I retired at the start of 2021, aged 57, and since then have been exploring my new life with my wife Mandy and two terriers Lulu and Ziggy. We own a narrowboat and spend much of the year travelling the canals of the UK. I also enjoy cooking, skiing, visiting new places, and blogging. I love people following my stories.
My wife likes to do jigsaw puzzles. My mum also enjoys them, though she can only do 500 piece ones these days. I quite like the cartoon ones but I have always found jigsaws a bit of a waste of time. Surely I could be doing something more productive than moving bits of cardboard around a table.
This week I have really been enjoying building this space shuttle jigsaw. It is three dimensional and built of wood, so feels more like a model than a toy but it is still a jigsaw. It was a secret Santa present so I felt obligated to build it. I am glad I did because it felt like a real achievement to complete it.
So is doing a jigsaw a waste of time? Have I been wasting my time? Maybe I have but I have also been watching TV this week and how productive is that? And I have read the latest Rory Stewart book, which was also given to me at Christmas. For some reason, reading does not feel like a waste of time, but what good does it really do?
Also I am very aware of Mandy reminding me that we are retired and entitled to relax.
We are staying for a few days with our eldest son Robbie, and his partner Alessa, in their swanky house on the South Downs. I woke up this morning to the most beautiful sunrise.
We really are blessed to live in such a stunning country. Whether we are living on Narrowboat Thuis, or in bricks & mortar houses, there are few countries like the UK. I spent much of 2025 grumbling about the weather. When we were on the boat in the summer, it was sometimes so very hot. The canals dried up and became unnavigable. From September to December it felt like the rain never let up. The ground in some areas became like a marsh.
But on crisp, cold, clear mornings like today I could not wish for a better place to live. And having Christmas with one son and New year with the other, both with their wonderful girlfriends has been such a privilege. I am a very lucky chap.
I think it is a sign for me in 2026. My New Year’s resolution is not to complain about the weather or other challenges and what they are stopping me doing. Instead I will enjoy the moment and what it allows me to do.
A very very happy new year to you and your family.
I am writing this on Christmas Eve. I am looking forward to the big day tomorrow. Christmas has always been my favourite time of year. I have such happy memories of when the boys were growing up. I would plan the day practically to the second. I would go to the midnight service at our local church and then come back to help Santa fill the stockings and eat the mince pie and carrot. At 0630 the boys could come into our room and open their stockings. Then breakfast at 0730, family presents at 0830 and a walk before lunch at 1300. The rest of the presents were at 1430 and then the Queen’s broadcast at 1500, followed by charades and a little more TV.
As the family grew up I have had to learn to be more relaxed about the plan. This year our youngest Martin and his girlfriend Cheryl are joining us. They have been under a lot of stress lately and they have asked for a lie in tomorrow, before a brunch and a late lunch. I have tried hard to accommodate this chilled approach to Christmas Day, but as it has got closer the lack of a plan has begun to get to me. So I have made a plan on a spreadsheet for our relaxed Christmas Day.
Just having this plan has made me feel better about the day. Mandy, Cheryl and Martin can stay in bed, while I complete the prep and then they can join me.
I know what you are thinking. What if others do not follow my plan? For instance what happens if they are not up for the 10am brunch? Well that is OK too. I know that if I complete everything on the plan in the right order, it will all come together. I can flex the times if I have too. Even better, because it is on a spreadsheet, I can adjust everything.
A happy Christmas for Pete is a well organised Christmas. A happy Christmas for others is an unstressed relaxed Christmas. All I need to achieve both – is a plan.
I hope you had a wonderful day and are enjoying the festive season. A very merry Christmas to you all.
This week I received.a package in the post. It contained not a Christmas present, but four books with maps and routes of the canal network in the UK.
Narrowboaters have many options for navigating these days. We use a website called CanalPlan AC and an app called OpenCanalMap. But most boaters also like to read the guides. Some use the ones from Pearsons, but we prefer the originals – the Nicholsons. They have good maps of the routes, helpful lists of pubs and places to visit, and honest descriptions of the towns and villages on the route.
I also have a personal connection to the Nicholsons because one of my friends is the main author, Jonathan Mosse. I met him about ten years ago at a barbecue for narrowboaters in Scotland. He lent us a long chain for an anchor when we travelled the tidal river Clyde. And since we have been in England we have used our Nicholsons to navigate the huge network of rivers ad canals across the country.
Once a year I let Jonathan know all the changes and edits we have found in the books. Perhaps a pub has closed. Perhaps a bridge is incorrectly numbered. Perhaps we have discovered a wonderful new cafê. In return he sometimes sends me new editions, and that was what I received this week. In fact, guides 2 and 3 have not even been published yet. They come out in February but Jonathan has got me early copies.
We have been living in bricks and mortar houses since October, albeit with six weeks in the Outer Hebrides. I am itching to be back on Narrowboat Thuis. We won’t get properly going till March but perhaps we can get a week or two on the boat while it is moored in the Marina. Maybe New Year in our Narrowboat, with me, Mandy, the dogs and reading my new books. Sounds good to me.
