Monday, 17 December 2018
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Brexit Chaos aka Democracy In Action
Puzzled or infuriated by what’s happening in the House of Commons around Brexit? It’s called democracy. Democracy is supposed to be messy when big decisions are at stake.
The EU does not want the UK in the EU anymore. It is too Socialist and the UK is too Free Market. The EU countries love being run by administrators who went to good schools - like the ENA - while the politicians are rendered powerless by their lack of education and inability to make friends. Quick, how many European countries have a two-party system? Yep. The UK. The EU wants an European Army and there is no way that Her Majesty - the C-in-C of the UK’s Armed Forces - is turning her lads over to a Belgian General who is at the behest of a bunch of unelected officials. The EU wants the unrestricted immigration of unskilled, uneducated young men from all over the world who have been thrown out of their home towns and villages for bad behaviour. The UK thinks would rather have well-behaved, educated, skilled people who speak English from all over the world.
Theresa May has known this all along. So did David Cameron. What do you think MI6 and GCHQ have been doing all this time?
The EU bureaucrats and other elitists thought that they could do a deal and not involve Parliament. Really. That’s elitists for you. Theresa May knew that even if she got The Best Deal Ever, she would have to present it to Parliament. This is because the UK is a democracy. There aren’t many of those in the world, so it’s not surprising that you don’t recognise one in action when you see it.
No negotiator, no Cabinet member, not the Prime Minister, nor even HRH QE2, can decide the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. Only the elected representatives of the British people can do that. Only they can do it, because only they can lose their jobs if they go too far against the wishes of their constituents. Read that again carefully: unless I can get rid of you, you don’t get to make decisions that affect me. That’s the basis of democracy.
Those elected representatives have had their orders for a long time. The opinion polls confirm month after month that those orders have not changed. Sovereign courts and border control. Free trade is a nice-to-have.
Hence Theresa May had to work hard to get the best deal from the EU that she could get. So we would see how devious and one-sided it was. She has to champion that deal, because it is her deal. The House of Commons should rightly reject the deal and send her back to the EU to re-negotiate. Because they know that the EU never folds until 23:59:59. And if it isn’t going to fold, it has to be the EU who is shown to be intransigent and devious.
It’s supposed to be all about The Backstop. The Irish border is the biggest non-issue in contemporary politics. Anyone who makes it one is effectively threatening us with a new IRA / UDA bombing campaign. Everyone knows this, and no-one is going to make a decision about the UK’s political status on threat of a few IRA bombs. We did this already. Remember? Bombing the British doesn’t work. We’re stubborn like that.
Right now, the matter is in the hands of the members of the House of Commons. No lawyer predicts the jury decision. I hope they feel they have blustered too loud now to turn and accept the deal after Christmas. Unless it turns out that when Junker clarifies ‘No’ he means ‘Yes’. The Honourable Members will not be voting for a hard Brexit, but for more negotiations. If the EU refuses, the EU will be the one forcing a hard Brexit.
So expect lots of noise about preparing for a hard Brexit. Which is, I repeat, something that your employer should have done already. My suspicion is that most companies will have done this, or replaced their EU business with exports somewhere else. If you are working for a company that does business in Europe, and does not know how it will carry on if the UK is not in a free-trade zone with Europe, look for another employer NOW. And ask the interviewers what their hard Brexit plans are.
The EU does not want the UK in the EU anymore. It is too Socialist and the UK is too Free Market. The EU countries love being run by administrators who went to good schools - like the ENA - while the politicians are rendered powerless by their lack of education and inability to make friends. Quick, how many European countries have a two-party system? Yep. The UK. The EU wants an European Army and there is no way that Her Majesty - the C-in-C of the UK’s Armed Forces - is turning her lads over to a Belgian General who is at the behest of a bunch of unelected officials. The EU wants the unrestricted immigration of unskilled, uneducated young men from all over the world who have been thrown out of their home towns and villages for bad behaviour. The UK thinks would rather have well-behaved, educated, skilled people who speak English from all over the world.
Theresa May has known this all along. So did David Cameron. What do you think MI6 and GCHQ have been doing all this time?
The EU bureaucrats and other elitists thought that they could do a deal and not involve Parliament. Really. That’s elitists for you. Theresa May knew that even if she got The Best Deal Ever, she would have to present it to Parliament. This is because the UK is a democracy. There aren’t many of those in the world, so it’s not surprising that you don’t recognise one in action when you see it.
