Being retired is like living the life of a Regency gentleman who isn’t Jane Austen rich.
Not “Pemberley with a lake and a staff of twelve” rich. More “decent coat, warm house, no urgent letters from the bank” rich. Comfortable. Secure. But with the faint, nagging sensation that you’re basically just waiting for the next meal like an indoor cat with a pension.
Because that’s the thing they don’t tell you about retirement. Everyone bangs on about freedom, but freedom is only enjoyable if you’ve got somewhere to point it. Otherwise it just sloshes around inside you like unused energy in a battery you can’t quite be bothered to wire up.
Working life, for all its nonsense, gives you structure. It gives you deadlines, consequences, and that small, addictive hit of competence when you solve something and the world moves because you moved it. Then one day you stop. And suddenly nothing needs you by 4pm. Nobody is waiting for an answer. Nobody is ringing to say “we need this sorted now” in that tone that suggests the building will collapse if you don’t respond in the next six minutes.
So you potter. You dabble. You don’t “do projects” anymore. You “have a little go”. You wander into the garage, look at something with intent, pick up a tool, put it down again, and then spend forty five minutes researching the best version of the tool you already own. Alternatively, you buy yet another tool. Pottering is retirement’s default setting. It looks like leisure from the outside. From the inside it’s more like life on standby. You’re not unhappy. You’re just not fully deployed.
And dabbling is what happens when you still have the instincts of a capable man, but the world has stopped issuing you missions. So you invent tiny ones. Move that plant pot. Tighten that hinge. Sort out that drawer that has been “on the list” since 2017. Reorganise the shed, which is a noble fantasy that lasts precisely one afternoon before entropy reasserts itself and you retreat indoors for tea.
Tea becomes the new quarterly review. Did you achieve anything today? Well… I replaced a washer. I located the thing. I thought about the other thing. I moved three objects from one surface to another surface. Then I rewarded myself like I’d negotiated the Treaty of Versailles.
And this is why retirement car rebuilds take forever. When you’re working, you rebuild a car like a normal person. You need it done. You need it running. You need it back on the road before you forget what the steering wheel is for. So you make decisions, you compromise, you bodge the non critical bits, and you move forward.
In retirement, urgency dies. And without urgency, the project stops being a job and becomes a permanent seminar. You don’t “fit the part”. You research the part. Then you research the better part. Then you discover a third part that might be better still, but only if you redesign the bracket, relocate the thing it mounts to, and re route three pipes that were perfectly fine yesterday.
Then you stand there for half an hour, staring at it, not because you’re stuck, but because you’re thinking about the optimal attack strategy like you’re planning D Day, except the enemy is a Triumph and it’s already surrendered.
The actual work becomes a small percentage of the time. The rest is contemplation, refinement, and the slow realisation that you can spend an entire afternoon achieving nothing except certainty.
And once you’ve rebuilt a car slowly enough, you start applying the same mentality to everything else.
Take candles. I now make candles from old candles that are no longer viable. Not in a charming, Pinterest sort of way. More in a “clearly this man has too much free time and access to a saucepan” sort of way.
A candle has done its duty. The wick has gone feral. The wax is a cratered wasteland. It still smells vaguely of Christmas, but it’s never going to burn properly again. In working life, you’d bin it without a second thought and move on with your day. In retirement, nothing gets binned. Everything becomes “materials”.
So you melt the remnants down like an apothecary. You strain out the old wick debris. You pour it into a mould with the solemn care of a man casting a bronze cannon. You insert a fresh wick with the precision of a shipwright stepping a mast. Then you leave it to set, feeling quietly pleased with yourself, as if you’ve just secured the nation’s energy supply.
And to be fair, they are very nice. They burn well. They look decent. They smell reassuringly of civilisation. But they are also entirely pointless.
There is no actual need to do this. You can buy candles. You can buy them cheaply. You can buy them in bulk. You can buy them in scents so aggressive they could fumigate a Victorian workhouse. Candle making is not an economic strategy. It’s not even a hobby with a clear outcome.
It’s just something to do because the day is long and you’ve already tightened every hinge in the house twice.
This is retirement in a nutshell. You become a man who can’t just own things, you have to optimise them. You can’t simply accept that a candle has reached the end of its life. You have to recycle it, upgrade it, and bring it back into service like it’s a decommissioned naval vessel being refitted for one last glorious voyage.
