I retired from work six months ago. In some ways time has gone quickly but in other ways, not. Sometimes I wonder how I have frittered the time since I retired away on so little. In other ways, and on other days (like today), walking through those revolving doors on Canary Wharf for the last time feels like ages away and that life since has been very rich.

View From My Work Desk Earlier This Year

So what have I learned? Here are the first five things that come to mind.

Work Didn’t and Doesn’t Define Me. I didn’t expect to miss work – its pressures, the meetings, the schedules/routines, the achievements/failures and the PowerPoint – and I don’t. I might do something resembling work in the future but its currently way down the agenda to even think about that.

Still From A Video I Took As I Went Through The Office Revolving Doors For The Final Time

There Is Plenty To Do In Retirement. I used to work 50-55 hours a week plus there was the 12 hours a week travelling to and from work. Retirement has freed up a lot of time. Filling the released time hasn’t been difficult. A lot more walking, more reading the newspaper to catch up with world events, more TV box sets, much more reading, more gardening and a bit more cooking has expanded into the space. And that is before the holidays, the time spent on this blog, and my scrappy attempts at learning Italian (not unfortunately something I can include on this things learnt list!).

There Is Still Need For Structure. A few months into retirement, I realised I needed to drive myself a bit more to get things done. I needed to supplement the bucket list of broad things to do with retirement with a list of almost daily items ‘to do’. I like routines and my new one, dotted with one off tasks, works for me.

Holidays Are More Relaxing Now. Long Suffering Wife (LSW) continues to work part time so holidays still need to be scheduled around that. However, holidays can be longer now I have retired. That, in itself, increases the relaxation of going away. On our almost four-week Australia trip, there was no tension of clearing the desk in the build-up and no concern about returning to a backlog of work email and issues. Also, I’m happier about having trips away from our home in Gloucestershire rather than holidaying there now that I‘m no longer spending the majority of my time in London. LSW and I only did the Australia trip aboard in the last six months but we are planning more for 2018.

I Miss London, But Not As Much As I Expected. The loss of immediate access to London night life – music, restaurants and cinema especially – was a worry to me as I retired. This concern has proved to be largely unfounded in practice. LSW has been especially supportive in trying out local music venues with me and the new Marshall Rooms in Stroud is promising. The quality (the ambience especially) of local medium-priced restaurants is poor relative to the best of the constant and hectic turnover of new strivers in London. However, we are learning to love the local pub(s) and saving our food money for our occasional trips to London – like the one earlier this week which was excellent. While there are independent cinemas locally, rural film watching was always going to struggle to compete with living over Barbican Cinemas 2 and 3! I’m filling the gap satisfactorily with European box sets. It’s not so bad…

I realised as I was writing this that the lessons learned above are just a few of them. They may not even be the main ones. So I’ll think again and augment this list shortly….