No negotiator, no Cabinet member, not the Prime Minister, nor even HRH QE2, can decide the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. Only the elected representatives of the British people can do that. Only they can do it, because only they can lose their jobs if they go too far against the wishes of their constituents. Read that again carefully: unless I can get rid of you, you don’t get to make decisions that affect me. That’s the basis of democracy.
Those elected representatives have had their orders for a long time. The opinion polls confirm month after month that those orders have not changed. Sovereign courts and border control. Free trade is a nice-to-have.
Hence Theresa May had to work hard to get the best deal from the EU that she could get. So we would see how devious and one-sided it was. She has to champion that deal, because it is her deal. The House of Commons should rightly reject the deal and send her back to the EU to re-negotiate. Because they know that the EU never folds until 23:59:59. And if it isn’t going to fold, it has to be the EU who is shown to be intransigent and devious.
It’s supposed to be all about The Backstop. The Irish border is the biggest non-issue in contemporary politics. Anyone who makes it one is effectively threatening us with a new IRA / UDA bombing campaign. Everyone knows this, and no-one is going to make a decision about the UK’s political status on threat of a few IRA bombs. We did this already. Remember? Bombing the British doesn’t work. We’re stubborn like that.
Right now, the matter is in the hands of the members of the House of Commons. No lawyer predicts the jury decision. I hope they feel they have blustered too loud now to turn and accept the deal after Christmas. Unless it turns out that when Junker clarifies ‘No’ he means ‘Yes’. The Honourable Members will not be voting for a hard Brexit, but for more negotiations. If the EU refuses, the EU will be the one forcing a hard Brexit.
So expect lots of noise about preparing for a hard Brexit. Which is, I repeat, something that your employer should have done already. My suspicion is that most companies will have done this, or replaced their EU business with exports somewhere else. If you are working for a company that does business in Europe, and does not know how it will carry on if the UK is not in a free-trade zone with Europe, look for another employer NOW. And ask the interviewers what their hard Brexit plans are.
Monday, 10 December 2018
Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Late Twentieth-Century Music
Recently I read Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. Now, I get that the Oxford History of Music will have a bias towards ACM (Acoustic Composed Music). That’s what has survived, because it was written down. There was no Now That’s What I Call A Drinking Song! double-CD in the seventeenth century. Nobody wrote down the popular tunes. We know there were popular tunes because the Church composers used to get told off for adapting them, and other composers swiped them for their written work. We just don’t know how many others there were. Or what the Top Ten sounded like.
The point is, that for the majority of the Twentieth Century, we do. The traditional excuse for only covering the music of the church, aristocracy and popular opera - because we don’t know what else there was - does not apply after, say, 1920. There’s no excuse for not covering it.
What has to be covered? In no special order: flamenco and its revival in the 1980’s; the development of jazz from be-bop to free jazz, perhaps told through the careers of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the rise of chord-scale Euro-jazz; the continued use of orchestral music in film; the Beatles and Bob Dylan (a Nobel Prize winner, for heaven’s sake), Jam and Lewis, and Stock, Aiken and Waterman; the Hollywood and Broadway musical; ambient and electronic dance music; the evolution of rock music from Chuck Berry to Nirvana; and finally, to the factory-like output of modern chart music. On the composed side: serialism, minimalism, electronic music, and a chunk on the Period Performance movement and its re-discovery and re-habilitation of dozens of composers. If I was commissioning such a history, I would ask the writer(s) to show, with examples in score, the links between the Minimalists and ambient music; or between the harmonies and chord changes of the Beatles and earlier composers; and I will happily contribute an essay on rock musicians’ plundering of the avant-garde for technical and musical devices.
There would not be much about the academic music to which Taruskin devotes much of his book. First because there was very little of it. Second, because only the same one hundred people ever listened to it once, and fewer a second time. Taruskin makes this seem like a virtue: here is music so pure, nobody can actually stand it. It’s true that only a handful of people ever listened to a Hayden string quartet, at the time, and wanted something new afterwards, but now those string quartets sell in the thousands every year and are listened to again and again in people’s homes. That’s going to be true in a hundred years’ time. In a hundred years’ time, no-one will listen to Boulez’ first piano composition, except out of sheer curiosity for a couple of minutes on You Tube, and they will agree with the first comment: there is a cat on the piano?
