Good morning from Hartlepool, where the weather is doing what it always does and I have stopped expecting otherwise.
Today's piece is about something nobody puts in the retirement brochure.
A man I sailed with for eleven years retired six months before I did and moved to the Algarve. He had a spreadsheet, a shortlist of towns, and what appeared to be a pre-planned sunset. His photographs are warm. He looks genuinely content. I stayed in Hartlepool — not from lack of imagination, but because moving felt like performing a version of retirement I didn't quite believe in. After forty-six years of performing competence, I was tired of performing anything.
What I did instead was walk. Sit at the harbour on weekday mornings. Read books I'd been meaning to read since 1987. Take up considerably less space than I used to occupy.
And then the thing nobody mentioned arrived quietly, without announcement.
Forty-six years at sea means forty-six years of someone else building a life that works without you. Not resentfully — practically. The house had its rhythm. The days had their shape. A fully operational domestic life, humming along efficiently, whether I was in the North Sea or the South China Sea or, as of two years ago, in the next room making tea and having opinions about things.
I was, I came to understand, the inconvenient new variable.
I once navigated a 280-metre bulk carrier through the Strait of Malacca at night in heavy traffic. I cannot find the spare batteries in my own kitchen without generating a quiet but pointed look from the person who has known where they live for four decades without my involvement. These two facts coexist peacefully in my daily life. Neither of us has commented on it directly.
The mornings though. The mornings are something else. Nobody calls. Nobody needs anything decided. The harbour is there and I'm watching it with Yorkshire Tea and no particular obligation to be anywhere before I choose to be there. That's not a small thing. I didn't know that until I had it.
Neither of us signed up for this version. We're both working it out, two years in, with better results than we probably deserved.
The full piece is over at my Substack today — free to read, no sign-in required. If you've been meaning to follow the longer writing, this is a good one to start with.
More than 10,000 people read it over there each week. Come and join them. It's free, it publishes every day, and it never tries to sell you a course.
See you tomorrow.
— TOGT
If the writing helped, some readers buy me a Pot of Yorkshire Tea. I’m English and run my days on tea. It’s one of the ways I keep this work independent. I appreciate every kindness — truly.