Authors Electric

During the recent lockdown I’ve been reviewing my lifestyle and as a result I’ve taken one important decision but I’m still dithering over another one. First of all, I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to work from home – I just wish my employers had enabled us to do it years ago so that I could have used my brain more fruitfully, particularly in the area of strategy and anything else that required concentration. But what I’ve also realised is that although I like being at home all day, there are aspects of my work that are so mundane that there’s a distinct possibility that a trained monkey could carry them out. Although I wouldn’t ever wish to subject an innocent little monkey to such stultifying boredom. Anyway, having come to the realisation that there may be better ways to spend my time, I’ve decided to retire from my day job at last. I can picture my line manager rolling her eyes and saying, ‘Thank goodness for that!’ although she would never be ill-mannered enough to sa...

People around me seem to mention the word “retirement” a lot, asking one another when they are thinking of taking the plunge. I’m keeping a low profile because I am not sure that, as a lifelong freelance writer, I completely grasp the concept. Retire from what exactly? If I wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea for a book, am I going to turn over and go back to sleep rather than follow the train of thought to wherever it might lead me? If someone emails me from some distant and mysterious land, inviting me to travel to them to hear their story with a view to ghosting for them, am I going to decline because now I am “retired”? There are aspects of writing which become increasingly tedious with age – typing mainly - but then sitting on a ride-on lawnmower can become tedious after an hour or two, as can sitting in a coffee shop with a newspaper or staring out to sea from a tropical island paradise. None of these things do I particularly want ...