Most of us take thousands of photos each year with our phones. It is a long way from when I was growing up and I had a very old camera that only took black and white film. Each photograph was carefully chosen and then I had to wait till the film was used up before taking it to a chemist and waiting a couple of weeks to find out if any of the pictures had come out, or if they were out of focus or had my finger in front of the lens.
I have mentioned before that I like to study family history, and one of the challenges I have found is old photographs. My cousin Pat and I have lots of old pictures of family but most of them have no names and we struggle to work out who they are. The best we can do is to try to look for matches. For instance, I think that this photograph is my great great aunt Elizabeth Capener.
But Pat has this photo about 30 years later. Is it the same person?
For a long time I have worried that the massive photo collections we now have will be even harder to collate once we are gone. Photos are no longer special to us so although they have many meta tags on things like place and time, they don’t know who the people are.
I downloaded IOS 26 on my iPhone this week, and it is full of the latest AI tools. It can turn any photograph into a 3D image. It can create panoramas by merging photos. And it has the security of really good facial recognition. So the technology for matching faces is out there. But without being a professional developer I have not found an app that does it for me. Is there one?
Either way, such tools are coming, and I think that family historians will have an easier time in future. Or maybe we will simply be redundant when a bot just does all the work for us.
Anyway, are these photos Elizabeth? What do you think?
EDIT I have just used ChatGPT and it has done an incredible job matching the photos, pointing out things like the left eyelids being slightly droopy and the deep set eyes with identical spacing. They are likely to be the same person. Hello great great aunt Elizabeth!
I don’t like clutter. Never have. That is why when we moved house a year ago I was so quick to unpack boxes and find the right place for everything. Within a week the house was basically sorted although an awful lot of stuff went to charity shops or the tip. The one area where I failed to tidy was the garage. For quite a while it was jammed full of boxes.
In the spring I finally went through every box and threw a lot more stuff out. But as I emptied the boxes, my garage itself became a bit of a tip and I have become increasingly frustrated through the year as I couldn’t find anything. Well this week I finally got around to putting up some shelves and tidying.
There is a good and a bad in this. The good is that I can now find whatever I need. The bad is that I have become obsessive about maintaining the tidy garage. I found myself telling Mandy that she can only put things in there after consulting me. I mean – it’s a garage!
I think my ridiculous behaviour is a mental thing. When things are well organised I feel under control. When things are messy it just feels wrong. I can cope with a disorganised garage by closing the door but eventually it has to be sorted. That is just the way it should be.
I see that Wes Streeting is saying this week that the NHS is over-diagnosing Autism and ADHD. I am not sure that over-diagnosing is the problem. The thing that costs money is over-treating. People like me with unusual ways of thinking are OK with no treatment. Because even though sometimes I have ridiculous ways of thinking, I quite like them.
It was my Mum’s 90th birthday last week. When I asked her back in February what she wanted to do to celebrate, her answer was that she was not sure we should organise anything because she might well not be with us. She was not being grumpy or sarcastic, simply practical. Fortunately we paid no attention and with my siblings and Mum, we organised a wonderful party on Saturday.
It was just immediate family and a few friends, and was for less than three hours, but it was a really lovely occasion. I think everyone got to talk to everyone else, and in particular my Mum was made to feel very special.
It made me think what I would want when I am 90.
I wouldn’t need more “stuff”. That’s for certain. I spent the first 60 years of my life acquiring things I didn’t really need. By 90 they would be even less important.
I would like to be compos mentis. We lost my Dad to Alzheimer’s a few years ago and I hated the decline. I’d also like to be physically fit. Mum struggles with mobility but can still cope independently. I’d like that.
But if I can’t have those – indeed if I can’t even live that long it would be OK. I’d like to be able to look back on my life and say it was a life well lived. I’d like my children to be happy. I’d like Mandy to have remained the bedrock of my life. I’d like to have been a good person.
I think my Mum can say she has achieved all of these and more. Hopefully she has many more years to go, but it has been a good life and it I feel lucky to have been able to celebrate with her.
We have just returned from six weeks in the Outer Hebrides. Also called the Western Isles, this archipelago of islands is one of the remotest areas of the UK and at this time of year the tourists have gone home and it is even bleaker. The winds are wild. Daylight hours are short. Why on earth would anyone want to stay there? I can give you ten very good reasons
1 It is incredibly beautiful.
You can drive through Lewis and Harris, get a ferry to Berneray, drive across causeways to North Uist, Grimsay, Benbecula, Soouth Uist, Eriskay and a short ferry to Barra. Around every corner there is something beautiful to take your breath away, from inland lochs, to dramatic cliff edges, to awesome views.
2.. The history is fascinating
We saw Iron Age brochs, prehistoric standing stones, a ditch of blood where the MacDonalds fought the MacLeods in the seventeenth century. We saw a ruined temple which is claimed to be the oldest university in the UK. And more modern history such as the Iolaire monument in Stornaway, overlooking the bay where hundreds of soldiers returning from the First World War, lost their Iives in a shipwreck.
