In the weeks before I retired from the civil service, at the end of March this year, work colleagues would ask me whether I had any plans for my retirement. Of course! I would reply, and would outline the four "big projects" that I expected to fill the next few years -- a reading backlog (three-quarters of it fiction) which would keep me occupied for about five years if I did nothing else; the digitisation of the residue of my once-huge vinyl record collection (the residue being stuff that hasn't appeared on CD and is never likely to -- 12-inch singles from the early 1990s by Ride, for example); albumising the photographs from varous foreign holidays, some of them (Southeast Australia, Andalucia, central Spain) dating back to 1998 and 1999; and the digitisation of my late father's enormous collection of slide photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s (some of which, from his trips to Australia associated with the subsequently-abandoned Skybolt project, could be of minor historic interest). There wouldn't be time to sit around doing nothing; why, I was retiring at 60 precisely so that I could get on with these things!
Needless to say (you're probably ahead of me here), I haven't started any of these projects. The fiction is untouched; the vinyl records are still taking up space on the floor of my room; nobody seems to make photograph albums any more (Boots and WH Smith both offered loose leaf formats to which pages could be added as required, but they are now incredibly difficult to find); and I have yet to actually open and view the boxes and boxes of slides. What have I been doing, that these projects have slipped so?
One answer is that these are all things one does indoors, when the weather is too cold and wet to be doing things outside. In the past, "outside" has usually meant the garden and the allotment, which could only be dealt with at weekends, but giving up work has freed us to deal with them at any time, which means that we've been able to keep up with all the jobs that have needed doing (weeding, harvesting, cutting the grass, renewing bed edging, whatever) instead of running furiously behind them and never catching up. (So hooray for that.) "Outside" has now also meant, as I wrote in a couple of posts earlier this year on my LiveJournal blog, the exploitation of the weekdays that retirement has given to us to attend lunchtime lectures, make midweek visits to places outside London, and generally fill the days with activities that we might otherwise never have fitted in at all -- looking back through my diary for 2014, and reviewing the rolling list of places we've been (as we tick them off....as new ones are added), I find that we have had an average of two events a week since the end of the March, not counting the various things that we did individually because the other wasn't interested. (Weekly dance classes for Judith, day trips to the National Railway Museum in York and Bovington Tank Museum for me.)
Looking ahead to the rest of this week, I see that we have tickets for the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master at the V&A on Wednesday, followed by a trip across the road to this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum; on Thursday I have a lunchtime lecture on Germany: Floating Frontiers at the British Museum followed by a visit to the Museum of London for its Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die exhibition; and on Friday we have tickets for Late Turner: Painting Set Free at Tate Britain, with an evening lecture at the British Museum on New Discoveries from Ancient Egypt. The following two weeks each have another two BM lectures, then a range of local events....the week commencing 15 December is currently blank, but something will doubtless be added to it at some point.
Busy busy busy -- so busy that we both wonder how we ever had time to go to work. But that's retirement for you -- the best career move one can ever make!
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