Embracing Freedom: My Second Year of Retirement

Lessons and fun from my second year of retirement and my growing relationship with sheds.

I ended the first year of my retirement, or “not working” life with another epiphany, in that I was wasting my time advising client. As any consultant will know, in many ways that is how we make our living, we give them our best advice based on experience and research, they ignore it, and then come back and ask us how well they are doing and pay us again. Or, in some cases, they pay us to give them the same advice on a number of occasions. It is difficult to say no, but life has to have a point, and I realised this wasn’t it for me.

I had also survived a difficult year in the company that had been largely outside our control, we made some good decisions and over the next 12 months things should be back under control and so it transpired.

One of the team left as planned, a couple of difficult contracts came to an end, and we gradually wound down our accreditation activities and peace slowly descended on the operations, which freed me up for more fun.

I also had my Ugly Bloke commitments, my promises to myself, one of those was that I would not take on new clients.

My love of sheds

Idle minds are the devil’s playground, and I have a particularly fertile mind for ideas and the need to achieve things. I built another garden shed to fill in a gap and tidy things up around the garden. Then I had the idea of building a garden room in another corner. In my view these were great projects, they took research and planning and ended with something to be proud of.

Wooksie wasn’t quite so enamoured, when I explained it was for her to enjoy the garden in the shade. She pointed out that it wasn’t a garden room but just a larger shed with more windows than normal, she also pointed out she had a very nice conservatory with comfy chairs, why would she want to sit in a garden shed with spiders.

Luckily, our daughter was back from completing university so I dedicated the “chalet” to her, a place where she could relax, play music and enjoy life out in the fresh air. Unlike her mum, she was grateful and uses it as her garden office when she is working from home or crocheting or reading or just avoiding her parents.

My eldest son, who lives in Brighton, was also the beneficiary of my newfound freedom, I rebuilt the grand kids tree house, replaced decking and then designed and built a shed that took advantage of some waste ground in the corner of their garden. This was wonderful stuff, I was actually a useful dad to him for a change 😊.

The summer was taken up with a holiday to Crete with the younger kids, a mountain bike trip to the Alps, lots of outdoor exercise and planning for the big adventure, a safari, there were lots of things to think about and keep me busy.

My new hobby, sea fishing

I’d been promising myself I’d take up fidhjng again when I retired and indeed I kept my promise, and caught my first flat fish on my first trip, something I’d never achieved as a kid.

I also volunteered to organise the tournaments for my walking football club. This proved more stressful that I had anticipated. Having played a lot of football in my life and still playing regularly I fancied this challenge, but it proved more complicated than I’d expected. I had been involved with the club for 18 months and knew we had some decent players; they just needed to be organised.

Walking football and club politics

In most football clubs, it is all about getting the best team on the pitch, I quickly learned to my expense that walking football clubs are different. Firstly, people are generally older, quite set in their ways and don’t like change.  They are also not keen on being organised, tend to be forgetful about instructions on where to be and when, they are resistant to technology and social media, and they also get injured easily.  Over the summer we had 6 tournaments, and everyone of them involved late night calls, calls from holiday, pleading, chasing, reminders, being let down and scars on my back.

However, the comradery between the players on the day nearly made it all worthwhile but at the end of the season I decided to call it a day as it wasn’t worth the hassle. We will return to this story elsewhere.  At the end of the day, we did get a team out for each tournament, and they equipped themselves well, that was a big achievement in hindsight.

Wooksie and the team were on top of operations, so I was free to enjoy my life, so space between work and me was growing. An opportunity to do an assignment for a client arrived, we had discussions, and they wanted something like stuff we had done before so I agreed to do it.

Many people talk about their “dream” being to spend a ski season in the Alps. My snowboarding trips had been curtailed in the first year by unreliable conditions, so as we happened to own an apartment in the Alps, I decided I was going to live that dream and spend the winter in France. Obviously thanks to Brexit can’t do this for very long, but I certainly decided that once Christmas was out of the way I would be spending the majority of my time in France and started to make plans. I would then get to enjoy the snow when it turned up rather than me try to chase the snow. (A winter in the Alps will be another blog).

Work – the final straw

So I agreed to do the client assignment, with a plan to complete before Christmas so I was clear to go to the Alps, and everything was on schedule for completion until I received an email, out of the blue,  from the client contact on the 1^st Dec stating he was now  away for 3 weeks and would pick it up when he got back, he basically had dropped everything and swanned off. This is quite a good example why projects go wrong, because people involved are idiots.

Ahem, that is past the completion date for the project Mr Client, I pointed out.  A bit of discussion with the sponsor, and in the spirit of client love, I offered to fly back from France so that we could have a final workshop with them and nail the package.  A week after arriving in France I was on my way back for a workshop, it could have happened virtually as they had not prepared, we agreed a closure plan which Mr “Swan Off” ignored and I ended up back in France to find an email with a load of changes that we hadn’t agreed and totally out of sync with the plan.

As always, we came good, finished the work and signed off. However, this had now interfered with my fun plans and my winter snow season. It had also got deeply under my skin and left me agitated because when I wasn’t working on it, I was thinking about it, not because it was complicated but because of the ignorant behaviour of one member of the client team.

I decided that this was my last assignment, I didn’t want to feel that sort of stress anymore and I didn’t need the money, it w5as the final epiphany as I was now over the work thing.

In March I was contacted by a potential client about an assessment, something we had done many times in the past and was relatively straightforward. I had discussions with them, my head was saying just do it, my heart was saying don’t. 

It meant breaking one of my Ugly Bloke commitments as it would be a new client, that always has issues as you get to know each other. However, I was finding it incredibly difficult to say no to the offer, I went as far to provide a quote and scope out the work.

Helping old friends

In April I met with an old friend and business contact from Australia who was over here in the UK.  Two really good things came out of it:

1. I discovered that the market in Australia wasn’t great for him. I told the new client I had some health issues that would affect my availability to avoid saying no, and recommended my friend, and he has been able to make some money out of it.
2. I have talked about writing a book about my adventures and escapes for years, which he had seen firsthand. He suggested that I should start by doing a blog, that way I could see how they build up and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Lessons from my second year  

So as my second year of retirement has come to an end, lots more progress has been made in finding the way forward in my new chapter.

• Work life balance – now doesn’t involve work, but life. I’ve now crossed the Rubicon and turned away work. There Is only one scenario where I may take on work, but I’ve left most of it behind now, I can say “No” and I didn’t let the client down.
• Wooksie on board – she has made loads of progress towards enjoying part time working now things are more stable in the business.  Once the company has gone in the future she may well take on a part time job elsewhere so someone else can take the stress, but we have lots of adventures ahead.
• Solo adventures – I’ve come to terms that my love of adventures will involve solo trips. I did the winters season snowboarding (thought had lots of visitors) and plan to do a summer season the Alps Mountain biking, a new bike is waiting to be transported down there to avoid rental costs and I want to be the fastest old bloke on the mountain.
• Blogging – building the blog and associated media like the website and YouTube are creating challenges of their own, so I can see that it is going to be a big new thing over the next 12 months, learning about how to write in an entertaining way and bring the fun to life.
• Strangely relaxed – I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I am hyperactive, I tick just about every box on the ADHT scale, but being in complete control of my life has left me amazingly relaxed about things because there is always something to do and I am getting an amazing amount of fun done every day basically.

So, we are now stepping into year 3 of retirement, all things are in place for nonstop fun so let the good times roll.