It’s hard this jazz business, no wonder so many of the greats self-destructed in their prime. And no that doesn’t include me. No, siree. Take Charlie Parker here, dead at 34, as just one example. Obviously, in my case, there were going to be peaks and troughs (although not as deep as being dead) in…
Ebooks and the retired person and the bottom drawer
How do you write a blog about writing? Well, plenty of people have written about writing so it can’t be that difficult. Yes, but this is writing about writing Ebooks (as in picture right) and furthermore writing about them as a retired person. What does a retired, old git person know about publishing Ebooks after…
Retirement and the Big A (and I don’t mean apple, at least I don’t think I do).
Inevitable I suppose as you get older that the spectre at the feast of your retirement is your health, both physical and mental. And you know you’re in a bit of trouble mental health-wise when you start thinking Edgar Alan Poe. In the last couple of days Mrs Summerhouse went back to Specsavers to have…
Goal Setting for Retirement
I read somewhere recently that a person should avoid making any decisions about their retirement for two years after they retire. About the same time I heard on the radio that the key to a feeling of well-being in retirement was to have a sense of purpose. While I can see the possible logic behind holding…
Vineyard 20 : Snatching victory from defeat, kind of
I wrote in Vineyard blog 19 about the set back, to put it mildly, we had received in our wine making ambitions. Take a note, next year make sure that we protect the grapes from birds. We had one of our Yorkshire wine makers’ meetings a couple of weeks ago and, high on my agenda,…
The transfer window and the meaning of life
From January, 2014 this retro retirement blog is a particular jumble. If I took this retirement blog as typical of my writing early in my blogging career I can only say I think I”ve improved, but I don’t think it is, so I can’t. And that’s a jumble as well. The pups were asleep on…
A Broad and Balanced Retirement
Well-being in retirement has been a continuing theme in this blog. It actually forms a category on its own, so highly do I tend to regard it as a goal for retirement. It’s a simple enough concept but inevitably one that means different things to different people. Worse still, any close examination runs the risk…
Life on the edge
When you retire why don’t you do what a lot of retired people do and buy a caravan? It could be a mobile one or, in the case of this story, a static caravan I believe they are called (see right). A misnomer as we shall see. A mobile home might be a better term….
Retirement and being in control
In my retirement life I probably read more of the weekend’s papers than I used to. I was reading an article by David Mitchell in last weekend’s Observer. He writes a weekly column in The Observer, he has also written a book and I imagine that was why, this week, he was being interviewed as…
Yoga 4 : Let’s be positive
As you know (if you’ve been reading it) this blog has been a little bit on the ugly side of late so I’ve asked Mrs Summerhouse to write something with her yoga hat on, a blog with a pick-me-up flavour. Maybe sometimes you need more than logical thinking to get yourself out of a slump….