A Retirement Blog by Caree Risover

   My primeval nesting urge invariably sets in as the days grow noticeably longer and Spring is in the air. Unusually, and just as the shortest day of the year approaches, I've been hit by a compulsion to declutter. So, totally out of kilter with my normal instinctive behaviour,  I have been dropping goods off at the Charity Shop at the end of the year rather than the beginning. I've also found an outlet that buys old digital cameras (the Charity Shop having refused to accept them in case I might inadvertently have failed to wipe the memory and their contents presumably be distasteful!) I've disposed too of a significant percentage of my paperback book collection; the part with yellowing loose pages and tiny print in an obscure font with no double line spacing. Horror of horrors, in an epoch where Charity Shops want nearly new goods and these were fit for nothing other than recycling assuming that the paper could be separated from the glue which appeared to be rapidly det...

  We can all go through life attacking imaginary enemies if we so choose. Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but I dare say today he'd have equally mistaken a row of pylons for evil giants.  In retirement my choice has been to avoid conflict, as I try to negotiate my way to a place of calm and stress-free Karma. Unfortunately in recent weeks, it has not been so easy.  There is one chance for the floors  of our home to be reinstated properly. We have no confidence that the insurance company's contractors can deliver. Would you employ a crew used to digging holes and trenches to put everything back together again with the finesse of a master housebuilder? We are understandably running scared. Work has ground to a halt and having sought expert advice have been left even more concerned. It's just like being back at work, waking in the middle of the night to confront the worries of the next day. Even then, I doubt I ever dreamt about filling in floors nor planned conversati...

  It was my third morning back at the gym today. Apart from forgetting my trainer shoes (again!), I confess to being modestly proud to have survived unscathed. So far there are no screaming muscles, my joints aren't stiff and I'm ready to do it all again tomorrow (trainer shoes packed in readiness). Conscious of  fast approaching the era for physical decline, yesterday I found my attention online diverted to a somewhat old study on the benefit of being able to sit down onto the floor and then stand up again without using your hands. I surprised myself by being able to do this relatively comfortably. That's just as well, because the study from more than a decade ago suggests that failure gave a seven times greater likelihood of dying within six years. On the one hand that could suggest that this blog might be around for a while yet. On the other, and on the basis that I'm pretty sure I probably couldn't do that in the early days of retirement not to mention during th...

   It sounded a little too good to be true when we received an email at the beginning of the week from the remediation company contracted by the insurers, suggesting that we could feasibly be back in our home by Christmas. The day dreaming began and the pace of work in the rooms upstairs that we are decorating quickened. Little by little, however, we realised the serious pitfalls of such a situation, not least because notice to terminate the lease on our temporary accommodation would need to be given this month with no certainty that we would actually be able to return as indicated. Corners would need to be cut and/or we would be returning to somewhere only half finished with no prospect of entertaining family over the Christmas holidays.  Then nightmare of nightmares, because the tenancy end date would actually be 25th December, I had visions of cleaning and clearing two houses at the point when most people might be sitting back, slippers on, waiting for Santa Claus to p...

  In my blogpost on September 8th , I described the challenge of undertaking an online course in Health and Nutrition. I am pleased to report that the final assignment was completed and submitted on Friday. Whilst I did my best to spread the workload over the time allowed, there was so much to complete that I still felt under pressure and far removed from the carefree retirement state I now consider normality. On the plus side, it felt like a new experience and I do feel far more knowledgeable than previously; I also appreciate the practical implications of what I have learnt and am already conscious of making changes as a result. However, I would like to think that even wild horses will not drag me back to the classroom. I do so much prefer the stimulation of active practical learning and creativity. So it was that during September I also undertook the restoration of an old Ercol rocking chair that my grandmother had given me when I was only a toddler. It was a dark, stained finis...

  My vegetable patch has been notably absent from this blog and indeed my life this summer. Before we vacated our home, I planted potatoes and onions and then left it. Forays back to the garden have been made only to harvest new potatoes and shallots as well as from the fruit trees. Sadly whilst the trees are doing us proud, mainly because of the lack of wasps this year, the harvest from the ground has so far proved disappointing. It demonstrates, I suppose, that my regular presence is indeed required to administer tender loving care in the form of a watering can and fertiliser, as needed. That said, and however much I enjoy gardening, it has been a boon not to feel tied down in the servitude of peas and cabbages. So much so, that I have now even been devising plans for next years vegetable beds which might see two or three of them taken out of action. I have a feeling that displays of colourful blooms amongst the edible crops might be easier on the back, require less man hours to ...

