From R.S Thomas' Poem, 'Retired'

No longer guilty of wasting
my time, I take my place
by a lily-flower, believing
with Blake that when God comes

he comes sometimes by way
of the nostrils. My failure, perhaps,
was to have had no sense of smell
for the holiness suspiring from forked humans.

Dying with your boots on

I had this conversation recently with a family member. Neither of us has a pension pot worthy of the name, and we fell to speculating about those who had. Or rather, thought they had, until recently. The small print on all those adverts suddenly sprang to mind: "Prices can go down as well as up," or whatever the paraphrase was. Or perhaps, "Prices can go down as well as plummet." Many people only slightly older than myself are now looking at seriously reduced pensions, and contemplating working until their 70s simply because they can't afford not to.

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