In the last lockdown I tried to adopt a project-oriented mind-set to my retirement life. I’ve thought this was a useful way of thinking all through my retirement years but particularly so during these challenging times. In the last lockdown my projects took a variety of forms. I published my vineyard book both as an ebook and a paperback. With the help of a chum I started the process of turning this into a podcast. Which is of course, on-going.
These cerebral pursuits were nicely balanced by a number of mostly outdoor DIY projects. Repairing, even making, garden furniture. You will remember that the spring weather was uncommonly kind to us, so outdoor work made sense. Our garden has never looked so good over the summer. So at the end of four months of lockdown I emerged feeling that I had just about made the most of my enforced isolation.
Now here we are again. I am not daring to believe that this lockdown will be as long as the last one. But I am beginning to realise it’s going on long enough to feel the need to crank up my project mind-set again. I started in a rather unambitious way by deciding it was time to sort out my filing system and began with the files for our three vehicles. There were a large number of bills, MOT certificates and stuff that had been kicking around in my drawers and not in the files which I had set up to keep things tidy and so we would know exactly where to find these bits of paper when we needed them. Ha.
And, in the way that so often is the case, in looking through these files I came across something I had not been looking for but which sparked my latest project. The item in question was my father’s birth certificate. I vaguely remembered that I’d got it somewhere because I gave it to the woman who did my genealogical research. But that was three or four years ago and I hadn’t seen it since.
But here it was along with some other birth, death, marriage certificates. To fully understand this retirement blog and the direction this unplanned for discovery took me in, you have to be a believer in serendipity, fate or that there is a greater intellect than ours guiding our life-decisions.
At least this was how it seemed to me at the time. Silly I know, but there it was. I decided that the finding of my father’s birth certificate, with his place of birth – Limerick in the county of Limerick, Ireland – meant something. We visited his birth place which was called Strand Barracks on account of his father being in the British army at the time. I believe I wrote about this visit in a blog several years ago.
So what I decided it meant is that I should begin a project to obtain my Irish citizenship. I could dress this up in all kinds of logical ways. I could say it’s to do with Brexit and an Irish passport making travel to Ireland much easier. I could say, well our British passports expired in March of this year and never got renewed because we didn’t travel anywhere this year. We need new passports so why not an Irish one?
I might even stretch plausibility to its limit and say if we decided to give up on this country and go and live somewhere else this would be easier if we were citizens*. We could even buy another house but that would mean selling one here. But no this isn’t really part of the justification either. Good for the kids? Nah.
So what is the reason for this latest venture? Is it my restless soul looking for pastures anew? Not quite this either. At this point it feels more like I’ll toss this up in the air and see where it lands. You know run it up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes it. Mrs Summerhouse who would, courtesy of her Irish heritage, do the same thing if the process goes well for me, certainly saluted it. Go ahead and see what happens, she said.
She’s probably thinking that, like many of my schemes, it will die a natural death so no point making an issue of shooting the idea down at this stage. So last Sunday I searched on line for Irish citizenship companies. Did I mention I have no intention of doing all the hard work myself? For the price of, what seems at this point, to be a few hundred pounds, I’ll get somebody else to do it. I don’t need that big a project, this lock-down business isn’t going to go on forever – is it?
The first company did not reply to my completed enquiry form. A sign or portent maybe? Give it up? Well, I’ll try one more which I did on Tuesday. If they don’t reply I’ll take that as a sign. They replied and on Wednesday I completed their detailed form about my ancestry and what documentation** we had to support my application. I now await their response and next steps if there are any.
I had intended to let this potential project unfold a bit further before writing it up as this retirement blog, but I decided to get this first bit ‘written’ down and I will, as they say, keep you informed. I realise I haven’t explained why I’m doing this and the answer is obvious, because I don’t know. When / if I do I’ll tell you. Maybe it’s just that people do funny things when they retire?
*I told a friend, we met in the park while dog-walking, about what I was thinking (at that point) of doing. He told me, as his father was born in Panama, he was thinking of taking out Panamanian citizenship. Wow, I said are you going to live there? No, he said I thought it might help with my tax situation. He’s an architect. I can’t really say I’d become an Irish citizen for tax purposes though.
**The only bit of paper I can’t find is my own birth certificate.