2008 8 1 forward? 16 11 3 (8) 25 1 27
Whenever I think about my retirement 2 dates always
spring to mind: the first is 04 11 26 which was on a Friday when I reached the
age of 65 and the company who employed me at the time kicked me out like all
the other employees who reached retiring age that year. The law was about to
change you see and if they had allowed me for example to stay another 5-6 weeks
to carry me over into the New Year 2005 I would have had the right to stay
another 3 years until I reached 68... It was a moot point in my case however
because I started back the following Monday to begin serving the same company
as a Management Consultant and so worked another 3½ - 4 years which brings
me up to the second of the 2 dates 1st August 2008 when I retired the second
and final time.
There was a kind of poetry in this too because when I left school on a Friday 29th July I started work Monday 1st August and so saw
myself gainfully employed continuously from age 4½ right through to age 68½ that's 64 years 52 of which were to do with making a living...
That last retirement date was significant in
another way too, a less auspicious day in every sense because it also marked an
absolute end to one of the longest friendships I ever had: with a guy I had met
in the summer I left school age 15 and who up until 5 years before the day in
question I had ceased to hear anything from. In other words the friendship had
terminated in 2003 already after 48 years but I needed for some peculiar reason
to draw a line under it. To do this my wife and I that year when we visited UK
as we do every year drove the hire-car round to his house, fortunately to catch him in the house but who without any explanation refused to entertain
our being there... The only regret I have about this is that I subjected my wife
to the humiliation she felt: for me it was different because I was able to walk
away and put the guy out of my mind once and for all, a guy who was only ever
the friend of a friend as it were in my wife's case.
Later that same month August 2008 I met someone new
and at first I thought this person will make a good replacement for the friend I had just lost but I guess what was happening instead was that my life was
changing in a very dramatic way although at the time I wasn't fully aware of
what it was...being retired..!?
Around that time in my life I used to be active
with a couple of accounts on MySpace which in those days was still very popular
as a social networking site but increasingly was losing ground to the then up
and coming F-book. It was a place to put pics and vids and my accounts were
given over to my hobbies of meeting new people taking pics and either sailing
in the Finnish Archipelago or climbing hills in Britain’s mountain regions in
N. Wales, the English Lake District or Scottish Highlands, that is whenever I
had free time from my onerous work schedules… If I met people of a kindred
spirit in the hills I would take pics of them and post these pics later on
MySpace so that at any given time I might have a dozen friends and
acquaintances who occasionally would visit one or other of my sites and
although I had no way of knowing who had visited I would see someone had
visited, etc., etc., etc.
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