Retirement blog – but what to write about?

I have to admit just recently I’ve been finding it difficult to have ideas for writing this retirement blog. Maybe, after six years and approaching 700 blogs, it’s only to be expected. But if you’ve been reading my recent blogs you’ll know I’ve been somewhat under the weather. And I only mention this because, when you’re ill, you don’t feel like doing very much.

I’ve missed a few Monday night jazz classes and Thursday night folk fiddle sessions and just generally haven’t felt like going out or doing anything at all. This of course means I have less to write about in these retirement blogs.

True, I could write about the broader issues of retirement – top tips for a happy retirement – rather than specific events that have happened to me. I did write one on resilience in retirement which was OK. And I could have re-posted some of my earlier blogs as a helpful friend suggested when I told him I was a bit stuck for ideas. I don’t know about this strategy, it seems a bit like cheating to me. We shall see.

I could have written about how, under the influence of drugs and with too much time to ponder on how sorry I felt for myself, how the mind wanders. For example, I got an email from a log-cabin building company based in the USA offering me the opportunity to sign up for an on-line course. I had the bright idea of signing up my son-in-law for the course as his Christmas present. Cost? A mere $1,000.

Fortunately, Mrs Summerhouse mopped my fevered brow, gave me a couple of paracetamol and pointed out that this was not one of my more sensible ideas. I mention it simply as an example of how enforced idleness encourages the mind into moments of insanity.

I could write more about insanity but I think it’s been done. Also true in the last week or so, because of the insanity issue, I’ve made a real effort to get out of our number one house. It has all the comforts of home, as it would it being home, but this cocoon of domesticity easily turns into a form of cabin fever. Hence making the effort to spend a night at the barn / vineyard and now at the Derbyshire cottage, where I’m writing this particular retirement blog.

We didn’t do a whole lot at the barn, at least I didn’t but Mrs Summerhouse did. It seems like a whole family of mice have moved in while we’ve been away. Their contributions in the peeing and pooing area were everywhere. She was not best pleased when clearing up but retains her humanitarian leanings refusing to set traps to kill them.

Hence we set off to Masham hoping to be able to buy the ‘humane’ (or the mouse equivalent), peppermint oil that supposedly repels them rather than kills them. She seems to have forgotten that, when she used this at the main house, she found two dead ones in the cupboards, killed off rather than deterred.

None of the shops sold peppermint oil so we called in at the local agricultural merchants. This sells all manner of butch farming supplies and equipment including the standard mouse trap. I’m afraid the average farmer in these parts is more concerned with killing the little buggers not relocating them elsewhere in a humane manner. They didn’t fully grasp the relocate or release into the wild concept as it applied to mice.

Back at the Derbyshire house, you’ll be interested to know I’ve got a renovation project going on. I’m renovating an old chest of drawers that belonged to my mother. We were going to throw it out, as it’s not all that attractive, but maybe it will have a certain charm when I’ve partially painted it, replaced the handles and sanded down the drawers so the bloody things open and shut. It’s not fascinating as a topic but, given my post-illness blues, it’s pleasing to be doing anything at all. But it’s not a whole blog’s worth.

So with this coming Tuesday in mind I’ve been trawling through my diary looking for any snippets of ideas. There were a few possibilities – developments in the vineyard, turning down an invitation to a wine-growers lunch (actually I didn’t turn it down so much as ignore it, after the harvest (or lack of it) we’ve had this year the last thing I want is to spend two or three hours in the company of those who’ve done well). Yes, I know I’m a bad person.

True, looking at my diary, I did manage to play on Monday jazz night (although not fiddle on Thursday) and now have to make a decision about whether I perform at next Monday night’s gig. You will remember the public performances have moved to Monday night from Friday. There will be all the usual soul-searching that goes with performing live for me. But I don’t really want to write about this, not yet anyway.

Back at the ancestral pile. On Sunday then we read the papers and, given my lack of subject matter, I read with one eye on potential retirement blog topics. And there it was a whole page article about the difficulties sports people have when they choose, or are forced, to retire from their sport. The article had many quotes from elite sportspeople about their struggles after retirement. All of them pertinent and revealing.

There was one short passage from the article that said something I’d never heard before and that’s saying something given, as I mentioned, I’ve written nearly 700 of these retirement blogs. Clarke Carlisle wrote that ‘because I was Clarke the footballer. I couldn’t see the reason anybody would be proud of me … (without that identity) they’re going to see me for what I am – and that was nothing.’

Is that so very different for those of us who had a career and then, when that was gone, we thought people might see us for what we had become – nothing. A bit dramatic? Possibly, maybe not ‘nothing’ but certainly not the person we had once been.

I’ll finish on an optimistic note if this rings a bell then make sure when you retire you become something. As I’ve written before make sure you develop a new identity or as Eric Cantona put it, ‘having another passion,’ to replace that you had for your career. And to think I was worried I had nothing to write about in this retirement blog. Ha.