Retirement Diary

 Five years or more ago there were a couple of pieces here entitled Retirement Diary. I don't think it was ever intended to be a permanent or ongoing series but it seemed a fitting title at the time. The cessation of full-time paid work seems to me more of a 'coming of age' than 18, 21 or any other age were. It's as significant as one's first or last day at school, one's first at work, perhaps the beginning and end of significant relationships, moving from one place to another or even buying one's first record.

When still in paid employment I would see people who had graduated to the leisured  classes and would often ask how long it had been since and they'd say things like, 'five years', and I'd think, Five Years, as if it indicated something akin to an eternity in paradise. And, of course, as long as one has enough to do, it's a vast improvement and it's not long before one is saying you don't understand how you ever had time to go to work.

But it is one of those tricks that time plays on us that we are caught up in it while the rate at which it disappears accelerates. I've had a sort of flexible structure that is like a half rhyme with routine in that the diary of concerts, walks and other events isn't fixed week by week but regular things recur in a time signature more appropriate to modern jazz than the 4/4 of a pop record. 

Today has been spent reading The Woman in White to the accompaniment of Alina Ibragimova playing the Brahms Violin Sonatas, returning to the bookmakers most of the small amount I relieved them of yesterday and now attending to this need I have to use words irrespective of if anybody wants to read them.

It's been writing that has accounted for most of what I might think of s 'achievements' in the last five years, which it was ever meant to be. I'm glad in a way not to have been a journalist - which is possibly what I should have been- and had to produce words to a deadline. I like doing it but, like anything one likes doing, I like doing it primarily to please myself. There have been times when I've thought I should have produced more, and better, but one can only produce that which the ideas for present themselves. 

Thus, writing about local music events has become a staple diet, a few essays appeared in print, the final edition from David Green (Books) collected the handful of poems from the last six and a half years and there's been the flow of casual thoughts here, for better or worse. It could have been worse.

Before I finished at work, one of the great last four managers I'd had asked what I intended to do, travel? Oh, dear, no. Not very far. Stay in the same place, having chosen it almost by default. But even when one's life is one big holiday, there are places one feels like going to while no longer wanting to complicate matters by going to other countries. Thus, Durham Cathedral with a supporting cast of Lindisfarne, Newcastle and Alnwick last year and Nottingham, with Lincoln and Lichfield earlier this year, were great successes within my limited ambition.

One can find oneself wondering if it should have been better but I'm convinced it could easily have turned out far worse. For the most part, so far so good, I got lucky. The way we live measures our own nature, as it says in Mr. Bleaney, and I don't think I wanted to be Rod Stewart and couldn't have carried it off. I don't know how much more there ever was to want and if, having got it, it would have delivered any of its promised satisfaction. I suspect that a life spent mostly concerned with books, music, art and the like is 'secondhand' but I'd rather read about the Wars of the Roses, Soviet Russia or James Joyce, perhaps, than be there at the time.

There are still people of my age and older, for reasons of their own, attending the office each week, undergoing the latest half-baked business initiatives focussed on improvement. I won't ever entirely escape them because they sometimes come back to me in the mildest of panic attacks but as much as the pleasures of taking part in sport are over for good by now, so are the horrors of them.