We have had a wonderful Christmas week. Far too much to eat and drink. Thoughtful gifts. Wonderful company. Competitive games. An unexpectedly busy Midnight Mass. A glamorous hotel. A hideaway cottage. An apartment minutes from the beach. And most of all – family.
Christmas Day is my favourite day of the year. I hardly sleep in the week before because I am so full of excitement. It harks back to my childhood when Christmas was such a magical time. And then when our two boys were little and the anticipation and delight n their eyes. Sometimes the reality of Christmas is a let down, but sometimes like this year it is every bit as good as I had hoped.
So why am I so tired?
I have not worked very hard. Others have taken on the heavy lifting of cooking, planning, entertaining. It has been fun. But the truth is that all of us, including the dogs, now just want to sit in front of the TV and snooze.
Maybe that is how Christmas should be. Full on, and then sleep.
We will be getting up early tomorrow (22nd) because we need to be on the road b y 0530. We are travelling from Edinburgh to Brighton to spend Christmas with our son Rob and his fiancée Alessa. At best it is a nine hour journey plus break stops. However, the BBC website says that tomorrow will be the busiest road day of the year, with many people still working and many others, like us, travelling for Christmas. So we expect the worst.
There is also a yellow weather warning for high winds, and with the roof box on the car that does make us a little like a sail. We will have to be particularly careful on bridges.
I am not looking forward to it. When we are on the narrowboat we also have to be careful for winds. Particularly in marinas it can be exceptionally difficult to steer. But we are only going at 2 or 3 mph, and the beauty of being retired is that if we do not like the weather we can just moor up.
I think the biggest difference between travelling in a car and travelling in a narrowboat is that in a car, it is all about looking forward to the destination, while in a narrowboat, it is all about the journey itself.
But there aren’t any canals between Scotland and England, and even if there were, the 380 miles would take us about two months.
Christmas will not wait for us, and so we just need to grit our teeth tomorrow and face into the journey. At least we can stick on some Christmas songs to cheer us up. And when we get there I am sure we will have a really lovely week with our family and Alessa’s family,
So instead of Bah Humbug, I will be Ho Ho Ho and wish you and yours a very very merry Christmas.
My last day at work was Christmas Eve 2020. In the months before I left, I spoke to a number of people who were already retired and a common theme was that it takes years to learn how to be properly retired. When I was at work I was very used to change. It was one of the things I was particularly good at and so I doubted their words. For me, it would take maybe three months. Certainly no longer…
It will not surprise you to hear that they were right and I was wrong. That is not to say that it was not immediately enjoyable. The first few months in retrospect I treated like being at work. I had lists of jobs to do and an urgency that was just like work. I got a lot done and it was fun. I was a total irritant to my wife because I wanted to organise everything.
After that, the first year was more like a very long holiday. We had the narrowboat and were off on our first long trip, across the north of England. I wanted to make the most of every day and despite best intentions I still had a tendency to rush at everything. I did not like “days off”. If we did stop in a location I would find five or six things that absolutely needed doing and would take up my time.
The second year was better. I still had a pretty detailed plan of how we would spend the year – where we should get to by when. But I was a bit more chilled about plans changing and relaxing into each day. It was the first year after the pandemic and we made the most of it to see old friends as we boated around the south of England.
This third year has been the best yet. We have still travelled a long way, from Chester to Bristol and back. We have had real adventures and Mandy, the dogs and I have made a great team. But I have also enjoyed the days when we did not travel. I still find it hard just to read a book or do a jigsaw, and I have tended to go off and find a stately home or a new town to see. But I am getting there.
For next year’s narrowboat trip we have so far just planned the first canal – Liverpool to Leeds. It makes me uncomfortable not to have more of a plan, but I am trying to learn to be a better retiree.
When I first left work I was determined to have something to aim towards, not just to stop. I had seen too many people stop work, do nothing and get ill. And I think in that I have succeeded. We are so lucky to be able to do what we do, whether on the boat, or on our trips away. It is a wonderful life.
And after three years I feel like I am still only beginning to make the most of that life. After three years I am probably still not properly retired. But I am getting better at it!
We have been staying in West Lancashire this week, looking for a house to buy. Over the past 40 years, we have lived in twelve different houses, usually moving for my job. Now we are retired it is time for my wife Mandy to come first and she has always wanted to live near her friends and family in Lancashire. She was born in Burnley and has a red rose in her heart.
The key criteria for choosing has been within an hour of Burnley. But that still gives a great deal of choice, especially since we are looking at a range of prices because we can choose to swap some pension assets for property if that makes sense. At the start of the week we had a long list of 54 houses on Rightmove.
We narrowed that list down eventually to about 16, and then by “drive by” to about 8. We have spent most of the past few days, visiting those 8. And boy have we seen some fascinating things. There was a beautiful farmhouse near Barnoldswick, dating back to about 1500. There was a house in the middle of Lytham St Annes that had a room full of snakes – yes really! And most interesting of all, we went to see an old cottage, near Blackpool airport, which turned out to be a witch’s house. Everything was painted black, and the cottage was filled with spiders, skulls and black cats. It even had a coffin shaped mirror in the bedroom.
We feel a little guilty about delving into other people’s lives, but we were genuinely looking for our new home, and by Wednesday night we had narrowed our search down to two properties. The first is a stunning stone built house in a village to the east of Preston. It has three stories, with a beautiful lounge on the first floor, overlooking woodland and a brook, and a wonderful kitchen diner on the ground floor, with stone flagstones and underfloor heating,
The second house is a new build on a small estate near Freckleton. The builder has gone bust, which meant the price front the administrator was excellent, and it has really spacious bedrooms, overlooking fields across the Fylde peninsular.
After two days of deliberating we have put in an offer on the second house and are waiting to see if it accepted. As a new house it provides a blank canvas for us. I wonder if Mandy will be looking for a pointed hat and a broomstick?
Last Saturday I attended a school reunion for my year at Ernest Bailey Grammar School in Matlock, Derbyshire. We left school in 1982, 41 years ago, and are now 59 or 60 years old. I was really not sure about whether to attend.
We did have one other reunion, after 20 years, and while it was nice to see old school friends, there was something a little too competitive about the conversations. – who could claim to have achieved more with their lives.
This time it was so much more chilled. 54 ex-students came, along with 7 ex-teachers. We are all at or reaching retirement and the conversations were comfortable, reflecting on happy memories from school, and chatting about all our different directions in life. I do not find it easy to mix in social occasions like this but I really made an effort to circulate. I remembered few faces but we had name tags and the names brought back so many more memories than I expected.
No doubt there were people who did enjoy it, but in general students at our school had a really rewarding experience, and that was reflected in our conversations. I do feel sorry for children that these days have so much more pressure for exam results and from social media. School should be a time for study, learning how to get on with others, for play and for mischief – not necessarily in that order.
So thankyou so much to Helen and Sarah for organising the event. 60 is clearly not too old for a school reunion. Happy days.
Pete's Blog 