One aspect of my retirement plan which has suffered somewhat over the last 18 months has been my goal related to continued learning. On the whole, prior to the pandemic, this aspect of my retirement has gone pretty well. I’ve managed to keep what brain cells I have left ticking over by setting myself mostly sensible learning challenges over the six or seven years prior to the pandemic.
However, as I say, in the last 18 months things have gone a bit wrong as we psychologists used to say. There have been no jazz workshops so other than the last summer school about which I have already reported, not much has happened musically that has been self-motivated and you know how bad I am at that.
I have tinkered with my on-line learning courses (Great Courses), primarily of late, The economic history of the world from 1400. Sounds impressive but you’d be less impressed if you could see me snoozing through the latter half of the lesson. But I keep trying.
The vineyard experience is on-going and continually sets new challenges which provide me with very different learning opportunities. Reading through ‘our’ agronomist’s last report and trying to work out exactly what I need to do, for example. And generally, as I’ve written before, the vineyard does not provide an ideal learning context as you have to wait for a year to see if what you think you’ve learned was the ‘right’ thing. More of this in a dedicated vineyard blog coming shortly.
Which leaves areas of learning covered by what used to be Guardian Masterclasses. For obvious reasons these have not happened for a while with the exception of some on-line courses. No doubt they are a reasonable substitute under the circumstances but they do not engage or motivate me in the same way the face to face stuff does.
So it was with some trepidation that I signed up for an on-line blogging course, How to create a WordPress website in a day, last Tuesday. There’s a certain irony here in that a course entitled ‘how to set up your own blog’ or similar, was the very first Guardian Masterclass I signed up for way back when at the start of my retirement. I’ve continued to write this blog ever since. So it worked out well.
Which brings me to the reason why I returned to blogging with this last course. The arrangement for putting out my retirement blog, thus far, has been simple, I write the blog and post it my tech guy takes care of the technical side and I pay him for doing so. Works well most of the time until, for example, I want something doing and he doesn’t want to do it or, worse still, I can’t get in touch with him. Doesn’t happen often but it did a couple of weeks ago.
Which led me to wonder if perhaps I couldn’t do the tech side myself (a bit like I am with the Vineyard podcast). As fate would have it there appeared an advert for this Masterclass in the Guardian and it was very clearly about the ‘doing it yourself’ side of blogging. People who wanted to set up and run their own blog.
At £200 plus I thought it’s a bit expensive or maybe I’m out of touch with the cost of learning these days? Anyway I signed up and spent a theoretical 6 hours listening to James telling us in very comprehensive fashion how to set up your own blog as it said on the tin.
It was interesting and, for once, I found myself actually knowing a lot of the stuff James was telling us. This makes a pleasant change from feeling like a complete dumbo in most other learning situations. James packed a lot in, which you would expect of a course costing £200, but there’s the rub.
About half way through I thought, you know my IT guy might be a bit annoying at times but I’d rather pay him the money and let him (mostly) take care of things rather than me have to learn all this stuff about widgets, plug ins, menus, settings, cover blocks, pages and posts and more – much more.
I also realised that my IT guy hadn’t missed much in terms of helping my Google ranking. I wouldn’t be going back to him and saying ha, ha I’ve just been on a blogging course and I think you’re missing a trick with my SEO rankings. Nope, no magic bullet for a successful Google ranking. If there is I’ve yet to dig it out of the plaster.
I repeat, I’m not complaining about all this information, just simply reporting that, on balance, I feel like I’ve got enough going on without adding more complication to my retirement life. After all haven’t quite a few of my recent retirement blogs been about keeping life simple?
So there we are you may argue £200+ is quite a lot of money to work out that the current arrangement actually is as good as I can get with this retirement project entitled The Summerhouse Years, a retirement blog.