A Walk On The Wild Side
On seizing the day
All my life I have tended to play it safe. I never took a “Gap Yah”, since I am not great at roughing it, was never adventurous, and I like my routines and comfort. Much safer to press straight on after university, into the world of work, to build a steady career in a safe job, hopefully with a good pension at the end of it. Wife, house, two children. Mainstream and safe. Both my brothers are much better travelled, though that never particularly appealed to me, and this was reinforced by my decision not to fly again after I became environmentally aware in the late 1980s.
So the last forty years have been dominated by a 9–5. Boringly predictable some might say, and they would probably be right. Somewhere along the way in that quest for stability, the day job can become tedious, a straitjacket. You lose some of your spark, what defines the real “you”.
There is an old saying that the only difference between a rut and a grave is how deep it is. “Metro, boulot, dodo” as the French so neatly and rather chillingly put it! Of course, many of us fall into this trap. We may take on commitments, perhaps a mortgage, perhaps have children that we want to support and give them the very best start in life. I have always taken that responsibility seriously. After all, they didn’t ask to be born, as they may sometimes like to remind us! It is a parent’s choice, so a parent’s responsibility to provide.
The plan went reasonably well until I was made redundant in my early 50s in a round of local authority cuts. In my case, my local authority housing department had an Audit Commission inspection and got a “zero star” rating; whoops! So there was a major shake-up to turn things around, and two-thirds of the staff lost their job. Redundancy was an interesting experience. A mass meeting in the town hall, where workers got one letter or another, “stay or go”. Mine was the latter — quite a jolt to the system after three decades of working for various councils. The redundancy interview is one I will not forget.
For a while, I did minimum wage work such as delivering leaflets and catalogues. Still, I bounced back into first agency work with a housing association, then a fixed-term contract with Bristol City Council, and then a permanent role with my current employer. My pension will have taken a bit of a hit, but nothing too disastrous, and I have been able to help both my daughters through university and start their independent lives.
Now about four years from state retirement age I have decided to take a risk! One feels the sands of time slipping through one’s fingers at my age. James Bellerjeau described it in an article recently as awareness of the “finishing line”. We all know where life ends up. We may have seen what life’s cruel trick played on our parents, perhaps friends who preceded us in the departure lounge. So I have decided to try and make the very best of what remains.
The risk I will take, in my minor walk on the wild side, is that on Monday I will explain to my manager my intention to retire at the end of the current tax year (end of March). Quite how that will go down is anyone’s guess. I may be encouraged to stay on, perhaps with a further reduction to my hours (I reduced to three days a week when I turned 60). I will explain it as a late-in-life change in career rather than early retirement, as I intend to start writing full-time.
One of the factors in my decision is life on Medium. When I was younger I tried several times to start an environmental newspaper alongside my day job — I loved writing and the news industry. However, my lack of business acumen meant that each attempt failed. I retain a love of writing and reading, and was pleased to discover Medium a year ago.
So my hope is that I will replace some of the income that I would have made in employment, between now and state retirement age, with an income from writing. Yes, a huge risk to base any financial security on such a precarious profession of writing, but I know that if I don’t give it a try I will regret it, just as I may well regret taking the financial risk. So the start of a new journey. I will let you know how it goes!
As always, thank you for reading.
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