moon and back

To Ron and Gail at Salmo Travel

The stories of our lives are marked by the places through which we have passed or about which we have dreamed

-from a plaque in Wenceslas Square, Prague

Us

It was about three in the morning. Some ridiculous hour. Joan was tugging at the sheets. ‘Come and look at this,’ she said. I crawled reluctantly out of bed, trudged behind her on to the balcony and followed her gaze towards the heavens.

The night sky was alive with a million stars, not light years away but within our grasp, it seemed to me. So clear was the air that we appeared to stand witness to the entire universe. It was fabulous.

Right overhead, our very own Milky Way snaked across the sky like a ribbon of silk encrusted with sequins.

It was January 2006, and we were off the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica, aboard the Regal Princess, and surrounded by monster icebergs and towering white cliffs. There is only an hour or two of true darkness in those parts at that time of year. Joan had chosen exactly the right moment to wake.

JOAN, MY WIFE, always says that had she been told as a young girl, skipping in the streets of Crumpsall, North Manchester, that one day she would stand at the end of the earth, struck speechless by such beauty, she would have laughed in your face.

She has laughed a bit more. Not that many grandmothers, she reckons, have ridden a camel in the Sahara, snorkeled over the Great Barrier Reef, seen a lioness with a cub in her mouth, hot air ballooned over the Valley of the Kings and sailed on the Amazon delta.

Neither have many downsized from a rambling family home to a cosy flat without a single significant modification to their lives.

You will gather this is mostly, though not entirely, a good-luck story.

As a teenager, I had the thrill of doing National Service in Hong Kong, with two month-long troopship voyages fore and aft. Some years later, already a mother of five, Joan went on her own to Boulder, in the Rockies, via New York and Chicago. Travel fever took hold long before we were able to do much more about it.

We met at the Ritz Ballroom in central Manchester on Halloween 1958. I had not long joined the old Daily Herald as a sports sub-editor, and Joan worked as a nursery nurse. We managed a couple of foxtrots, shared a kiss on the platform at Victoria Station and married sixteen months later. In just over five years, Louise, Simon, Kate, and Adam had arrived. Amy brought up the rear after a gap of six years, completing a tidy circle—Joan is one of five, I am one of five, and now we had five.

As green as two Granny Smiths and initially without family and friends to advise us, we were on paper hopelessly ill-equipped to handle a baby epidemic. But without recourse even then to teach-yourself handbooks, we came through on instinct alone. Joan turned overnight from giddy teenager to an accomplished mother, unveiling more and more talents as the years went by—as superb multitasking cook, knitter and seamstress, photographer, dancer, champion bowler (crown green and tenpin), gardener, hostess and supreme counsellor. She even starred (as herself) in an ITV commercial for Phensic, the old headache tablet, though her whopping fee disappeared when we discovered dry rot under the front room floorboards.

In the early days, I clocked on for work (now at the Daily Express) in the late afternoon, getting back home at around two in the morning. Thus, I saw far more of the infants during the day than most dads and soon developed a boast—not without its grain of truth—that I had changed more nappies than most mums.

The kids had all grown up and left the nest before we started taking holidays abroad. We peaked—or thought we had—with a tour around the world, west to east, despite illnesses that threatened our lives let alone our great circumnavigation. Back home and broke, we made an emotionally charged decision to sell up, a process with drama all its own, and came to rest in the ground-floor flat, fifty yards from our old front door!

In the next five years, we went bananas on the proceeds, leaving England thirty-six times, constantly mindful that our health problems could call a halt at any time. Now, in 2012, that is more than ever the case, and the allotted funds are anyway dwindling fast.

Here comes the paradox. They say that youth is wasted on the young; it could be added that time and opportunity is often wasted on the old.

An enormous wave of brittle bones infests the world at any given time. They creak along on the prom at Benidorm in the spring sunshine, pick over the relics at Ephesus, fly in little groups over Niagara Falls and queue obediently for a launch to take them to James Bond Island. There are more wheelchairs and pacemakers on the average cruise liner than you’ll find in Guy’s Hospital. As a stage comedian on the Thompson Emerald asked, gazing over his audience: ‘Am I the only one here with his own hips?’

