So hello, and welcome to this little blog all about my retirement. To be honest, I'm mostly doing this for my own purposes - it's acting as a sort on online diary, and I'm not expecting many other people will be that interested, although that said, I'm sure Mum and Dad will be !
What it does do however, is reminds me of how lucky I am. I retired early (at 55), which is a lot earlier than most people are able to do, and I do know how fortunate that make me. I worked hard for the 35 odd years, but I also took some risks in terms of moving to smaller, upcoming companies (Axon, Keytree) and those moves more than paid off. They've given me the freedom to make the decision to retire much sooner than others, and I intended to make the most of it. See here for a small post about my last day ever (?) at work.
I've never been one to sit around, and even whilst I was thinking about retiring, I was already making lists of what I'd get up to. From more travel (obviously), loads of projects around the house and garden, through to sitting down and reading more, and maybe, just maybe the odd little bit of work/charity etc.
Pretty much everyone asks me now, what am I getting up to, and so in part, this blog helps me to answer that. It's quite a difficult thing to answer, because unless you've got a mega-retirement project, maybe sailing around the world or something, it's easy to sound like you might not be 100% fulfilling your time with wholesome, awe-inspiring 'stuff'. But now, I can at least bring this blog up on my phone and give people a flavour. Indeed, some of the mechanics behind the scenes of this blog have been mini-projects in their own right - and I've be exploring using AI to help me 'code' some of this.
One thing that I am doing as a sort of background 'project', is the "ABC tour of the UK". I'm finding this incredibly rewarding - go take a look at what it is and why I like it so much.
So, take a look around. There's a series of static pages where I am summarising the major categories (travel, projects etc), and then there's the blog entries themselves. I'm trying to label each blog and so you can also explore via the label metadata.
Anyway - enough for now.
Enjoy
