How I fell in love with my soup-maker – and became a new man |
In recent years, the issue of depression and loneliness affecting older men who live on their own has come to the fore. Here, Kevin McKenna explains how an unexpected gift is helping his mental health.
My Ninja soup-maker emerged from the shadows silently and without warning … like the elite Japanese assassins it’s named for.
I thought I’d reached the age when new socks and jumpers for Christmas are no longer greeted with fake jocundity. After a chap reaches 60, the glee is real. At this stage of life, you’re not really expecting anything dramatic.
My children have learned to adapt to my advancing material rectitude. My home is littered with the discarded electronic gadgetry of Christmases past: a jilted Alexa is gathering dust behind a couple of tall plants I’d once bought at a garden centre in a (let’s face it) pathetic bid to impart metropolitan cool.
My diminishing circle of friends are all expert at keeping indoor plants. They seem to have practiced the Feng Shui on them and thus their homes all look pale and interesting. In contrast, my indoor frondescence slouches sullenly and accusingly.
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I’d been told that indoor verdure provides significant health benefits by aiding your mental well-being and sense of purpose. If there were social workers checking up on the well-being of the rubber plant community, mine would have been taken into care years ago.
There’s a theory that some plants have super-powers that can sense when you’re depressed and can shoot out happy pheromones. If I wanted that though, I’d just get in a couple of their........