The court composers wrote music for a wealthy economic and political elite, but it was written to entertain and delight the audience, and in some cases, show off the playing skills of its sponsors. It was popular in intent, for all that it was aristocratic in audience. When it was made available to larger audiences, they took to it. When a larger bourgeois audience appeared in concert halls, they took to the earlier aristocratic music, and to the music written especially for them. When that music was made available on recorded media, it was and still is bought and enjoyed by people from all walks of life.
The career challenge for young composers in the twentieth century, who were being turned out in ever larger numbers by an expanding music education industry, was finding a way of making an impact, of being shocking and surprising without turning away the audiences. Stravinsky more or less sealed that off. Where do you go after the Sacre du Printemps, the fin de musique for the twentieth century? All twentieth-century string quartets sound like one or other of the six Bartok quartets. The options seem to be that you either write perfectly competent stuff that might have been written in the middle of the nineteenth century (with the addition of a couple of bracing twentieth-century harmonies), or you write stuff that very few people will ever listen to.
Read Taruskin and you may imagine that every music department in the Western world turned serialist. You might imagine the same about mathematics departments and category theory as well. The truth is that music departments went on teaching common practice, regular ol’ triads, inversions and all the other stuff available in Hindemith or Piston, in the same way that mathematics departments carried on teaching real analysis the epsilon-delta way. Serialism was confined to a handful of academics in a handful of elite colleges, the journalists that hyped them, and the foundations and clients that backed them. Electronic music and musique concrete, by contrast, was rapidly taken up by broadcasting companies to accompany dramas. How it came to be regarded as the signature "serious music" of the last half of the twentieth-century is the subject for a book on history, hype, personalities, and politics.
Taruskin calls the academic music he’s writing about, literate, as if to separate it from popular music, which is not written. Except it is. Jazz musicians pride themselves on their ability to play at sight, and most popular music session musicians read fluently. The prolific pop producers of the 1980’s all wrote music, and the virtuoso soloists of rock and jazz both extemporised and read the charts. The only significant musical tradition that does not use written music is flamenco. The legend is that Joni Mitchell had no background in music theory and composed entirely by ear, but she is remarkable exactly because almost no-one else could produce music of that quality without the theory and the staves.
So should you devote the many hours needed to read this volume of Taruskin’s History? I don’t regret it: I do after all have Varese, Xenakis, Berio and Boulez in my collection. I understand more about serialism than I did, and appreciated the coverage Taruskin gave to some research that concluded that serialism was, in fact, profoundly unmusical. I don’t mind his coverage of that period: I do mind reducing the entire history of Miles Davis’ music to a few quotes from critics about the politics of his later adoption of ‘rock music’. Taruskin doesn’t even discuss the well-known suggestion that On The Corner was influenced in part by Stockhausen. Taruskin’s book is also very heavy on the politics - but then to understand Russian music in the twentieth century we do have to be reminded of life under Stalin. So, no, you don’t need to read it. It’s not a history of later-twentieth century music.
The point is, that for the majority of the Twentieth Century, we do. The traditional excuse for only covering the music of the church, aristocracy and popular opera - because we don’t know what else there was - does not apply after, say, 1920. There’s no excuse for not covering it.
What has to be covered? In no special order: flamenco and its revival in the 1980’s; the development of jazz from be-bop to free jazz, perhaps told through the careers of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the rise of chord-scale Euro-jazz; the continued use of orchestral music in film; the Beatles and Bob Dylan (a Nobel Prize winner, for heaven’s sake), Jam and Lewis, and Stock, Aiken and Waterman; the Hollywood and Broadway musical; ambient and electronic dance music; the evolution of rock music from Chuck Berry to Nirvana; and finally, to the factory-like output of modern chart music. On the composed side: serialism, minimalism, electronic music, and a chunk on the Period Performance movement and its re-discovery and re-habilitation of dozens of composers. If I was commissioning such a history, I would ask the writer(s) to show, with examples in score, the links between the Minimalists and ambient music; or between the harmonies and chord changes of the Beatles and earlier composers; and I will happily contribute an essay on rock musicians’ plundering of the avant-garde for technical and musical devices.
