Apparently, a lot of people drop dead within the first year of their retirement, so I've done better than them. I have to say, though, it's not what I was expecting it would be like. Every day is a Saturday, but when I was at work I wasn't paid for Saturdays, and that remains the case. My pension covers my normal monthly expenses, and I was expecting to be able to spend some of my savings on foreign travel while my health still holds. Sadly, rather than the two or three ten-day trips abroad I'd envisaged taking, it's actually been zero. My wife won't be receiving a pension for another three years, so she doesn't want to spend any of our (well, her) savings. I hope I'm still in a fit state to travel by the time she feels financially secure enough to spend some of what she's saved. I have been to foreign climes as part of games-related activities, of course, but only for a couple of days at a time and not as a tourist. I spent my short Madrid stay sitting in an airport hotel, for example, rather than exploring Madrid.
Although I've given up university work, I still do consultancy. The pandemic put a stop to most of that work, though, and it never recovered; I only occasionally get a short gig now. I think I had two last year. It's interesting, but just a sideline; most of the time, there'll be an initial call in which I tell the people exactly how bad their ideas are, then they don't engage me to tell them how to fix them. Still, better that than getting involved in something I can see is heading for a cliff edge.
Much of my spare time has been spent, and continues to be spent, on writing the second edition of Designing Virtual Worlds. This is a real time sink. I usually spend two or three hours a day working on it, and progress is slow. Today, for example, I'll be continuing the sub-section on character skills that I began yesterday. I won't finish it until maybe Wednesday, because I need to ensure it's correct and reasonably complete. Citations suck up a lot more time than one might expect: a simple-looking (name, year) could take anything between 5 and 30 minutes to get right, depending on how obscure or old it is. Searching for scans of 1960s periodicals so I can find the page numbers of an article I want to reference is time-consuming. I shan't really feel that my retirement has begun until this book is done and dusted. It's been something of a weight around my neck for far too long.
I did cut back on the book-writing for the BAFTA games awards. Playing forty or more games to check them out was a welcome activity, and playing eleven of them more extensively was also worthwhile. That's not something I could have done quite as easily were I not retired.
In addition to this, we have days during which we look after our grandson. These are fun, but they're write-offs for other activities. I don't get to write much or read much on them. Still, I'd much rather have them than not, and am really looking forward to when the little chap can speak in sentences rather than just individual words. Gawd knows what he'll do to my home office when he can walk, though; there's rather a lot within reach that small hands shouldn't be holding.
There are two things I miss from when I was a lecturer: a salary, and conversations with intelligent students. There are many things I'm glad to be rid of, which I shan't enumerate in case it triggers traumatic memories.
Overall, then, so far I'm happy to have retired when I did; I just needed to be less optimistic about it when I did so.