Examine those tanned, age-lined faces and you will detect, more often than not, a sense of entitlement and determination. We’ve worked all our lives. We brought up the family in hard times. We made sacrifices for the children. Now it’s our turn, and by heck, we’re going to make the best of it.

But they are all runners in the great race against time. How much can they squeeze in after retirement and before either their hearts or joints protest too much? Or dementia sets in? Or their insurance providers have a laugh? Look at the front cover—the sunset of our lives is rarely without its dark cloud or two.

True enough, there are high-profile octogenarians around like Bruce Forsyth and Bill Roache, who still look capable of strolling up Everest, and David Attenborough, who has only just given up on journeys that would test an Olympic athlete. The Queen has probably been abroad more often since she turned eighty than most of us manage in a lifetime. We can only observe such immunity with envy.

On a Shearings coach tour of the Scottish Highlands, we sat behind a clearly well-to-do couple who were telling their neighbours that after a career of globe-trotting (apparently a lot more informed than ours) they had ‘retired’ and now travelled around their own country. The wife explained: ‘It was the insurance mostly. I had so many things wrong with me.’

For a long time, Joan and I bought annual cover, a commodity that increased annually by three increments. There was always a hike for inflation. Another as we each got a year older. And a third as we inevitably reported additions to our long list of infirmities. The premium reached a high of £307 in 2011.

The following year, already cutting back severely on our travels, we booked our tenth and final cruise and wisely opted for single-trip insurance. Our familiar and friendly brokers, Delta Travel, came back with a figure that shocked us to the core—£289 for the eleven-day trip! And that covered medical emergencies only—no cover for cancellation, delays, or lost luggage—with a £500 excess to boot. Worse, Joan was obliged to declare yet another ailment only days later, which gave Good To Go the chance to slap another £14.45p on the bill.

Disguising your medical history is not an option. One constantly reads of people being refused payouts because they failed to disclose conditions from the distant past. We always stick rigidly to the rules for that very reason. Nevertheless, it is a pain. Before arriving at a premium, the broker requires answers to a computer-generated quiz. You can’t say ‘ah, but my blood pressure readings have been excellent for two years now’ and expect a sympathetic hearing. If you’re on tablets, you’re on tablets, and cyber space makes no distinctions.

The internet is full of sites suggesting places to see before you die. I logged on to one bucket list naming fifty. I had seen twenty-six of them, Joan twenty-three, and there is little chance of improving on our record.

Not that we would rush to all the places listed anyway. It is true though that the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, the Northern Lights, Victoria Falls, the Himalayas, Dubai and the Great Wall of China would all have figured in this book had the money and our health lasted a few years longer. Not that we have entirely given up. Dubai isn’t so far away, after all. Neither are the Northern Lights but you can plan a trip to northern Norway in perfect detail and still miss the show.

Specific locations aside, we shall always regret that we never made it to either India or New Zealand. I am seventy-seven now, Joan is five years younger, and we never will. If age does one thing, it saps the appetite for long-haul flights. Following in the footsteps of Frodo will remain a dream.

We are back where we started—when the children had left home—taking the odd week in Europe, though not doing a great deal when we get there. The final cruise was just that—a final fling. These days, we each move with the dexterity of a wounded hippo, smiling at fairly recent memories of slithering around on glaciers and chasing big game in a bucking bronco of a minibus.

But we are paid-up members of the National Union of Old Farts, the mighty, growing movement of senior citizens. Our influence on Britain’s culture and politics is unforgivably derisory but one day those in power at Westminster and in the boardrooms will wake up. They will need us to stay in power and in profit.

If you feel that way too and enjoy stretching your wings in a way unthinkable to your own grandparents, you should enjoy our story.

We have done nothing that thousands have not done before us, so you may ask: why bother?

Well, go to a splendid theatre show or a gripping football match and you want to read the papers afterwards to relive the pleasures and compare your views. If you have travelled with the same relish as us and to the same places as us, you will recognise these pages with affection. If you entertain such hopes in the future, your lips should be smacking by the end.

