The pharmacy one got me first, and it got me at half past nine on a Tuesday morning, which is not an hour at which I have any fight left in me.
Repeat prescription form, the usual business, and down near the bottom, wedged between "date of birth" and a box asking if I am exempt from charges — which I am, thank you, fourteen months clear of the working world and every bit as smug about it as that sounds — there is a line asking for "occupation.
" Not "current occupation."
Not "occupation, if applicable."
Just occupation, as though the pharmacy needs this information to dispense my blood pressure tablets, as though there is a special dosage for men who used to command ships and a different one for men who never did.
I sat there with the pen actually hovering.
That's the bit that got me.
Not the question — the hovering.
Thirty-odd years I could have answered that in my sleep, in a force nine, in three languages if you count the swearing.
Master Mariner. Ship's captain. Done.
Next question. And now here I am, pen in the air over a leaflet-strewn counter in a pharmacy that smells of hand sanitiser and quiet desperation, genuinely unsure what to write, and a small queue building behind me because apparently everyone else in this village knows exactly what they do with their Tuesdays.
I wrote "retired."
Obviously.
What else was I going to write, "formerly employed in the maritime sector, presently employed in the sector of standing in pharmacy queues"?
But I want to be honest with you about the hovering, because that's the actual story here, not the word I eventually settled on.
Then, same week — and I promise I'm not manufacturing a pattern for your benefit, this is genuinely how it went — the council sends round a form about a change to bin collection, some consultation nonsense that will result in absolutely no change whatsoever to bin collection, and buried in it, because councils cannot resist, is a demographic section.
Employment status.
Dropdown menu. Employed. Self-Employed. Unemployed. Retired. Student. Other.
Six options this time, one more than the pharmacy, and I want you to appreciate that the extra option was "Student," which did not help me even slightly. I clicked the dropdown and just looked at it for a moment, the way you look at a menu in a restaurant you already know you're not going to enjoy.
"Retired" was sitting right there again, second from bottom, patient as you like.
And I clicked on "Other" instead. I couldn't tell you why, even now. Something in me simply refused to click the same word twice in one week for two different strangers who had no earthly need of it. A small, pointless act of rebellion against a bin consultation.
I imagine somewhere in a council spreadsheet there is now a category called "Other" with exactly one entry in it, and that entry is a man objecting to being filed correctly.
By Thursday it was the insurance renewal, and this is where it stopped being funny and started being — well. I'll get to what it started being.
⬇️ Keep reading for the deeper story — this is the part you shouldn’t miss.
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