I have just published a new book – my third. This time, non-fiction – a light-hearted account of life in the French Alps post-retirement. It covers Winter and Summer, travels through France, learning the sort of French no-one teaches you at school and enjoying life with family and friends.
As a taster, the first chapter is below.
You can spend it in the garden. You can sit in front of the telly. You can sleep till midday. Retirement is a sad word. I didn’t want to tire, with a ‘re’ or otherwise. I was more for a re-firing and luckily we had the possibility of doing something adventurous. Work behind us, we would head off to the Alps for a surfeit of skiing, a second career as ski bums. Dreams are great while they are just that but the calendar, the mirror and the pensions people at work were pointing us to the end of our working careers. This dream could become real. ‘Bit scary’ as our little grandchildren would say!
I was apprehensive about giving up work. I loved it, loved the responsibility, the people, the chance to make a difference. So why was I even contemplating early retirement?
‘Whatever will you do with yourself?’
‘You’re such a busy person – how will you slow down?’
‘I can’t imagine you not working!’
‘I’ll miss the click-click-click of your heels as you rush from place to place.’
These were the comments that bombarded me when I announced my intentions, so it wasn’t surprising I struggled with mixed emotions as the ‘R’ day approached. I knew I needed to be busy, that retirement wasn’t synonymous with doing nothing, but how it would pan out was worrying.
Would I miss work?
Tony, my husband, had already retired, having changed his status without a backward glance. It’s sickening how well-adjusted some folk are. I really didn’t want, ‘Wish you were here!’ messages as he travelled the world while I ploughed through the e-mail mountain on a grim Monday morning. Okay, sometimes the job wasn’t marvellous. His plan was to take me off to the mountains a couple of days after leaving work for the last time to stop me thinking too much about what was happening. So that’s what we did.
‘You’ll be okay. You’ll enjoy yourself. Don’t worry. Retirement is good.’
We’ve skied in many places and been to the French Alps frequently, to Méribel Mottaret in the Trois Vallées, in particular. We have a small apartment there, so in many ways it’s home to us. But we’d never been for more than a couple of weeks at a time and I was hesitant about being there for a whole season, a period of nearly three months. Tony had no doubts. He’s one of those guys who are at the lift before it opens in the morning and bliss for him is finishing the day at the top of the mountain with a vin chaud, then skiing back down after the lifts have closed. It’s partly ski fanaticism, partly the desire to make up for the first thirty five years of his life before he learned to ski and partly determination to get his money’s worth out of the expensive ski pass.
Tony knew me better than I knew myself. We set out in early January on our ski-bumming career. This is our experience.
linimeant 