Almost three months into retirement, I can begin to detect
the elements of a routine, like the time structure to your life that work gives you. What
is my routine looking like?
One factor is that I’ve taken up a new voluntary task of
deputising for the organist at church. I don’t have to deputise very often, but
to be adequate to the task when I do, I need to practise, and this means
improving my keyboard skills - I’ve played the piano since childhood, but not
practised so much in recent years. So most weekday mornings, I walk the fifteen
minutes to church, picking up the paper on the way, have at least an hour’s
practice, maybe do some shopping and then walk home. It also gives me exercise.
Then I still have some academic writing to do, so I settle
down at the computer. As deadlines approach, I do this more vociferously.
You can’t keep going with that for hours on end, so I intersperse
that with blogs. Greyamble, focused on policy, practice and experience on
older people, is one of them – it is a mixture of personal experience, looking
at policy and issues on older people, and just picking up interesting stuff on
older people and services and policy for them. I do something similar on end-of-life
care for my ‘Social work and end-of-life care’ – that’s more a professional
blog, less personal and less non-serious stuff. I have two more occasional
blogs on ‘big society policy and community work’ and ‘social work around the world’.
I tweet about the posts and also use other media to draw attention to them. I
have nearly 2000 followers on Twitter, so if a reasonable number of people pick
up on a Tweet, there is a fair chance that a people who find it useful will see the
post. That's more than the numbers of people who buy the average academic book or will look at the average academic article, although of course many people will use them in libraries.
I also have a blog on self-positioning; if you sign up to
that, you get a gentle question that might help you with personal development,
based on a picture, most days, but there’s been a gap recently. I usually do
these in blocks and schedule them to appear daily, but didn’t manage to do this
over the past few weeks, so they’ve run out. But I’ll start again soon.
When Margaret is at home (she’s grandparenting and socialising
a lot) we have regular breaks for drinks and not too much nibbles, as I’m
trying to reduce my size. And we stop for evening entertainment or activities at six o'clock.
Every so often this routine does not apply and we have what
I regard as a proper retirement day, when we go out for some travel, tourism,
art, theatre etc. And we hope to have some regular hols. Last week was with
part of this with one of the grandchildren tribes.
Then there are the regular commitment: choir and choir
practice, residents committee.
And the occasional academic jobs and preparation for them;
one of these, a lecture at a local university, last week.
So far, I’ve not been back to the work I retired from yet,
but I will need to do this to go to the library with the new book I’m starting.
And I’ll need to go to the British Library and the King’s Fund library too, so
I reckon, in winter, there’ll be a trip to one of those every fortnight.
And then I've got projects. The first is organising the stuff that came from my office into my study, so therefore reorganising the study. Then there will be a series of academic projects that I've been imagining I will get around to in my retirement. The reorganising will help here, because I'll set up boxes to collect the material for each project and then prioritise them.
Lots of time structure there: both in daily routine and longer-term strategy; a mixture of older commitments, one or two new things and
one or two continuing things. A bit of sitting in the garden because it’s been
summer. I think winter will mean more computer. It feels busy but not so pressurised, so as a time strcuture it seems OK. Lets see how it goes on in the longer term.
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