I have not posted for a while but life has been good during April and May so I have a few posts to catch up on.
Waking up with nothing much planned I naturally wander down to the pottager. I am Henry Thoreau now after all - I have a pond and I have no job.
All there is in the Spring "hungry gap" is a basket of leeks. I am glad I planted these last year. The basket itself fills me with joy. A gift from Jane.
Life has taken a turn in the last couple of months. I retire a bit early from the law firm I interviewed for at 23 years old in a few weeks after a spell on notice and having just celebrated my 53rd birthday. That's a fairly long time - not a full working life but a fair amount of time to spend in in one business. 29 years ? I really do not know where the time has gone ? Well I guess I do.
I trained for 2 years in Leeds and then moved to London with one suitcase and my cat in a box like Dick Whittington in 1995. I met Jane on the August bank holiday in 1998 and by July 2000 we were getting married at Castlemorton Church a Raven's flight away from Oaklands on the other side of the Malvern Hills. Two boys appeared in 2001 and 2003 and then we moved to Manchester in 2004 - me in pursuit of a partnership. Jane stepped away from a career in television to accommodate that. That felt like a huge move at the time. We liked the North West as a concept but I wrecked that with my ambition - this time to work overseas to run my own team of lawyers. We took the seat of family life to Dubai in 2008 supposedly for a 3 or 4 year posting but as it turned out I finished up my career with a 14 year stint out there. I say that - I might have to do a bit of lawyering at some point but I don't think I will fit in another 30 year stint at a big firm, That's a kind of once in a lifetime thing. I am really not so sure I have got my head around this yet but I guess it's common for retired people to think - Oh - that was that then ?
So that answers that one - 29 years in not quite the blink of an eye. I am currently winding up our affairs in Dubai and will be able to move back to the UK next year. So I have a strange year of transition and travel to get through, not so planned, but welcome none the less.
I am not sure what I thought that "retirement" or "semi-retirement" would feel like. It's very early days. I know initially what it felt like. A bit of a shock if I am honest. It has taken me a month to stop reaching for the phone to check my in-box as the initial reaction to the question "What's Next". Even if I do reach for the phone my "job" currently is to hand over stuff to other people. That in itself is fine but there is an awful lot of guilt attached to the concept of waking up and having the day pretty much to yourself. We are all bent and knocked into the shapes we adopt in the working world from an early age. In my former life I didn't really know what any day would bring - hopefully a nice big issue to sort out for someone else. In a perfect professional world the bulk of my time and energy was available to be sold by the hour to sort our other people's problems. Take that away and you have nothing left but your own problems and those of family. Or it can feel that way if you have been employed as a problem solver for a long time. There has to be a problem to solve right ? Life is a series of problems to overcome ?
So the first thing to note about retirement is that you have an awful lot of time on your hands and if you are me you keep looking for problems. I have spent 7 weeks now working on that mindset.
I will talk about soup. Soup is important - if you want it to be.
I am really not short of answers on how to spend my time. I have a thousand answers to that question. You can get busy being busy very quickly. The real question is how best to spend your time and how to think about time. We are all used to looking forward to the weekend and planning weekends - squeezing in leisure, friends. You almost feel guilty sitting with a book or "wasting time". Faced with nothing but time though and a multitude of options you are not stealing moments. Very quickly and beyond the question of what to do with your time are the bigger questions. The only questions in fact. In fact you realise you were fire fighting life and not answering the right questions - Thankfully Jane and I knew that where we wanted to be in the end was somewhere like Oaklands. Early on in married life we talked and dreamed about "downsizing" - about "stopping". That seemed like the answer.
So you stop and then what is the point ? What is the meaning of this ? Should I be doing this ? Who am I ? Stick on Talking Heads "Once in a Lifetime" and you are prepped for a breakdown to some nicely sourced background music.
While my tortured soul began uncovering these questions and stacking them up in the sky over my head to land or crash one by one like some philosophical air traffic controller my muscle memory and common sense had me wander down to the compost heap to clean my leeks. I can't actually take credit for that decision. Jane discovered the life hack of cleaning vegetables at the compost heap rather than at the kitchen tap. You can overthink the decision of where to clean your Leeks - honestly I think the compost heap is best and Jane is onto something there.
It's an interesting place to spend some time.
Well I have to feed myself before I can even think about what my life's purpose might be. Without an income in fact life's purpose could be just feeding us ? On that particular day soup seemed like it could be both the question and the answer. There were a couple of errant potatoes in the bottom of the fridge, all I needed was a stock cube and a magi-wand. Maybe a clove of garlic ? Soup is easy if you keep it easy and filling and pretty to make.
Beauty has a value of its own. Now we are onto something. A life in pursuit of beauty ? Leeks look good once chopped. I can see no other reason to my taking a picture of a pan of chopped leeks. There has to be a meaning right ? Or it is just soup.
If the floor supporting your life seems to lack a few floor boards on any given day I now know that soup can help if you don't over think it. I am in fact recommending it if you have had a bit of a bump. It is a perfectly good reason to be for a morning and has real value as you have to eat (drink ?) after all. If you are worried and hungry you can sort out half of life's problems straight away. As it is easy to make you are free to keep worrying if you want to. I spent all morning saturating myself in the stock of the soup making process. And magically losing yourself in something real diminishes worries that are in fact not real. They just are not real. Your arms haven't fallen off. You have a house, a wife, children. You have your health and the boys are OK - not without their worries and stuff but essentially OK. You have some money in the bank. There are jobs around if you want one. Unlike in the Ukraine - nobody in Herefordshire is coming up the lane to drag me or my family away or to bomb the wood. It really is OK and if for some reason it isn't we can deal with that then ? But for now why spoil a perfectly good April day - one of your 10,000 left - in worry,
There is nothing wrong with spending a morning making soup. The rest can all come later.
No need to rush.
What else have you got to do today ? Plenty to be sure on the life list but for now choosing to make soup well seems to hold some meaning for me.
Instructions for a Slow Leek Soup -
Plant late leek seed August 2021
Leave work
Lift Leeks April 2022
Worry and feel a bit odd
Clean and chop - add to pan and sweat with butter and a clove of garlic.
Add potatoes then chicken stock
Leave to bubble gently
Stop worrying needlessly
Take off heat
Add a good couple of tablespoons of yoghurt and whizz using a magi-wand (my new best friend in the kitchen)
Finish with a blob of sour cream or greek style yoghurt, chopped chives from your herb garden and cracked black pepper
It was a very fine soup - If you are short on answers to bigger questions including the big question for many people of what is for lunch then soup will provide.
Soup prevents hunger and relieves anxiety.
Comments