Well it’s the annual retirement review time. I say annual although, as I’m fond of saying these days, it feels more like 8 or 9 months. Anyway however long it’s been, the question is, what kind of ‘year’ has it been?
Of course it’s fashionable to describe this last year and more as a terrible time on account of the pandemic with at worst people dying and at best many irritating restrictions seemingly randomly applied by a highly irritating government and prime minister.
But the truth is for us we’ve been ‘lucky’ and nobody close to us has died from Covid that is but a good friend did. So you could fairly call that a highlight of the year – that we’ve stayed well. The restrictions have been only mildly annoying and for us, again, life has gone on in a largely acceptable manner. Certainly to the point of making a positive review of the year at least feasible and even enjoyable.
Of course there’s been some downsides, mainly giving up the jazz and struggling with this retirement blog. But overall life has treated us well. The highlights have been as follows:
We’ve managed three hotel stays since lockdown ended, all pleasant in different ways. Two in the Yorkshire Dales and the other in that London. And talking of the Yorkshire Dales we’ve ‘discovered’ an excellent TV programme entitled Winter Walks. The second series is set in Yorkshire with previously a similar one which I think is called Walking With, or something like that, and which is set partially in Derbyshire.
All of these programmes make you enthusiastic about an important part of our retirement activities – walking the dogs. Certainly our continuing to walk them twice a day has been a continuing success of our retirement goals (see below). Long may it continue as such.
We’ve manged a few train trips, short ones to try and get Archie acclimatised to rail travel. A planned heritage railway trip (just me) from Wirksworth to Duffield on a steam train, was one highlight. A totally unplanned one from Derby to Matlock and back to Duffield on account of us missing our stop on the way out was a definite highlight of the year because it was taken in a snowstorm. Magical countryside scenes out of the carriage window. Yes, a real memorable highlight and, as I say, completely unplanned. Go figure.
People think we’re a little mad supporting three properties but I have to say that, with the lifting of travel restrictions, we’ve used the Derbyshire cottage a fair amount and we’ve always found nice things to do, like the aforementioned rail trips. So re-establishing our visits has been another highlight of this year.
Strange to describe the handing over of one other property as another highlight of this year. We’ve ‘gifted’ the land in Colorado to our daughter and son-in-law. This on the grounds that we weren’t doing anything with it and it was bugging me. So by handing it over to them it vastly increases the chances that my last great project (building a cabin on the land) will come to fruition. Not this year obviously but maybe next year. Fingers crossed. But it’s in the highlights column because what we’ve done feels like a real step forward.
And while we’re on the property part of our retirement let me just say about the vineyard that we’ve had a fairly successful year with the grapes. True not as good as 2018, but a whole lot better than the last two years when we didn’t get any grapes at all, ergo no wine. We hope to make about 100 bottles of either still or sparkling wine, depending on cost, from this year’s harvest. So yes, a success.
So much for the specifics let me revisit the ‘goals’ I set at the beginning of the year. In the distant past I used to review the year (and give it a score out of 10) by rating each specific goal I had set myself and written at the beginning of each new diary.
Since I retired I haven’t set specific goals but rather, as this year, simply written down what might be described as guiding values for retirement. These I wrote down in pairs, although at this distance, I’m not quite sure why I paired them as I did. They were as follows:
Enyoyable (7) / Interesting (7)
Learning (6) / Achievement (6)
Relaxation (8) / Helpfulness (4)
Novelty (6) / Routine (8)
Exercise (8) / Outdoorness (7)
The numbers alongside each are my scores out of 10 as to how well I feel I’ve done in applying or following each value. It’s interesting, looking back on these values, to realise I’m not quite sure where the words came from. I guess they must have been my brain-stormed idea of what made for that elusive perfect retirement that sub-headlines this blog. The fact I haven’t looked at them since rather suggests that I haven’t lived my life by them or even tried to do so. They haven’t guided my retirement actions like values are supposed to do. Which will make for an interesting exercise when and if I try and do the same thing again in a week’s time.
Retirement Review summary
So that’s my review of our retirement life in 2021. As I say not bad at all given all the trials and tribulations most of us (the world) have suffered. I guess we’ve been lucky but also we’ve tried to control what can be controlled and live with what can’t. So, in that sense, we probably deserve any good fortune we’ve acquired in this year nearly gone. I’m going to give the whole year a 7 by the way. Where does that take us in 2022, I wonder?