Used to drop like a guillotine. 65th birthday? Off you go. Such simple times.
I think I'm retired. Just waiting for those big, fat pension cheques. Or however they pay it out nowadays.
When did I retire? I'm not sure. In my mind, when I was 23. In the very much larger amount of flesh that I now have. Not really sure.
When my last job ended? Three years ago.
Maybe. Since then I've been in a grey zone.
Not really. I was technically unemployed and looking for work. Not with a great deal of hope, being well into my crumbly years. In the US, where many have no choice but the work til you drop (dead) option, it's no problem picking up new contracts well into tour seventies. Different here in Europe. No chance of picking up anything.
When the dole ran out, I hadn't quite hit Dutch retirement age. No pension. No work, either. Just as well I've sent both the lads down the pit.
Never working again. No pension yet.
I say never working again. By that I mean wage slave work. I do shitloads of, well, given my recent book sales, basically unpaid work. Those books don't write themselves. It may surprise you to learn that they take lots and lots of hours of eye-breaking work to roughly nail together. Did I ever mention that the only exam I ever topped at school was woodwork? Which I dropped next year to study ancient Greek.
When my pension finally arrives, perhaps then I'll label myself retired. I'll still doing the important work. Stuff that really matters. If not to the whole world, at least for me. And it's not fucking programming.
Here are a couple of my latest books, if you fancy helping me out f penury.
It took me five years to write this fucker. Even if you buy 100 copies each, I'm never getting a fair wage for those hours.
The second volume contains the recipes. But not just that. There are also overviews of some of the breweries covered, showing their beers at the start and the end of the conflict.
Buy one now and be the envy of your friends!
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5 comments:
Ok Ron you guilted me so I bought the recipe book. I have been retired for 2 years and am enjoying it. Did I mention that I never liked work anyway. You failed to provide a discount code that Lulu requested. I tried Mild but it did not work maybe Bitter? Enjoy retirement but don't stop producing the great content you provide. The Bobcat
For state pension don't forget that in the UK if you didn't start work at 16 and went on to sixth form or uni or whatever, you would have received National Insurance credits for those years.
Also if you had periods of unemployment, ditto.
Living in Australia since the late 70s when the P word came up and I had to apply to the Work and Pensions mob, I'd completely forgotten about that and when my UK part pension was awarded, surprisingly I was entitled to quite a few more years than I realised.
I first "retired" when I was 60, because I was working in Hong Kong, and that's the official retirement age there … the company I was working for made me go on holiday for a month and then hired me back. Theoretically I retired again when I was 65, but I pretty much had full-time jobs from then until earlier this year – and I've seldom been busier now I don't actually have a proper job, with a host of projects on the go, plus travel – four trips abroad last year, five this …
It's a good book! I'll always remember 1943 as the year of the oats.
I'm coming up ten years and it's a frantic grind to get through the day. I'm only half way through my to do list and I still haven't got into town to get the new seedlings and do Aldi on specials day.
Retirement is a tough life but someone has to do it.
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