Taking Stock

Five years ago this summer, having been told that my job was 'at risk,' I was waiting to learn if my role was indeed going to be demised and that I would be faced with the choice of redundancy and early retirement, or if I wanted to try to find a vacant job elsewhere within the bank. It was not a difficult choice and I politely but firmly rebuffed any suggestion that my managers help me find another position.

Five years ago, my daily commutes via Liverpool Street were winding down. 

Come September, when I was told that yes, my job would be disappearing, I was reconciled to my impending change of circumstances. In fact, I was relishing the prospect of no longer having to work, but like any other life changing event - like getting married, having children, or suffering a bereavement - it is something that benefits from some consideration. Other people, already retired, had told me that what with all the myriad things they had going on in their lives, they could not now understand how they had had the time to go to work prior to retirement. And I have said exactly the same thing to people since, although there is a certain element of Parkinson's Law about it, and it is easy to sit down with a cup of tea, start browsing social media, or scrolling through the TV channels and suddenly find that your tea is cold and an hour has elapsed. In fairness though, I can remember days at work when it would have been possible to do that, but there again I had some jobs that were either feast or famine at times.

One of the things that the bank did to ease people through the process of redundancy - whether that meant early retirement, or if they needed (or just wanted) to get another job - was to bring in a company called Working Transitions to provide support in the form of workshops and seminars and advice on CV writing, opportunities to do voluntary work, or simply provoke thought on what to do in retirement. Since I had neither the need nor desire to carry on working after leaving the bank - although I would not have ruled it out completely - I had to give some thought to what I would do with all that extra time that was going to suddenly come my way, and one of the things I gave serious consideration to was writing.

Ever since I was very young I have enjoyed writing, even if simply for my own pleasure and not for others to read, and even before I retired I had been writing regularly for Romford Football Club's programme, so when considering a hobby, or pastime in retirement, writing was inevitably one of the front-runners. The internet has provided a vast array of resources for the aspiring writer;  from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing for those aspiring to be the next JK Rowling or Jeffrey Archer, to the plethora of blogging platforms for both serious commentators and for the casual writer. And a blog seemed to me to be just the thing to provide me with an outlet with the minimum of fuss.

One of my articles in Romford FC's programme

But now, four-and-a-bit years and two-hundred and thirty-two blogs later, it is time to take stock. Are the reasons why I started writing Rules, Fools and Wise Men still valid? It started as a means to impose a bit of structure and routine into a life that, after thirty-six years of work, had seen those things taken away. It was intended to be cathartic, to allow me to examine my changed status in life, and to vent my spleen about things that irritated me, or to enthuse about things that excited me. These days I have many things going on and my blog sometimes becomes something of an afterthought. There have been weeks when I have had to think long and hard about a subject; there have been weeks when I have had to squeeze writing into a rapidly shrinking timeframe, and there have been weeks when I have had to write two blogs so that I could publish one during a week on holiday abroad.  There have been weeks when the number of hits the blog has received has been a trickle, and there have been weeks when it has been, if not quite a torrent, then at least a respectable stream. The Midland Odyssey series of blogs have proved pretty popular, and have been some of the most fun to write, but there have been some blogs that have been less well received in terms of numbers.

In his novel, Nod, Adrian Barnes, writing about writers - specifically poets - describes a scenario in which, "the sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of about ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening." There's more than a grain of truth in that, the internet has enabled anyone who wants to be a writer to be one, providing a platform, but not necessarily an audience, which has made me grateful for the number of hits - approaching 80,000 at the time of writing - that this blog has had. But that grain of truth reminds me that a reason I started this blog was for fun, even if it was just my fun.

In writing those two-hundred and thirty-two blogs - or the best part of 290,000 words - I have sometimes knowingly, and sometimes unknowingly, repeated myself. I have started off more than one blog only to realise that it is following a very similar trajectory to one of my previous efforts. I have lost inspiration and abandoned blogs a few hundred words in on more than one occasion, and I have cobbled something together without great enthusiasm a couple of times just to be able to publish something, too.

But through it all, it has been fun. But as the bookmakers' ads say, "When the fun stops, stop," and right now a little bit of the fun has gone out of writing this blog. In truth, there are times when it has become a bit of a chore recently, and that isn't what it was supposed to be.

This isn't to say this is the end, but this will be the last Rules, Fools and Wise Men for a few weeks at least. When it will be back remains to be seen; that depends either on how much I miss writing it or if some topic too irresistible to write about presents itself. Today we are all off to vote in the General Election: that irresistible topic might present itself earlier than I imagine.