A Retirement Blog by Caree Risover

  This weekend marks 5 weeks of living on bottled water. Not the most auspicious of anniversaries, coinciding as it has with Plastic Free July and ruining all attempts on my part to live more sustainably. So the stress runs on, but we are building our resilience.  In my case, I have found that throwing myself into exercise classes and some heavy gardening certainly helps and undoubtedly has me falling asleep even before I get into bed. Last weekend the Village Gardening Club co-ordinated a tour of members' gardens. Rain had forced me to abandon any effort to weed and I confess that my flower beds, with some in an ongoing state of renovation, were an embarrassment. I devote my time in early summer to the vegetable patch and then never find a weather window to sort the rest of the garden; it's usually too wet, too windy or too hot making the clay soil seal like concrete. However, shamed by the success of others and helped by ideal conditions, this past week Mister E and I have f...

  I know that as you age it is considered common to have issues with your urinary tract or prostate. Mister E and I however seem fated to have problems with a different kind of plumbing. The central heating has been a headache on occasions with a blocked radiator and more recently a screw through a pipe.  We currently have an issue with the heads on the Retirement Project too. However all this pales into insignificance when compared to events of the past 3 weeks. I've moved from a state of shocked paralysis, through panic to waking up in the night attempting to logically solve the problem at 3.30am (it never works and just leads to continuing insomnia). If I ever thought I'd left the world of stress behind me the day I retired, I could not have been proved further wrong. Hot sweaty palms, a fast beating heart and bouts of sudden nausea have all made their inevitable appearance. It started a few days after we returned from our Baltic trip (and believe me, I could now do with ...

  I'm not sure why but I do love my garden. However, toiling for hours to produce fresh produce just at the time it is widely available in the shops and consequently relatively cheap, surely requires some explanation. I think it is that mixture of nature and nurture, not in the sense of the great psychology debate but from the perspective of getting up close and dirty with the first, whilst deriving pleasure and reward from the actual process of rearing all those seedlings and cuttings. Experimentation and creativity abound; the economics of production are irrelevant. However, there is no doubt that it can be back-breaking and tiring. Since retiring, I have concentrated on trying to reduce some of the more physical aspects of digging and weeding. Consequently, I now have a system for adding compost and turning the soil immediately each bed has been harvested, covering it with a weed suppression fabric until it is time for planting again. In the flowerbeds too, I have begun to use b...

  We have just returned from a 2 week trip to the Baltic. It had been our intention to visit it as part of our Adieu tour prior to the end of the Brexit transition period. The hope had been to make use of the railway and ferry connections with a view to ticking off the member states adjoining the Baltic Sea from here to Finland and back again. If only, but unfortunately that nasty pandemic interrupted all our travel plans.  I'm not sure whether we are just being slow to recover our confidence after Covid and clearly catching it whilst travelling last October hasn't helped. There again it could be an age related issue. Either way, whereas the idea of all those transport connections back in 2020 invoked excitement, this year they just seemed something of a complex hassle and we had parked the whole idea. Of course, the last time we were ocean bound it was on our ill-fated cruise to the Azores . The company offered us compensation in the form of an acceptable level of discount b...

  I have alluded previously to a visit by the Eldest and Dilly together with our baby granddaughter. They stayed a week and I have to say I had totally forgotten how exhausting babies are! Grandparent status is wonderful but I'm not sure I'd have the energy to care for a little human being full-time. Hats off, therefore, to Robert de Niro and Al Pacino who both made the news recently when they announced the births of their children. Aged 79 and 83 respectively, I think they need more than congratulations and good luck, although I suspect that neither might be the hands-on type of parent we would normally envisage. I'm absolutely certain that even  if it was biologically possible  the last thing I would want to do would be to give birth in retirement. I love my sleep and quiet periods too much, not to mention the freedom to do what I want, when I want. I never thought I was an overly selfish person but there we are. Raising children is a full-day, every day, long-term comm...

  When you are working so often busyness, stress and fatigue are held up like an award of honour displayed proudly on your chest. In reality they are debilitating and in due course exhaustion can lead to burn out. There are still occasions when I feel overburdened but unlike my pre-retirement days it's so much easier to remedy the situation. This week, as well as all the cleaning up from last week's disasters and on top of my normal schedule, I've put myself under pressure by seeking to dig over, compost and re-mulch the garden whilst the sun shines and before the clay soil turns once again to something that resembles concrete. Contemporaneously I'm trying to build in a variety of self watering systems based on wicking and capillary actions. There are seedlings to transplant and pot on, as well as more seeds to be sown directly into vegetable  beds. It's a race against time and it feels like I'm losing. Nowadays I know that the most important things in life are ...

 At Action for Happiness one of the 10 keys for happier living is described as resilience or the ability to cope constructively when circumstances conspire against us. Needless to say Mister E and I have been practising our resilience skills in droves this month. The initial trial of our skill-set began as cool weather dominated towards the beginning of the month whereupon the boiler decided it was an opportune time to fail. At least retirement gives you all the time you need to contact the man who services it and to liaise as to an early date for repair. After staying away from local hospitals since December , I was convinced we had finally broken the 2022 jinx. However, it turned out that the boiler wasn't the only thing in need of  urgent attention when my G.P. referred me to the emergency eye clinic with a suspected retinal tear and of course the timing clashed with that boiler repair, leaving Mister E shuttling between hospital and home.  Of course, sometimes I can n...