There would not be much about the academic music to which Taruskin devotes much of his book. First because there was very little of it. Second, because only the same one hundred people ever listened to it once, and fewer a second time. Taruskin makes this seem like a virtue: here is music so pure, nobody can actually stand it. It’s true that only a handful of people ever listened to a Hayden string quartet, at the time, and wanted something new afterwards, but now those string quartets sell in the thousands every year and are listened to again and again in people’s homes. That’s going to be true in a hundred years’ time. In a hundred years’ time, no-one will listen to Boulez’ first piano composition, except out of sheer curiosity for a couple of minutes on You Tube, and they will agree with the first comment: there is a cat on the piano?
The court composers wrote music for a wealthy economic and political elite, but it was written to entertain and delight the audience, and in some cases, show off the playing skills of its sponsors. It was popular in intent, for all that it was aristocratic in audience. When it was made available to larger audiences, they took to it. When a larger bourgeois audience appeared in concert halls, they took to the earlier aristocratic music, and to the music written especially for them. When that music was made available on recorded media, it was and still is bought and enjoyed by people from all walks of life.
The career challenge for young composers in the twentieth century, who were being turned out in ever larger numbers by an expanding music education industry, was finding a way of making an impact, of being shocking and surprising without turning away the audiences. Stravinsky more or less sealed that off. Where do you go after the Sacre du Printemps, the fin de musique for the twentieth century? All twentieth-century string quartets sound like one or other of the six Bartok quartets. The options seem to be that you either write perfectly competent stuff that might have been written in the middle of the nineteenth century (with the addition of a couple of bracing twentieth-century harmonies), or you write stuff that very few people will ever listen to.
Read Taruskin and you may imagine that every music department in the Western world turned serialist. You might imagine the same about mathematics departments and category theory as well. The truth is that music departments went on teaching common practice, regular ol’ triads, inversions and all the other stuff available in Hindemith or Piston, in the same way that mathematics departments carried on teaching real analysis the epsilon-delta way. Serialism was confined to a handful of academics in a handful of elite colleges, the journalists that hyped them, and the foundations and clients that backed them. Electronic music and musique concrete, by contrast, was rapidly taken up by broadcasting companies to accompany dramas. How it came to be regarded as the signature "serious music" of the last half of the twentieth-century is the subject for a book on history, hype, personalities, and politics.
Taruskin calls the academic music he’s writing about, literate, as if to separate it from popular music, which is not written. Except it is. Jazz musicians pride themselves on their ability to play at sight, and most popular music session musicians read fluently. The prolific pop producers of the 1980’s all wrote music, and the virtuoso soloists of rock and jazz both extemporised and read the charts. The only significant musical tradition that does not use written music is flamenco. The legend is that Joni Mitchell had no background in music theory and composed entirely by ear, but she is remarkable exactly because almost no-one else could produce music of that quality without the theory and the staves.
So should you devote the many hours needed to read this volume of Taruskin’s History? I don’t regret it: I do after all have Varese, Xenakis, Berio and Boulez in my collection. I understand more about serialism than I did, and appreciated the coverage Taruskin gave to some research that concluded that serialism was, in fact, profoundly unmusical. I don’t mind his coverage of that period: I do mind reducing the entire history of Miles Davis’ music to a few quotes from critics about the politics of his later adoption of ‘rock music’. Taruskin doesn’t even discuss the well-known suggestion that On The Corner was influenced in part by Stockhausen. Taruskin’s book is also very heavy on the politics - but then to understand Russian music in the twentieth century we do have to be reminded of life under Stalin. So, no, you don’t need to read it. It’s not a history of later-twentieth century music.
Thursday, 6 December 2018
The Orange Tree (Barbican)
This has to have been one of the best and longest-lasting autumns I can remember. This was taken at the end of October and most of the tree is still green.
Monday, 3 December 2018
Retirement Thoughts - Part Three
The longer I go on working, the later I have to live on a very much reduced income – though also with (not as much as you’d think) reduced expenses. However, I can’t say that I’m enjoying the life I lead while working. It’s not a drudge, but it is a chore – though that may be a fine distinction. There’s not a lot, if anything, about it that I’ll miss, and I have tried to make out a list of things that I really might miss. In terms of quality of life, I’m not convinced that life on a lesser income in retirement will be less than on this income working. Life will be different. Slower. Smaller things will feel like worthwhile achievements and it will take less to make a good day. (Pottering up and back to a museum between the rush hours will constitute a ‘good day out’, for instance. Some work in the garden or a spot of decorating will be a ‘good little job’). Right now, I’m not doing anything much except working, the gym, and basic housework / shopping / washing / stuff. This does not feel like achieving anything except a vague defiance of the Gods of Ageing.
