Sometimes I wonder why people choose to travel at all. If you’re travelling for work or visiting people, fair enough, but why would you put yourself through all that hassle without a good reason? If I’m honest, travelling is enormously inconvenient and frequently uncomfortable as well. Unless you’re fabulously wealthy of course, which most of…
My favourite things
With dire warnings of climate catastrophes hanging over us and the upcoming UK elections, with the results ushering in who knows what calamitous state of affairs, my brain is desperately seeking a ray of light to get me through this darkest of months. So, I came over all Julie Andrews and decided to compile a…
The never-ending demands of retirement
I had no idea that retirement would be so demanding. I looked up “retirement” in the Cambridge Dictionary and it is supposed to be “the point at which someone stops working”. To me this conjures up images of infinite leisure, but fond thoughts of doing jigsaw puzzles and knitting jumpers are quickly receding. I realise…
Can you ever go home?
Although I grew up in Ontario, I have lived most of my adult life in the UK, which means that visiting Ontario is not really like going home, more like visiting my youth. And who doesn’t want to visit their youth? I never really had a proper adult life in Canada. I lived there in…
So how disorderly is my retirement? Am I letting myself go?
I’m starting to think that the name of this blog might be misleading. Am I really letting myself go? How disorderly is my retirement? Maybe I’m deluding myself and this latest phase of my life, far from being a retirement of wild and reckless abandon, is really no different from any other except that I’m…
A year down the road…
I stopped working a year ago, so it’s obviously time for an Annual Retirement Review. It’s time to discuss my achievements of the past year, areas that need improvement, my goals for the next year and training requirements. I think the main challenge for any newly retired couple is adjusting to spending more time together…
From the sublime to the ridiculous
I rarely have the opportunity to use this phrase literally and without exaggeration, but the time has definitely come. Last week I attended two live events that could not have been more different. I still haven’t decided if I’m actually retired or if this is a phoney retirement, but that’s another matter. Anyway, my retirement,…
But will this coat see me out?
I can remember my Nanna buying a new coat and saying with some satisfaction “I think this coat will see me out”. I don’t think she meant out of the front door, I think she meant out of a more permanent door. I was impossibly young at the time and thought it was an embarrassingly…
That dress
No, not the black leather barely-held-together-with-safety-pins dress that Liz Hurley wore to upstage Hugh Grant back in the 90s, I’m talking about the current dress sensation. Nearly every time I go out I see a woman wearing the identical long white dress with black polka dots. Unlike Liz’s black leather number, this one couldn’t be…
In retreat
On Monday I retreated. I went on a ‘contemplative day’ based at a religious retreat in London’s East End. What I was doing on a religious retreat when I’m not religious and have very little to retreat from I don’t know. In fact, I was so worried that people might think I had spiritual aspirations…