3 The locals are friendly.
Because the tourists have largely gone, we were treated as part of the community, attending the local firework display, chatting in the pub, and even going to a travelling show abut Hercules the Bear, who escaped and roamed the islands for weeks in the 1980s. The Hebridean accent is soft and the people are friendly.
4 The shellfish is wonderful.
Some of the best shellfish in the world is landed in the Hebrides. We had a wonderful lobster lunch off formica tables in a cafe next to the fishing boats. I also had the best langoustine eggs benedict breakfast that anyone could dream of.
5 Rainbows
I am not sure why. Perhaps it is the ever changing weather combining rain and sunshine, Perhaps it is the time of year with the sun so low in the sky. But I have never seen so many rainbows. Stunningly beautiful.
6. Sunsets
It was not every night. We also had cloudy skies. But when the weather was right we had amazing sunsets and sunrises. We also got to see the Northern Lights
7 Sculptures
I think the remoteness must attract artists to the islands. I wrote in a previous blog about the pile of peat in an art gallery. I much preferred seeing the sculptures, scattered around the islands, set into the landscape
8.. You can hunker down in front of the fire
And when the rains turned horizontal, the properties we stayed in had wood burning stoves to keep the cockles warm. I settled down to read the latest Peter May book about murders in Lewis. Nice.
9. The wildlife
I am not a patient man. There are hides you can visit where people sit for hours waiting to see the rarest wildlife. Not for me. But we still saw two golden eagles, a sea eagle, black kite, deer, otters, coos on an uninhabited island, sheep swimming across a loch. It was pretty impressive.
10 The Outer Hebrides have the best beaches in the world.
Famously, West Beach n Berneray was used for a Thai tourist brochure. It is a lot colder, but the Hebridean beaches are empty. There are so many of them, and they are so dramatic, that after a while you think they are normal. White sands formed from crushed sea shells. Miles and miles of empty beaches.. Wonderful
So now we are back home. Six weeks is less of a holiday and more of an adventure. I would encourage anyone who enjoys peace and beauty to visit the Western Isles. Simply gorgeous.
In my random meanderings through the Internet this week, I came across this song from a chap called John Gill, who grew up in Matlock, Derbyshire just a few years before me
It’s a simple little folk song with a catchy tune but I found myself with tears in my eyes as I listened to the lyrics. Here’s just a bit:
I’d like to think that I was Superman Giving all the world a hand Oh what a super man I’d be I’d like to think I was invisible I’d be invincible Invincivisible that’s me Oh but I’m very unextraordinary And I’ll never be any of these things I dream about when I’m alone and lights are out I’m just me
I think we did a generation of children a disservice by telling them all they were special and were capable of anything they could dream of. I am a massive fan of positive thinking but the danger is that people think they have not achieved their potential because they are not an award winning author or prime minister or CEO of a massive company.
I live a very lucky life. I know that. This week we stayed in a Blackhouse crofter’s cottage on the Isle of Lewis. We saw sunsets and eagles. We slumped in front of the fire watching a film, while the rain lashed down. We went on adventures to seek out places from the Peter May Lewis books, and to see Iron Age houses and standing stones.. It was amazing.
The black house village where we stayed this week
It was a very special week. But does that make me special? Does it make me superman. Nope.
We felt very lucky this week to be invited to join the local people at a bonfire night celebration.
North Uist is a sparsely populated island, and the cottage we are staying in is in one of the remotest areas – Balranald. It has a church, a few houses, quite a few cows and a bird sanctuary. In the summer it has a campsite that looks as if it would be pretty busy but at this time of year that is closed and there is no one here.
That suits us very well. Whether on Narrowboat Thuis, or at home, we are comfortable with our own company and have had a very relaxing time here. The nearest proper village is Bhaigh (Bayhead) which is four miles away. It has about 40 houses and a shop. It also has the High School for North Uist, and every day about twenty minibuses carry the children to school from all around the island.
On bonfire night they bring together the local community to eat burgers, drink Irn Bru and watch fireworks. It was a great night. Not the most impressive display I have ever seen but still a very good one, complemented by the bonfire, the full moon, and the reflections in the sea. But what really made it was a couple of hundred people from toddlers to ancients gathered to enjoy it together.
The Hebridean accent is probably the softest of all the Scottish areas and I could hear it in the excitement of the little ones, the bickering of the teens, and the conversations between farmers and other locals. They had all arrived in their pickup trucks from miles around to be together.
One thing that did amuse me was hearing a father telling his child how good it was to celebrate the foiling of a Catholic plot, five hundred years later. Until the five mile causeway was built between the islands in 1960, there was very little mixing between Catholic South Uist and Protestant North Uist. I guess some views remain pretty embedded.
It was a lovely evening and it was good to be able to join such a distant but close community. Thank you.
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