You know the joke? The older I get, the less I pay to live. I get free NHS prescriptions, free eye tests every two years, and because I’m in London, I get free travel on London Transport at any time, plus free National Rail travel out to Zone 6 after the morning rush hour. After January 2020, my net salary will go up, because I won’t have to pay National Insurance (!), though the extra will be taxed. And I can take the State Pension and still work(!!), thought that will still be taxed. Tax or not, that’s a decent lump of money to put in the bank if made for a year, so maybe I should go on until June 2021 just because devilment.
I have been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of my life while I’m working, but that damned 05:30 wake-up and commute gets in the way. Maybe I need to accept that, at this age, simply getting up, commuting, putting in a day’s work amongst people half my age, three times my energy and in the same league as regards smarts, well, that’s enough for one day. I can get home, goof off reading or watching something, go to bed, and that’s been a good day. Sounds simple enough, but I’m having problems with the idea that it is enough.
Oh mutter mutter. This doesn’t have a neatly-resolved conclusion. I can tell. So here’s a photograph instead.
You know the joke? The older I get, the less I pay to live. I get free NHS prescriptions, free eye tests every two years, and because I’m in London, I get free travel on London Transport at any time, plus free National Rail travel out to Zone 6 after the morning rush hour. After January 2020, my net salary will go up, because I won’t have to pay National Insurance (!), though the extra will be taxed. And I can take the State Pension and still work(!!), thought that will still be taxed. Tax or not, that’s a decent lump of money to put in the bank if made for a year, so maybe I should go on until June 2021 just because devilment.
I have been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of my life while I’m working, but that damned 05:30 wake-up and commute gets in the way. Maybe I need to accept that, at this age, simply getting up, commuting, putting in a day’s work amongst people half my age, three times my energy and in the same league as regards smarts, well, that’s enough for one day. I can get home, goof off reading or watching something, go to bed, and that’s been a good day. Sounds simple enough, but I’m having problems with the idea that it is enough.
Oh mutter mutter. This doesn’t have a neatly-resolved conclusion. I can tell. So here’s a photograph instead.
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Retirement Thoughts - Part Two
“I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that”. That stayed with me for all of the Wednesday evening I wrote it and then evaporated on Thursday. My brave plans to commute in on Friday evaporated, and I schlepped the laptop home Thursday evening. Friday morning I was tired, tired in that I-have-to-physically-recover way, in the way that means the only thinking I wanted to do was the stuff on reflex, that happens in meetings.
Another twenty months of that?
I didn’t feel like this at the start of the year. I have spared you from reading all sorts of probably bogus pop-psych reasons why I might be feeling this way. Two major things have happened this year: my friend died over the summer. and we moved offices. Loss can be mourned, bad offices have to be worked in every day.
After leaving the Paradise that was the Shaftesbury Avenue office, they moved me to Bishopsgate. Where I am now makes Bishopsgate look like the West End. I get in at 07:30, and carry on with reading overlooking the back streets of the Barbican until 08:00. A few years ago, I would sit in the Caffè Nero near Holborn station for an hour, read, write or watch the people go by, but City workers are not watchable people and no City street has the presence of Kingsway. There’s no buzz in the City, just bustle. There’s a difference.
The new office is dark. The floor space is huge. The staff / desk ratio is 1.85:1. The per-person desk space is half what is was at the last office. There’s no assigned seating, so I can have total strangers sitting next to me. Even if I know them, it’s possible that we will go the whole day and not say anything to each other - office cameraderie is a thing of the past. This isn’t because I’m a mardy old git: I see the same happening to other people. They spend much of the day with headsets on, staring into an empty middle-distance. Before they would have travelled to a meeting, and actually seen the people they were talking to. Yeah, I know, productivity. However, a conference call is cheap, and if it’s a waste of time, who cares? Not so productive.
I can’t work in the chairs, and the desks are the wrong height, so I take my laptop, put on my Bose noise-cancellers and find an armchair(!) to work in for as long as I need to. I need the noise-cancellers because there are people talking in loud-and-clear telephone voices everywhere. No work requiring concentration gets done in that office except under headphones. Want to know why bank systems keep going wrong? One reason is that the on-shored workforce can’t concentrate because they keep bashing each other’s elbows, and they can’t focus enough to see the edge case they missed, which is why you see that webpage telling you there’s been an error. The air-conditioning is at least two levels cheap below where it needs to be for so many people and computers, and as we found out when there was a fire in the cafe on a lower floor, the air is re-cycled, not exchanged. The place smelled of damp-bonfire smoke all day.
