Anxiety Rising

          The other morning, I bought a takeaway coffee (£3.90) and a bacon bap (£4.50) and took them to a quiet spot where I could sit and celebrate the arrival of spring. I chose the Elizabethan Garden, which is tucked amongst the jumble of buildings that comprise the Barbican, the oldest part of Plymouth. Accessed through a passageway and invisible from the streets, the garden is often bereft of visitors and the silence of their absence enhances its historical atmosphere. Alone, I sat and observed the budding foliage of the box-hedges luminesce in the sunshine, while the ancient stones absorbed the warmth of its rays and the tinkling fountain played a medieval soundtrack. Before too long, the mild resentment I’d been harbouring at the extraordinary cost of ‘dining out’ dissipated and left me in a peaceful frame of mind.

          However, this state of bliss was interrupted by an incoming call from an unknown number, accompanied by the warning, “Suspected Spam!” Ordinarily, I would take heed and kill the call but, feeling relaxed and expansive, I decided to pick up and be kind to the unfortunate person I assumed to have been tasked with trying to sell me goods or services for which I have no need. People must make a living, after all. In this case, it turned out to be a bailiff earning her bread by demanding that I pay a debt of £1100 immediately. The spell of the garden was broken and I returned abruptly to the hum-drum business of life.

          Alarming though it was at the time, the debt turned out to be a mix-up in the council-tax department and was soon resolved. But hard on its heels came a couple of other concerns – the simultaneous reporting of leaking toilets at the two tenanted flats we still own 300 miles away in Manchester. As a long-term landlord, I can attest to the fact that if anything is going to go wrong it will be the plumbing. Even so – and considering that the flats are in different blocks – two failing toilets in one day is unusual. Fortunately, I still have connections in Manchester, one of whom is a handyman who is, unsurprisingly, especially handy with plumbing and, after a swift exchange of gruesome videos on WhatsApp, he set to.

          During these various negotiations, I noticed that my anxiety levels were impinging on my ideal of a laid-back lifestyle. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly anxious person, but lately I’ve been reassessing that assumption. I’ve caught myself worrying unduly about relatively unimportant issues – not just debts and plumbing but also whether there will be a good attendance at the next jazz evening, for example. I’m formulating a theory that worrying at this level is a consequence of not having anything more important to worry about and may be an inevitable consequence of no longer being engaged in a career. I recall someone telling a story about going back home to visit his retired parents and finding them, despite their comfortable circumstances, anxious to an extraordinary degree about trivial matters. He described his father as being “on 24-hour bin-watch”. I like to think that I would never reach that extreme, but it has to be said that bin etiquette is fairly high on my list of neighbour grumbles.

          Perhaps it was the cost of toilet repairs that was the catalyst, but yesterday I tried economising on the mid-morning indulgence. I went to a city-centre branch of Greggs, where £2.85 buys you a flat white and a bacon bap! It’s a long way from the Elizabethan Garden, so I took a seat at the window and observed the arrival of spring as celebrated by the wearing of shorts, skimpy vests and flip-flops to expose sun-starved flesh, tattoos and knobbly knees – and all done with a degree of self-confidence that betrays no sense of anxiety.