I might be guilty of repeating myself about the place writing plays in my retirement life. If so blame the quote from yesterday’s Guardian Book Review. The title of her (do I call it an article?) article is ‘Why I write’ by Joan Didion. She says, I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,…
Category: Well being
Retirement blog: where would we be without the arts?
According to a BBC article on my phone recently, in this lockdown we are watching more television and taking less exercise than in the first lockdown. I wondered where we figured in this. I wouldn’t say we were taking less exercise, with two lively collies demanding we walk them at the agreed times, there’s no…
Retirement blog : Valuing our routines
If I asked myself the question, how am I coping? A year ago that would clearly have applied to my retirement life. Today the enquiry would seem to relate almost entirely to the pandemic. OK, so how am I doing with the restrictions that this pandemic brings? Firstly I would say that having reduced options…
Retirement blog (short), at least try and look on the bright side
It’s tricky when you’re putting stuff out there, in the public domain, albeit in a very modest way, as with this retirement blog, and you’re doing it at a time of some national stress, to know what the most helpful, to other people’s mental health, tone is to adopt. That’s quite a sentence both in…
Retirement blog : Review of the year 2020
There’s just no getting away from it, the papers are full of it. It’s that time of year, the time to review the year just gone. 2020, that is, in case you’d forgotten. I do it every year in this retirement blog so better maintain the tradition. Marvellous thing tradition especially in these non-traditional times….
Retirement blog : are treats OK under the circumstances?
It’s official (if that word applies to this government), the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed an on-coming train. If this train had a name board it would say mutant (s)train. It seems to be heading nicely for the wreck up ahead. We are that wreck. Not quite sure whether this latest…
Retirement blog : meet that challenge
I’ve just come back from Ireland, Dublin to be exact and a conference, entitled (I think) Trad Ireland, run by an organisation called Tradtalk about how Irish music is faring these days. Jolly interesting it was (it’s still going on at the time of writing). Not such a huge challenge as you might think because…
Retirement blog : is it on the telly?
I suppose everybody acquires a few bad habits when they retire. Add into the mix your own version of lockdown and I suppose it’s a question of what, not if. In our case I admitted in my previous retirement blog to having added a couple more glasses of wine per day. But there’s a darker…
Retirement blog: am I going back to work seven years after I retired?
So here we are, Friday as promised. Yet more questions. It was an interesting measure of my retirement satisfaction over the weekend while I waited for Leeds Education to respond to my expression of interest. Just what was I hoping they would say? Yes, we have the job for you, we need you very much…
Retirement blog : another idea up the flag pole or another paradox?
You know the more I feel my control over my life slipping away, the harder I work to retain that control. As my physical state slowly deteriorates (no other word for it) and the more my mental state in terms of my memory, even my speaking powers, become to a greater degree, unsatisfactory, the harder…