But heed the lesson. Don’t put anything off. Do what you can while you can because ere long you may find that you can’t.

Our House

BY 1976 AMY, our fifth, was five years old. We needed something bigger than our poky home in Woodhouse Lane, Sale, and found it on the other side of the main Chester Road. We paid £15,000 for 14 Beaufort Avenue, a grand Victorian semi with four storeys, six bedrooms, and no heating. It was November. Most of the children were despatched to bedrooms on the top floor, with electric fires, fan heaters and hot water bottles. It is fair to say they were not amused.

The place had seen better days but the sheer roominess of the house, its location in a leafy, quite classy cul-de-sac and its decent-sized south-facing garden grew on us all.

We had central heating installed. Over the years, Joan (the paperer) and I (the painter) decorated every room in the house, including the cavernous cellars. Slowly, Joan, the one with the green fingers, developed a stunning garden; its architecture took the eye up and down a series of brilliantly conceived levels. The eventual centrepiece was a raised bed built by a professional dry-stone wall expert from Macclesfield, whom Joan had hunted down with typical vigour, just as she had found some great Yorkshire stone in a Stockport Council depot for the extensive patio (or ‘backyard’ as she preferred to call it) some years earlier.

Soon, we all loved our home and realised how lucky we were. Inevitably, though, the children grew up and one by one departed either for university or to start their own journeys in life. Amy was the last to go; she began her economics degree at Liverpool University in 1989 and never came back to live with us. Simon did, but ere long, he was married, leaving us to rattle around the ranch in a preposterous case of under-occupancy. (We were not alone. At least four houses in a row in Beaufort Avenue contained elderly couples only, sharing roughly twenty-four bedrooms. Tessa Jowell wanted to tax bedroom-blockers out of their mansions—she would have had a field day down our street.)

This situation could have been dangerous ground. Some couples find that once the brood has flown their relationship is quite mercilessly examined. After years in the role of joint family managers, they are like two people trapped in a lift. The little quibbles and squabbles, once swept up like crumbs off the dining room table, grow into weapons of confrontation. We know couples who much prefer to go on holiday with others, fearful that even a week or two in each other’s pockets might end in rancour, let alone the rest of their lives.

The potential dangers grow come retirement. Having the old man pottering around the house all day, bumping into things and making a mess, is not the average winding-down grandmother’s idea of harmony.

Thankfully, Joan and I are an odd couple; we don’t need other people in quite the same way most other people need other people. On cruises and coach holidays, we always request separate dining rather than risk a community table, politely discussing the day’s events with fellow travellers we don’t know and may not like. The occasional strange look is no big deal. We are happiest in our own company and that is one reason why our marriage has lasted fifty-two years.

There are others. Joan gets a kiss and a cup of tea in bed every morning, even if a tiff the day before has left a touch of frost in the air. This little ritual reminds us that we are married, for better or worse. It sees us through. It saw us through the considerable ups and downs of these chapters.

A relaxing, enjoyable peace filled our vacuum, replacing the extraordinary (with hindsight) ongoing drama of rearing a family of five.

Now, you may think, would have been a good time to sell up. We never gave it a thought. We enjoyed so much the garden, which continued to evolve, and the space. The space! The high ceilings, the enormous kitchen, the unused rooms; it gave us an almost spiritual extension. Model neighbours resided either side of us, caring but not obtrusive. Apart from which No. 14 was convenient beyond words.

01house.tif

No 14 Beaufort Avenue

From our house, it was a ten-minute walk to the Metro station, from which you reach Manchester city centre in twenty minutes, Altrincham in five minutes and even the fabulous Bury market in less than an hour—all for free with our bus passes! The M60 motorway, gateway to everywhere, was a five-minute drive. Brooklands Sports Club, our drinking hole and a fine thirteen-acre sward to delight the eye, was next door. Two more pubs took five minutes to reach. For those still with kids to educate, Sale Grammar School was at the end of the road, two minutes