Retirement: a prelude!

            This coming Monday, 12th May, is my 66th birthday. 

            It's also my final day at work, as I'm taking retirement!

            It's hard for me to believe that I started my first full-time job a whole half-century ago.  Monday, September 8th 1975.  Assistant Cellarman at 'Hill's Devon Cider' in Landscove, South Devon - just under the skirt-edge of Dartmoor: still my favourite place on earth.  I was a tall, skinny stick of a lad, greener than grass, not long out of school with not a qualification to my name.  I knew nothing much about life, about the world, or about anything I was supposed to have learned at school  (I could read, write, tell the time, count and do basic arithmetic - that was enough to get by in life, surely?)  School days were hell.  I spent most of them hiding from bullies, or bunking off, or feigning sickies.  I was glad to be away from it - a man at last (or so I felt), out in the world, earning a living (£24 a week before stoppages)... and with no ambition other than to be a writer.  I didn't know what I was going to write about... but I was going to do it anyway.  I'd dream something up.  And now I was earning, I could buy my own typewriter at last (which I did, as soon as I could - a Smith-Corona portable, from Woolworth's in Totnes, for fifteen quid!)  I wrote short horror and ghost stories at first - practically the only things I'd read up until then.  I started a newspaper correspondence course in TV Scriptwriting and attempted a TV play... about a family who move from London to Devon, where the young son starts work on a local cider farm!  I didn't get anything accepted, of course.  But I thought I would, eventually.  It was only a matter of time. 

            The cider farm was just the day job....

            And now, 30-odd 'day jobs' later (and still no book deal!), I'm finally getting what I've always wanted: my days free to do as I like - which will mainly, as I plan it, be reading and writing.  I haven't done enough of either of them for far too long.  And they're the two things that give true meaning to my life - just as for the musician it's playing music, or for the adrenalin junkie it's jumping off buildings in a wing-suit.  I have a different attitude to writing now, though.  For many years, it was the hunger and push for 'publication': the dream of writing a best-seller, making money, etc.  And for years, that took me away from the true essence of why I did it in the first place.  Because I had to.  Because it's what I'd always done, right from childhood.  Because it was my refuge and order when everything around me seemed hostile and chaotic.  Because it enabled me to make sense of things that were otherwise insoluble.  'I write to find out what I know', as some writer or other has put it before.  It sounds fanciful.  But it's true for me, nevertheless.  Always has been.

            As far as the other part of the equation goes, I'm currently re-reading two favourite books: Nicholson Baker's 2003 short novel A Box of Matches, and poet May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, first published in 1973.  A Box of Matches is 33 short chapters, each being a new day in the life of the narrator, Emmett (aged 44).  He rises early each morning, makes coffee, then sits with it and lights a fire - using a new match from the box of the title.  The novel ends when the final match has been used.  That's the structure.  In between, Baker builds a picture of a man in mid-life as he sits by the fire he's made each morning and talks about whatever comes into his head: his wife, his daughter, his pet duck (Greta), the art of coffee-making, the use of firelighters, love, suicide, ant farms. The thoughts grow organically in his mind as the flames grow and expand in the fire in front of him.  As the description on the cover puts it, this is 'Nicholson Baker at his obsessive-compulsive best, with humour and observation to die for, but with underlying truths about the ephemerality of life, the joy of small things, the darkness just the other side of everyday life...' 

            Exactly my kind of book, in other words! 

            Sarton's book, by contrast, isn't fiction.  Journal of a Solitude is exactly what it says: an autobiography, based on diary entries made during a year of living alone as she worked on writing projects.  As she states at the beginning: 'I am here alone for the first time in weeks to take up my 'real' life again at last.  That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened.'  She writes with keen observation and emotional courage of both her inner and outer worlds: her garden, the seasons of the year, daily life in her native New Hampshire, books, people, ideas - and throughout everything, her spiritual and artistic journey.

            These books between them have sparked an idea and a challenge for me: to start my retirement with a journal in which to record my thoughts, feelings, activities and experiences each day as I begin this important new stage in life.  If I can manage a thousand words per day... that'll be over a third-of-a-million words by my 67th birthday!  Even if it's only 500 words a day, it'll still add up to a substantial amount... of pages, if nothing else!  It may be boring and repetitive, but I'll try not to let it get that way.  If nothing else, too, it'll be a good exercise.  It'll get me into good writing habits again.  It may fire me off in different directions for different projects.  We'll just have to see.

            At least this time - unlike the me fifty years ago - I've got a few things to write about now!  I hope so, anyway.