But I thought you’d retired ?

Its been a strange year of that there can be no doubt.

And not just because I keep getting asked the same question, “But I thought you’d retired ?” so for those who have a modicum of interest, and as this whole JerryChicken thing is supposed to be a biography, heres what happened in 2020…

January started off fine, there was nothing wrong with January, yes there were stories of a virus causing deaths in China and then Italy but apart from that it all seemed OK.

I was employed as a mobile engineer in the electronics industry working from home and covering the North of England and all of Scotland, driving hundreds of miles for hours and hours to switch things off and then switch them back on again, it was a straightforward job which I loved and which I’d been doing for 35 years, as I’ve said, everything in January was OK.

We listed the house for sale in January but that was part of the overall Plan A, I had two and a half years to go to official retirement and we had planned all along to sell the house and downsize to a nearby bungalow, in January we put the first stage of Plan A into action and found a buyer pretty quickly, February was going well too.

Then a surprise email dropped into everyones inbox, the company was looking to make redundancies, we were a company who dealt with on site hardware and our own software but the future was all software based and on site engineers wouldn’t be needed, suddenly Plan A was gathering speed, a little too quickly it has to be said as two and a half years was a little early to consider retirement but I put my hand up straight away and asked about voluntary redundancy.

It was all sorted within two days, I accepted a package and quit the company on 29th February, by my carefully costed (LoL) budget the redundancy settlement would just about string out for two and a half years as long as we could downsize quickly and rid ourselves of a lot of overheads, the day I spoke to the Managing Director about accepting the offer I also received a phone call from the Estate Agent to say they’d found a buyer, Plan A was moving at top speed now.

March 1st was the first day of my retirement and I set about re-organising my art sales that had always ticked away in the background but which now would become my main source of income, this was going to be bloody ace, the bills would be paid by the redundancy payment and I’d get to paint all day long while the wife still had to go out to work, it was like I’d written the rules myself.

March was going really well for three weeks…

…and then the rest of the country retired as well.

“Thats not fair” was my first thought, “this is my bloody retirement and its not going to work if the rest of you are going to be sitting around at home with me, its just so unfair…”

And then I got another phone call from the MD of the company I had just retired from asking if I’d be willing to drive all over the country doing work for them on a self employed basis for their essential services clients, we agreed an hourly rate and I started work again.

The next few weeks were certainly very strange, whilst everyone else was locked up indoors hiding from the virus I was out driving the motorways to attend to breakdowns at supermarkets, two trips to Scotland in the first few weeks and on one Saturday a drive to North London in which I set off very early so as to avoid the notorious London traffic on the North circular only to find that the M1 motorway had no traffic on it at all, at one point I could see no other vehicles in front of me for at least five miles and nothing in my rear view mirror either, this was like a zombie apocalypse film, I hit the North Circular just before 9am and saw only one other vehicle on it, a delivery truck on its way to the same supermarket, arrived at the store at 09.10 and was back on the road just after 09.30 and no traffic on the M1 again.

Then in mid April I had a phone call from my brother who worked as a maintenance engineer in a company who operated two large modern Dementia Care Homes, they had a part time maintenance job at one of the homes and he insisted that I take it, “the job is yours if you want it” he told me, he spoken to the Ops Manager and they were holding it for me.

I didn’t want it, was quite happy doing what I was doing even though I knew that the demand for my time wouldn’t be quite so intense when “normal” times returned, I was supposed to be retired after all, remember that bit ?

He rang me the next day and insisted that I make a call to his Ops Manager so just to keep him quiet I did. It was a part time job, three days a week and the pay was a bit better than I expected, and in the words of my brother “You will never have another job like this one”, I accepted, quit my self employed status and I was back among the workforce again in another essential services job.

So while you bloody idle buggers have had six months furlough this year I’ve been bloody working and I’m the one who was supposed to be retired.

He was right in one thing though, my brother that is, working in Dementia Care is not like any other job I have ever known, its perhaps the best thing I’ve done in my working life, fulfilling, inspiring, sometimes fun, sometimes heartbreaking, I could write another book on what has happened since April 29th this year but most of it is very confidential and not for the telling, suffice to say that working in the Care sector during a pandemic is demanding but also very satisfying in that sort of way that you get home on an evening, kick off your work boots, fall onto the settee and think “I did something good today” even when the something good that you did was to stick your arm down a drain to unblock it because one of the housekeepers has blocked it with bleaching powder – we learned that day that the bleaching sanitizer that they use does not dissolve in cold water but sets like concrete, I earned my corn that day.

So there you are then – Plan A for retirement quickly became Plan B for retirement in which I now work three days a week and have no firm date set in the calendar for quitting.