Friday 5 July 2013

#355: Retirees at Play

Aaaaagh!  For all the world knows, I am permanently stranded in a stairwell in London because it has taken so long to complete my account of our UK trip!  And it is not as if I am trying to compose a travelogue or download a million pictures.  

It is just that things get in the way.  Volunteering makes demands.  The garden wants attention.   And we occasionally give in to a spontaneous impulse and attend a play in Stratford. 

We were not alone either.  On Wednesday when Bruce and I took in a wonderful matinee performance of Fiddler on the Roof, we had plenty of retired company.  It was a full house with an all-ages audience, but there were loads of grey-haired attendees.  (I concluded that some of these older and younger folks were together: grandma and gramps giving the kids and grandkids a cultural outing.  Perhaps I suspect this because it is what I can imagine us doing in a few years.)     

The seniors-love-Stratford thing was also evident when we had dinner afterwards at a favourite restaurant, The Parlour.  Carpeted floors, comfortable seating, and wasn't that Faure's Pavane tinkling in the background?  How very grown -up! And how appealing to the older folk we noted among our fellow diners.  We were really at The Parlour for their pavlova, but it was still a relief that there was no assertive hip vibe (the attitude, not the body-part) to remind us of our essential un-hipness. 

Yup.  Stratford knows its audience.  Even as we drove into town we had been greeted by an age-- appropriate message on one of those "thought for the day" displays outside a local Inn:
  Time is a great healer but a lousy beautician.  

I am capable of more than one act of summer spontaneity. I should take another look at that Stratford playbill....

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