During the course of my retirement I think it’s fair to say a number of strange things have happened, but none stranger than what happened a week or so ago. The simplest version of this event was that my living room was full of people. Not so strange you say but let me elaborate.
There were eight of us altogether including myself and Mrs Summehouse. For somebody who prides himself on avoiding people in his retirement (I can honestly say that I have lost more friends than I have gained during the course of my retirement and that in itself is odd because most advice on how to have a successful retirement stresses the importance of a solid friendship group) and yet here was my room full of people from the past. Let me explain.
A few weeks ago I happened to stumble across an old colleague in Sainsbury’s carpark. He was a chap I got along well with so I thought what harm could possibly come of my saying, hi how have you been these last 13 years (the period of my retirement). To answer my own question the answer is you end up with a room full of people that you haven’t seen for many years, when you were settling into happy obscurity, that’s the harm.
It may be a bit over-dramatic to say that when I realised he had gone beyond his mandate (we went for one beer, just the two of us at the local pub) by arranging for 5 other ex-colleagues to come round to my house for a kind of reunion, I was, what? Nervous, irritated, thoughtful. I suppose I was a bit anxious what would we talk about? I needn’t have worried
What I hadn’t realised as I anticipated their visit, was that they all (being considerably younger than me), were still working, with the exception of the guy I met in the carpark who had lulled me into a false sense of insecurity. I should have known they were younger as I had (modesty forbidding) interviewed them all for their jobs., not that they were in the same jobs. But they were in a WhatsApp group together.
So the end result was they had plenty to talk about without reference to yours truly. But strangely, and you’ll have to take my word for it, that was fine. I was able to sit back (on my own sofa) and enjoy their tales of the work place and feel not the slightest regret (as hasn’t always been the case) that I wasn’t one of them.
So there we are after a very chance meeting in Sainsbury’s carpark, an opportunity to re-evaluate my retirement in the strangest of ways but with, all things considered, the best of results. I don’t want to over-egg it but that result is that I am happy being retired and have absolutely no desire to go back to work. Repeat after me.
In case you were wondering what the significance of the elephant in the picture above was, I swapped it in a Secret Santa gift giving one Christmas with one of the colleagues in the room probably about 20 years ago. I told her that and she said she’d changed her mind and would like it back.