    Today marks ten years since I shut down my office computer for the last time, closed my briefcase and walked out of the door into Planet Retirement. That's right, unbelievable though it seems, it was a decade ago! Having just reached what is currently the official state retirement age, I do feel privileged to have retired when I did. I am conscious that had I in fact waited until now, I would probably be entering this strange new world in a state of total exhaustion and significantly reduced good health. Are there any little nuggets of wisdom I can take from my experience and share? At risk of sounding like a cliched reality TV show contestant, it has certainly been a journey. An exploratory trip into the unknown where time and freedom combine to offer a choice of pursuits and lifestyle. Ultimately I have opted to try to live more simply with less, embrace nature and honour my health and well-being. There is a beautiful world out there that enclosed in a workplace we may b...

 I have been working my way through children's games that I removed from one particular cupboard at our recently vacated home. This is an area that I've attacked a couple of times already in retirement, donating unused toys and other paraphernalia to charity shops. There remained, however, a mixture of well used board games, some stemming from my own childhood but also enjoyed by the Eldest and Youngest, as well too as their collection of game-consoles and the games that they loved to play on them. There will no longer be a place for most of them in our home when we return. Was it even rational to feel attachment to these games, no matter how long we've had them as a family? Those made in the 1960's were hardly vintage boxed originals from the 1930's, but could I let them go after so long? Pragmatism crept in when I lifted the Monopoly box and it almost disintegrated in my hands. The contents looked sad and crumbling. In Cluedo the Detectives' Notes had been fil...

  Like every new year, January started off with so much promise. After it did its best to impede my ability to breathe let alone exercise by knocking me down with a never-ending head cold and then spent most days tossing rainwater from the sky, I can't say I'm sorry to see its departure. Of course there were the good bits, like my nephew's wedding and our week away in the Lake District, but generally speaking  I confess I'm just glad it's gone. Restored and revitalised, I want to get out and attack life again. However, I've read so much of late written by people decrying the month of January that I can't help wondering if I'm simply living in an echo chamber. After all its hardly fair to blame a period of 31 days banded together under no more than the name of a month for either my woes or the weather. I may have felt that my role as an explorer of retirement was temporarily suspended but I still made headway with some serious decluttering, totally emptyi...

  The fourth day of this head cold and I feel that I am languishing in a state of total inertia. In retirement jumping out of bed on a morning has commonly been driven by my passion for morning exercise classes. Presently and until Wednesday, I have cancelled them all. My calendar is blank and time is devoted solely to staying warm and cosseting myself. To be fair, I have detected sufficent improvement in the malaise enveloping me that I am at least now looking at potential plans for activities going forward. From time to time, I do look at the original strategy for retirement that I committed to writing back in 2014. Ashamed yesterday by how much of Britain I have not seen, do I now add to my mortification by potentially calculating how far away I am from fulfilling my own agenda? After all if I'm already feeling melancholy from a heavy cold, would a diagnosis of failure make me suffer any further? Perhaps adopting a dead cat strategy and analysing progress at this juncture might ...

  It isn't so long since I told you in a blog post that I've been trying to avoid embracing the stereotypical  bucket list but have now begun to ponder on whether or not some kind of schedule is actually needed as I continue my exploration of Planet Retirement. At Christmas, however, somebody saved me the effort of pulling together my own spreadsheet by gifting me a Bucket List map . Now I previously felt quite strongly that not only did I not want to devise a inventory of places to visit but also that worse than this would be a list of experiences and destinations that somebody else had collated for general distribution. Just search Bucket List online and you'll know what I mean. In this instance, however, I was sufficiently intrigued to open the map and here I hang my head in shame. Billed as "1,000 priceless places to go and things to know" in Britain, I confess that I would be lucky to be familiar with half of them. In fact there are vast swathes of our relat...

  We had our regular annual review with our Financial Advisor this week. The investments that sustain our pension funds remain stagnant as we were already aware, but the good news is that, regardless, he recommends spending them on exploring Planet Retirement. Money matters but so does fulfilment. Obviously, first Covid and then this year the requirement for our presence to resolve the leaking oil issue, have both intervened to curtail our travels and experiences. Consequently, he echoed our concern that we don't want to miss out for too long, ending up in frail health and unable to realise lifetime ambitions.  We are so conscious of this and whilst vague plans are frustrated at present, it's good to have ratification from a third party. How easy it must be in retirement to slip into sitting at home in splendid isolation adopting the attitude that venturing out is only hassle. There may be a time in the future when we have to embrace that restricted lifestyle but for the momen...

  On Friday we went to a House Building and Renovation Show. After building our current home (well we didn't actually lay the bricks ourselves, but you get my gist) 24 years ago, we do not have any intention of repeating the experience in retirement. We love the finished product but the memory of the stress and hassle of getting there, militates against doing it all again. A sport for younger people you might say. We've always been happy with our home, so much so that, and despite the decluttering, we still haven't seriously contemplated down-sizing which I'm advised is a must at some point in the future. As for remodelling, well that's always sounded like even more hassle than building afresh.  We were potentially the show's most lukewarm visitors, surrounded as we were by a throng of amateur but enthusiastic would-be developers. Our presence was, of course, encouraged by the thought that ripping our house apart to deal with the contamination under it could be ...

