Page 18 - COBH EDITION 18th JANUARY DIGITAL VERSION

‘My life is being controlled by a watch’ - Trevor Laffan
One of the great things about being retired is not having
to watch the clock. Not having to work out when you need
to start getting ready for work or worrying about how
much time you have left sitting in the recliner before you
have to get out of it.

Having spent over 35 years as a policeman, I learned
early on, how to live my life by a watch. One of the
first things I was taught in the Garda Training Centre in
Templemore was that every entry in the official notebook
begins with four headings; Day, Date, Time and Place.
So, for every incident I went to, the first words written
in my note book were, what day it was, the date and what time it was when I arrived
at my location. These are important details that can easily be forgotten over time and
especially when you could be dealing with many incidents during an eight-hour shift.

So, right from the start, a watch became a critical piece of equipment for me and mak-
ing those entries became as automatic as breathing. We all did it without thinking.

When I retired, I was surprised at how quickly time became irrelevant to me and it
wasn’t long before I began to lose track of it altogether. It doesn’t matter to me what
day of the week I have because unless I have something specific to do, it is all the same
to me.

To a retired person, every weekend is a Bank Holiday weekend and every day is free to
be enjoyed however we chose to do it. I adapted to this lifestyle with little difficulty and
quickly grew fond of it. There are some who have commented that I was born for retire-
ment and that’s fair enough I suppose.
I liked this new-found lifestyle, not having to look at my watch every few minutes, and
I was blissfully happy. And that’s a dangerous mindset to be in because it seems to me,
that any time I reached a state of contentment, something always happened to turn it
around and introduce me to some misery and hardship.

I put it down to the Gods, the Greek ones in particular. You have probably heard about
some of them over the years like Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Athena was the god-
dess of reason and wisdom, Artemis was responsible for hunting, while Ares looked after
bloodlust and wasn’t liked by the others but apparently, he wasn’t bothered.

Zeus is probably one of the better-known Greek gods and he was the top man. The go
to guy. Apart from his many other duties, he also controlled the weather but unfortu-
nately, he was unable to control himself and spent a lot of his time chasing after other
women.
Hera was the queen goddess and she was a bit complicated. She was married to Zeus
but was also his sister and old Zeus liked to have his few flings and Hera got her kicks
out of tormenting these other women. Then there was Hades who ruled the world of the
dead and Apollo, who was like a fixer and carried out the instructions of the others.

So, there were lots of these characters around, creating mayhem and carnage, and