Where have all the brand new combine harvesters gone?

Isn't it funny. You live somewhere for years and your life assumes a regular pattern. You get up, you go to work, you do the shopping on the same day and at the same place every week. You swear to yourself, when I retire I'm going to break all of my routines. So, here I am, one year and six days after retirement...and blessed if I haven't got into a new kind of routine!

Sunday has become Dump Day. There's barely a week goes by when I don't have a car full of stuff to take to the Cradle Hill Recycling Centre - AKA The Dump. This week it was carpets. I must, of course, praise the generosity of the former occupants of this house in leaving the carpets for us. Sadly, however, those carpets were, shall we say, a little less than perfect, covered as they were in interesting single celled organisms, and languishing in the loft. They were also possessed of an interesting aroma; you could probably use them as an air freshener if you lived at the centre of a sewage farm. I'm hoping that the leaving of the carpets was not an oversight on their part, and that I'm not going to get a visit from the previous owners, asking for them back. I'd have to come clean - something that the carpets would never do, even with a generous dose of napalm - and I would also have to admit to disposing of their interesting collection of damaged house bricks.

That was the dull bit of the Sunday routine. After that was the bit I like best - wandering into town to get the papers. I always go via the beach to see what interesting stuff the tide has thrown up. There wasn't much this morning; some seaweed, a few bits of old rope, some driftwood that wasn't worth taking home to use on the fire...but on the positive side, the sky was a brilliant blue, the sea was sparkling, and I had the place almost to myself. I could quite happily have stayed there all day but, as we have a couple of friends popping in this afternoon, this would have seemed churlish. So, home I went.

As I turned into the road in which I live, I noticed an elderly gentleman, sitting on a low window sill opposite the baker's shop. Nothing remarkable about that, of course. Seaford is full of elderly ladies and gentlemen having A Nice Sit Down; they've got it down to a fine art. But, as I passed this particular elderly gent, he started to sing Where have all the flowers gone? And he sang it in tune with a strongish voice; not in that curious, quavering way that many elderly folk have. He would probably have been around twenty one years old when the song was released. This led me to speculate on what tune, should I be fortunate enough to reach the age of seventy-odd, I myself could sing whilst having A Nice Sit Down on that rather commodious window sill. Mamma Mia, by Abba? Perhaps. Save All Your Kisses For Me, by Brotherhood of Man? Maybe. But, on balance, I think the winner by a short straw has to be Combine Harvester, by the Wurzels.

I love these Old Classics.