It’s pottering, but with fire. And that’s the point. Not the candle. The ritual. The quiet sense of purpose. The fact that for an hour or two, you’re not just drifting through the day like a Regency gentleman of modest means. You’re engaged in industry. You’re applying skill. You’re transforming matter. You’re being useful. Even if the only person who benefits is you, sitting there later in the evening, looking at a perfectly good candle you didn’t need, thinking:
Well. That’s another crisis averted.
Another example is this:
I’ve had a Spitfire Rolls-Royce Griffon rocker cover hanging over a door for about six years, like it’s perfectly normal to walk under wartime aviation engineering on the way to the kitchen. It started as a brilliant bit of industrial decor and a conversation piece, but as with all things in retirement, it slowly stopped being “a thing on the wall” and became “a thing that needs doing properly”.
The original intention was to have it chrome plated. If you’re going to own a piece of Griffon hardware, you may as well make it gleam like a museum exhibit and blind visitors at ten paces. But the condition was too bad. Too pitted and too scarred, too far gone for polite society. Chrome plating would have been like putting lipstick on a brick, except more expensive.
So it ended up powder coated silver instead. And to be fair, it looked alright. It looked clean and “restored”. But it wasn’t original, and the lettering didn’t pop. The whole thing just sat there, quietly competent, like a man in a grey suit at a party.
Which is how I ended up repainting it satin black.
And because retirement gives you unlimited time to overthink small details, I didn’t just paint it and hope for the best. I inlaid clay into the lettering so that when the paint went on and the clay came out, the words would come up silver and crisp, like they were meant to. It’s the sort of thing you do when nobody is going to ring you at 4pm demanding a progress update, and when you’ve got the luxury of being able to redo it if it’s not quite right.
And the moment it was done, it was obvious. Satin black was always the answer. The lettering finally stood out. It looked less like “something I found on eBay” and more like “something that belongs to a Merlin’s angry older brother”.
That’s the other retirement trick. By 2pm you’re looking at the clock thinking, “Christ! Where’s the day gone?” Yet when you were stuck in the 9-to-5 grind you’d look at the same clock and think, “Christ. Will this day never end?” Time doesn’t change, obviously. It just stops being your enemy and starts being your raw material, which is both lovely and faintly unnerving.
But there’s a darker version of this, and it’s not a joke.
Retirement strips away structure, status, tribe, and purpose. You go from being needed to being optional. You go from being in the flow of things to being a spectator. And if you’re not careful, you go looking for a replacement.
Some people find it in grandkids, gardening, volunteering, fixing things, learning Italian, or finally rebuilding the car properly. They invent harmless little missions. They potter, they dabble, they make candles. They restore a Griffon rocker cover like it’s a sacred relic. It’s all slightly ridiculous, but it’s constructive, and it keeps the brain engaged.
Others find it in certainty.
Certainty is the most seductive retirement hobby of all. It’s easy. It’s instant. It comes with a tribe, a uniform, a few slogans, and a ready-made list of people to blame. It gives you purpose without the inconvenience of nuance, or evidence, or the tedious business of being wrong and having to change your mind.
And the really grim part is that it doesn’t feel like you’re becoming more gullible. It feels like you’re becoming more “awake”. More “informed”. More “common sense”. Which is exactly why it works.
Because the scepticism gland atrophies.
At work, you’re constantly being forced to test your assumptions. People challenge you. Numbers don’t add up. Plans fail. Someone wants something impossible by Friday. Reality keeps tapping you on the shoulder and saying, no mate, try again.
Then you retire and your world gets smaller and smoother. Fewer awkward conversations. Fewer people telling you you’re wrong. Less need to justify your opinions to anyone who matters. And if you’re not careful, you drift into a life where you only hear what you already believe.
That’s when certainty starts feeling like wisdom.
And once you’ve got certainty, you need enemies to keep it warm. You need someone to be the reason your life doesn’t feel as important as it should. Migrants. “Woke”. The BBC. The EU. The neighbour’s kid with blue hair. Anyone will do, as long as it gives you that little hit of moral purpose.
It’s purpose by substitution. And it’s dangerous because it feels like meaning.
The antidote is staying curious, staying technical, staying grounded in the real world where things either fit or they don’t. Where you can’t argue a bolt into place by shouting “common sense” at it. Where reality doesn’t care how patriotic you feel while you’re holding a spanner.
Which is why I’d rather spend my afternoons restoring a Griffon rocker cover than restoring my own certainty.
At least the rocker cover doesn’t lie to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment