This retirement gig is not quite going to plan.
It’s not all fun and lie-ins and lazy brunches. It’s not all holidays.
There is a certain antsiness – Skippy the bush kangaroo on steroids – when you have no particular place to go.
Remember that cartoon of the Herbs and Parsley the Lion? I’m channeling my inner Dill the Dog… rushing about, chasing my tail and causing mayhem. Then I collapse and fall sleep.
There are those in this house who find antsiness disturbing. The sudden switch from slug-on-the-sofa mode to full-blown Tasmanian Devil is disturbing, they say.
It’s not that I don’t love not getting up at 5am or driving home at midnight, but I still miss my work mates.
I miss the bleary-eyed togetherness before the kettle in the work kitchen at 5.30am. I miss the funny messages spelled out in children’s magnetic letters on our work fridge. I miss hushed conversations on late nights in the newsroom.
I even miss the midnight tap on my car window by the stranger at the traffic lights on the road home: “Best turn on your headlights.”
It’s more the sense of the narrowing of a life; the years speeding up; galloping towards a finishing line. Like we’re all in a Grand National that none of us wants to win.
“I’m not complaining, I’m just explaining,” was a favourite expression of ma’s in her later years.
She found purpose in Friday mornings in Oxfam for over 30 years. She was first on emergency call for her grandchildren and she was an organic gardener who was never happier than in her big sun hat, with her hands in the soil and a robin perched at her elbow, waiting for her to dig up his worm dinner.
When people ask me how I’m enjoying retirement, I smile and nod and think of the deserts of vast eternity that need filling with awfully important things like dusting the mantelpiece and weeding the front.
I’m a close friend of the postman now – we take parcels for the street because we’re always about.
Mine was a job that was clock and deadline-based... a breaking story has to be up pronto. It had an adrenaline rush. There was a thrill at being at the centre of things.
Retirement, on the other hand, is like easing into a warm bath. It takes time to relax into it.
Covid has left me with hyperventilation – think of young ladies in crinolines laced up into whalebone corsets by maids wedging a fat knee into their backs. I can’t walk and talk at the same time.
In retirement, I’m also learning Spanish. Mine is a mongrel tongue with a total disregard for word gender and a smattering of English thrown in… I’ve been known to drop an “agus” when I’m stuck.
It was all going bueno until the app started warning me about dropping down the league. I deleted it.
I’m not complaining… I’m just explaining.
Still, it took a friend to point out that retirement is returning me to my first love… books.
“You’re reading so much,” she said.
When people ask me how I’m enjoying retirement, I smile and nod and think of the deserts of vast eternity that need filling with awfully important things like dusting the mantelpiece and weeding the front
In the long ago, my father took me to the library every Saturday. I’d read late into the night and early in the morning.
Tis true. I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t grow from seed but the reading bug has bitten.
Still finding my feet with this retirement gig, but the reading, now that is a joy.
