It has been a long time since I last posted but there is a
reason for this, which is, that I have been busy retiring.
It is a funny old business, retirement. You walk out of work
at 5 o’clock on a Friday evening and that’s it. It is a bit like being one of
those cartoon characters who run off the edge of a cliff, and their legs keep
going for a while before they suddenly realise that they are in mid-air and
then they drop like a stone.
Of course, you realise just how quickly you become entirely
irrelevant to the place where you used to work. This is something that happens
whenever you leave a job, whether it is because of retirement or because you
are moving on to a new post. An old friend told me long ago, “When you get out
of the swimming pool, you don’t leave a hole,” and she was absolutely
right. Depending on how you feel at the
time, this can be a consolation or a regret.
When you leave your job to move on to a new one, you take
your belongings, and your knowledge and your skills, with you, and you hope to
be going to a place where they will continue to be useful and where you will
learn new and interesting things. It isn’t quite the same when you retire. You
still bundle up all your belongings (amongst them, in my case, all eight pairs
of shoes that had been living under my desk, three mugs, and the umbrella which
might have come in useful because although it had holes they were only small
ones) and take them home. And then you wonder what to do with them. Are you
actually going to need them as a stay-at-home retiree? How many pairs of black
shoes, with heels, will you need when all you do is potter to the supermarket
or in and out of the garden?
And it is the same with your skills and knowledge. You have brought them home as well, and now
you wonder if they are ever going to be used again. Do they follow the shoes into a corner where
they slowly get covered with dust and start to crumble until finally they are
thrown away? Is it worth keeping and polishing skills, or shoes, that neither
you nor anyone else may want again? Now I have a really really good excuse not
to, just how much do I want to engage with RDA and BIBFRAME?
It is interesting to discover how hard it is to lose the habit of work. It feels very odd to have
no pressure, no targets. It is shocking to discover how little I actually get
done without a deadline. After all,
there’s always tomorrow. But all the time it feels as if I ought to be doing
something but have forgotten what it is, or that I have put something down and
can’t remember where I put it, and that is vaguely and persistently
worrying.
And then there is the difficulty of work life and home life
having become intertwined. Although I have walked out of the door for the last
time, and with no looking back, what about social media, where the boundaries
of private and professional life are blurred, with people tweeting about both
their knitting and recondite RDA rules almost simultaneously? A lot of my contacts – a majority of them –
come from work life and to cut them all out would lead to almost complete
social isolation. With noone to follow on Twitter, and almost no emails, I
would enter a strangely silent world. It would be like not having Radio 4 in
the kitchen.
I was lucky in that I had already been asked to undertake
some consultancy work, albeit short-term and part-time, and I am also
volunteering one day a week. Both of these have acted as parachutes to break my
fall into retirement. What will follow, I have no idea but it will be
interesting to find out. This year didn’t turn out at all as I expected. Here’s
to 2014 – and not drowning but waving!