I started lockdown with all kinds of good intentions regarding exercise but a couple of weeks ago I started to cheat. Preferring to stretch in Pilates and Yoga sessions, I neglected HIIT and weights sessions. With my gym membership I have access to an App that invariably tells me that my lifestyle is very active. Had I logged into it last week, I'm sure it would have told me that my lifestyle is now comatose with nothing recorded to persuade it otherwise. The truth is, I need a class booked and a Gym Instructor breathing down my neck to really press myself. With indoor leisure activities likely to be the last to re-open, there was no choice; drastic action was needed. I have bought myself a cattle prod! Well that's not quite true, not the cattle prod bit anyway. It's actually a Fitbit but when I read that it would issue an alarm every hour if I hadn't moved, I did have visions of being subjected to electric shock treatment courtesy of the humble farm...

So the Twenties have arrived; not only a brand new year but also a spanking new decade. A drought of year-ends, suddenly succumbing to rainfall. I have grown accustomed to considering December 31st/January 1st as a time for reflection and resolutions. However, after drenching myself in the contentment of retirement (I appreciate that images of hearths and slippers will be flooding to mind, but it isn't like that at all) I have struggled to make fresh New Year's resolutions for a couple of years and abandoned doing so altogether last year. Since 2018 I have been setting myself specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed challenges. The trouble is that in retirement personal satisfaction becomes a given. Counting is no longer part of your thirst for life meaning that work-based SMART goals are doomed to fail. This time last year when I challenged myself to visit 52 art exhibitions over the course of 2019, adding up must still have been an integral p...

So much is written about the post-work bucket list that as you approach retirement, you inevitably feel that you should have one. A tick list of 100 things to see and do before you die. You don't even have to think up your own any more, the Internet is full of them. Glance through them if you will and you quickly get the impression that retirement must be full of adrenalin rushed grandparents throwing themselves out of aeroplanes or climbing Kilimanjaro. Indeed the eldest recently sent a book to Mister E and me entitled "101 Coolest Things to Do in Great Britain." Now it is a good read and has some, shall we say, "interesting ideas" but for those that hold the most appeal I can honestly say that I've already been there, done them, got the photographs. There are others that wild horses wouldn't drag me to. It may be cool, but somehow Mister E and I attending Bestival is beyond even the most vivid of imaginations. The problem with trying to...

The first page of a new year and with another 364 days to go we all need to be working together to plan a happy ending. That anyway was my thought as I contemplated the making of this year's New Year's Resolutions.  I was actually surprised to read that most people's resolutions involve losing weight, taking more exercise and making time in their busy lives for family and friends. To think that there was a time when I actually thought that I was unique in both my ambitions and failings. Now that I know that fellow humanity shares so many goals and aspirations, I want to reach out with this year's resolutions to strive for objectives we can all embrace together. 2016 was an appalling year on so many levels, so I now undertake in 2017 to: 1. Make someone smile every day 2. Ensure I have a good daily laugh too (I sense my family groaning already at my sense of humour) 3. Stand up for what I believe in and endeavour to engage others to fight the cause (oh dear m...

I have just discovered the Action for Happiness' website . Reading its pages has to bring a smile to anyone's face. However the page that caught my attention is labelled 10 Keys and on it are set out ten keys to happiness. I can't believe that since retiring I have been on a journey of self discovery in which I have succeeded in identifying almost all those aspects of life; instead all I needed to have done was to read this website! Still now that I have found it, I am delighted to note that I have been on the right track all along, no wonder retirement is proceeding so happily! The Action for Happiness whose patron is the Dalai Lama has an impressive Board of Directors committed to helping people take practical steps for a happier and more caring world. In so doing, and using Great Dream as an acronym, we learn from them that:  Giving or doing things for others makes us feel better too. I sense more commitment to my voluntary causes, family and friends com...

Almost four years ago now I attended a motivational event when we had to discuss with the person sitting next to us our goals for the future and specifically our five year plan. In my case I was fortunate that the colleague with whom I was paired was someone whom I knew quite well and I glibly told her that my intention was to retire.  After leading us through a variety of activities linked to planning the next five years, the coach at the session asked us to commit our plans into a written sentence, and pass it over. I found an old train ticket in my purse, confirmed my intentions in writing and then handed it on.  "I'm going to make a diary note and then remind you when the time comes," my colleague said laughingly, never for a moment believing that my intentions were serious. Earlier this year I had reason to e-mail the same lady and in doing so told her that I plan to retire at the end of June, and enquired if she still had the ticket. She came to s...