Old people watching

Today I embraced my new found gainful un-employment by going for a cup of tea and reading the paper (cultural nuance applies here to what can reasonably be called tea) in the company of other Bruxellois retirees such as myself. The location was the cafe in Hemma on Rue Neuve. An old man sat alone in a corner happily lapping up a pink ice cream Sunday and some purple-rinse ladies at another table talked about were to go for the best ‘pedicure medicale’. I felt right at home. These cheep and cheerful in-the-upstairs-of-a-department-store cafes are great. I could just as well be in a Marks and Spencers cafe in Rathfarnham shopping centre or in the Lunch Garden of Carrefour. In a way these cafes are like geriatric skate parks or ‘youth’ clubs where the old folks can come and just ‘hang out’ and have their own space within to express their old-age angst over a bowl of cream of asparagus soup. They’re also nice because here no one judges you for sitting on your own, and for just watching the world go by. Everyone does it. In fact it’s a prerequisite for entry into the Playground of the Winter of our Lives. Perhaps this solitude is an unfortunate bi-product of the inevitability that in a married couple one person will usually outlive their spouse, unless by some tragic coincidence they die at exactly the same time? That’s a morbid and existentialist thought (both terms need not necessarily be associated, fyi) but see that’s the thing, you never know on what kind of philosophical journey an afternoon in Hemma might take you!