I thought I’d share with you in this retirement blog one of my sleazy little secrets of retirement. Can you imagine, as a working person, admitting to watching TV at 3 o’clock in the afternoon? Hardly feasible you say. And if I further admitted that this weakness took the form of a programme called, Escape to the Country, you would doubtless be puzzled as to the attraction.
It’s not as if we want to escape to the country because we already have in one of our housing guises. And although the idea of living in a country village continues to hold a certain magical sway, it doesn’t make sense. In fact it’s silly really because, as somebody who’s not a big fan of having neighbours, it would be probably very claustrophobic.
Anyway, it’s out there now and why would I be telling you, it hardly shows us in a good light? And I’m not even going to tell you about the timing of the first glass of wine of the day (that’s except for Monday and Tuesday when we don’t drink). Well, I’m telling you so you understand the roots of this particular retirement blog. I might almost say the inspiration but that’s perhaps over-egging it.
And why this particular episode should spark this train of thought after the number I’ve watched and I’ve not been at all inspired, I really have no idea. All I can say is that this episode featured a more mature couple who were retiring from Edinburgh to Somerset to be in the country. Him so he could pursue his hobby of gardening which had been restricted in their Scottish flat as had her heart’s desire – baking.
What struck me was, here was a couple who were retiring to do something different. Not just a different house / part of the country but also different activities. Quite life-changing I think you will agree. It made me wonder (nice to know the brain is still working at least to some extent), just how much of a life-change is it desirable / sensible to make when one retires?
My only point of reference to answer this question was ourselves. And now we’ve been retired for eight years I would say we’re in a good position to describe what we have changed and how this has worked for us as a retired couple.
Let me say to start with what we thought we would change, but didn’t, at least not so far. Let me say with reference to this programme, gardening never did figure. This chap was introduced to something called ‘no dig’ gardening. I thought this sounds like my kind of gardening but, it transpired, ‘no dig’ most definitely did not turn out to be ‘no work’ so cancel this as a bright idea.
So no gardening and, as I’ve told you before in past retirement blogs, no golf, no photography, no long distance travel and until, possibly recently, no trips on trains to look at churches, even cathedrals. So put these in the category of things we wanted to change but didn’t manage.
You might add to these my grand plans to convert our ex-gardening van into a campervan and live a life on the open road. That didn’t happen and the closest we got to it was our legendary (at least to us), three weeks in a caravan in the wilds (literally) of Northern Scotland. The picture above looks rather benign but it wasn’t always like this. Correction, no it doesn’t because it wouldn’t load. Nor would another camping photo I had, that’s our one night in the Land Rover attached tent. I had a nice photo of that but that wouldn’t load either*. A possible down side of writing this retirement blog for the first time ever at our Heanor house?
Set against these ‘failures’ were activities that we started when retired but hadn’t planned to. The main ones in this category being getting two dogs (totally life-shaping), starting a vineyard and writing this retirement blog. Mrs Summerhouse’s plans for the arty life worked out pretty well (a development rather than a new start) although I would say not so much the baking and jam-making side of things. Back to me. The music side of things developed but it was never a part of my retirement plan to actually start to play ‘live’ music.
Throw in to this pot pourri of retirement activities, running a gardening business and renovating (or whatever the word is) my late mother’s old house (from where I am actually writing this blog and which now pandemic apart figures significantly in our retirement) and it will seem like very little of what we planned actually happened and much that we did not plan, did. And this from me, a self-confessed control freak and it does not bode well for a happy retirement.
I might use as some kind of defence my advice to fellow retirees when we all first retired, to identify the aspects of our lives that we wanted to keep and go forward into retirement. In the context of this advice, the music side of pre-retirement life should be no surprise. I’d ‘done’ it before and wanted to continue to ‘do’ it if you’ll pardon the grammar.
But I’m ducking the big question I posited earlier, how many things should you change when you retire? And the reason I haven’t answered it is because it’s a pretty crap question. There is no easy or obvious answer to the question because that answer depends on you as a person and what kind of life you had before you retired.
The only answer is ‘somewhere between nothing (you could even keep working in some way, some variation of your original job) and everything’, if you hated your working life. All I can suggest is, if you’ve been retired for a while, ask yourself, did I make the right choices and if I didn’t, well, it’s never too late.
*I had to settle for the rather dull shutterstock image above.