It doesn’t help that the uber-manager is two hundred miles away and appears once a week. That affects the way the unter-managers are motivated and behave. They aren’t getting regular in-person verbal and body-language feedback from the only person who matters in their (working) lives. All they get are e-mails and the boss’s carefully managed behaviour on visiting day. The unters don’t feel secure or validated. Absentee uber-managers are not a good idea.
I find the place draining: lord alone knows how I get to the gym afterwards. The most I can hope for after this monumental whinge is that I stop wondering if it’s something physiological or some pop-science nonsense about getting older.
Okay. That’s the whinge over. Let’s try to be constructive here.
Another twenty months of that?
I didn’t feel like this at the start of the year. I have spared you from reading all sorts of probably bogus pop-psych reasons why I might be feeling this way. Two major things have happened this year: my friend died over the summer. and we moved offices. Loss can be mourned, bad offices have to be worked in every day.
After leaving the Paradise that was the Shaftesbury Avenue office, they moved me to Bishopsgate. Where I am now makes Bishopsgate look like the West End. I get in at 07:30, and carry on with reading overlooking the back streets of the Barbican until 08:00. A few years ago, I would sit in the Caffè Nero near Holborn station for an hour, read, write or watch the people go by, but City workers are not watchable people and no City street has the presence of Kingsway. There’s no buzz in the City, just bustle. There’s a difference.
The new office is dark. The floor space is huge. The staff / desk ratio is 1.85:1. The per-person desk space is half what is was at the last office. There’s no assigned seating, so I can have total strangers sitting next to me. Even if I know them, it’s possible that we will go the whole day and not say anything to each other - office cameraderie is a thing of the past. This isn’t because I’m a mardy old git: I see the same happening to other people. They spend much of the day with headsets on, staring into an empty middle-distance. Before they would have travelled to a meeting, and actually seen the people they were talking to. Yeah, I know, productivity. However, a conference call is cheap, and if it’s a waste of time, who cares? Not so productive.
I can’t work in the chairs, and the desks are the wrong height, so I take my laptop, put on my Bose noise-cancellers and find an armchair(!) to work in for as long as I need to. I need the noise-cancellers because there are people talking in loud-and-clear telephone voices everywhere. No work requiring concentration gets done in that office except under headphones. Want to know why bank systems keep going wrong? One reason is that the on-shored workforce can’t concentrate because they keep bashing each other’s elbows, and they can’t focus enough to see the edge case they missed, which is why you see that webpage telling you there’s been an error. The air-conditioning is at least two levels cheap below where it needs to be for so many people and computers, and as we found out when there was a fire in the cafe on a lower floor, the air is re-cycled, not exchanged. The place smelled of damp-bonfire smoke all day.
It doesn’t help that the uber-manager is two hundred miles away and appears once a week. That affects the way the unter-managers are motivated and behave. They aren’t getting regular in-person verbal and body-language feedback from the only person who matters in their (working) lives. All they get are e-mails and the boss’s carefully managed behaviour on visiting day. The unters don’t feel secure or validated. Absentee uber-managers are not a good idea.
I find the place draining: lord alone knows how I get to the gym afterwards. The most I can hope for after this monumental whinge is that I stop wondering if it’s something physiological or some pop-science nonsense about getting older.
Okay. That’s the whinge over. Let’s try to be constructive here.
Monday, 26 November 2018
Retirement Thoughts - Part One
I can collect my State Pension from the 6th January 2020, about eight months later than they originally promised the schoolboy me. For some reason, this thought is at the front of my mind a lot of the time. Being able to ‘retire’, to give up the daily grind, to lay in bed until I want to get up, instead of when overcrowded trains say I need to get up. And most of all, never to have to go through the annual appraisal process, which is like going into a dark room where someone might throw the lights on and shout ‘Suprise’, or they might just stab you in the back over and over and then expect you to get back to your desk and work.
However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...
Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.
Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.
So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.
Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.
I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.
Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.
However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...
Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.
Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.
So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.
Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.
I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.
Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.
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