I had tried to retire when I was fifty nine but my boss wouldn’t let me and you have to wait till sixty to retire with or without permission. By then the opportunity I had in mind had gone and I accepted that I would just have to soldier on. Local Government is always changing but it had started to change at a greater pace and not for the better. The socio economic ethos which had been handed down from the days of the old Regional Councils was fast being replaced with a model based more on private enterprise. When my job title changed from a ‘Policy Officer’ to a ‘Policy and Performance Officer’, I knew that I was now in the employ of an organisation that didn’t really need me any more. Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. I wasn’t keen for too much of that cynicism to rub off on me. And so I was delighted to find that I could qualify for something called ‘flexible retirement’. It was a new right for all public sector employees and all councils were required to agree a policy on it - but it was left up to each council to decide what their policy would be. North Ayrshire Council decided it would apply to anyone who had reached their sixty third birthday and they would be allowed to take their pension and be reemployed with hours reduced by up to one day a week. This meant I was able to spend the final two years of my time with the Council working four days a week with my pension making up the drop in salary. On top of this, there was a crisis of office accommodation and so I was offered the option of home working if I gave up my room. I had embarked on my very own road to freedom
Work life balance is usually taken to mean ensuring you leave plenty time for family and friends, hobbies and relaxation. For me it meant making sure I did a good job at work as well as all my political campaigning. Flexible retirement allowed me to save up my days off and spend far more time with my wife Sandra at Westminster supporting her in her work as an MP (always unpaid, before you ask). When it was time to stop work altogether, I left as quietly as I could get away with. I had a nice send off with work colleagues at a farewell do in the Harbour Arts Centre. I was sixty five.
I had read all the ‘Preparing for Retirement’ literature and even signed up for ‘Ayrshire Opportunities in Retirement’. It didn’t turn out quite how I expected. The first year I worked full time on the Referendum campaign. Received wisdom has it that the Better Together Campaign killed off the Scottish Labour Party, forever tainted by cooperation with the Tories. My logical mind doesn’t wholly accept that theory. Referenda confront people with a binary choice and throw up two official campaigns, one on each side of the argument. It is inevitable that you find yourself on the same side as those with very different views from your own. It is true that very early on Sandra and I realised how important it would be to support a separate Scottish Labour campaign and threw ourselves totally into United with Labour. We took to the streets every week and also organised a series of public meetings. Sandra invited some of her colleagues with particular areas of expertise to be the speakers at these. Packed meetings listened to Ian Murray on the Economy; Greg McClymont on Pensions and Anne Begg on Social Security. Having won that campaign, I was immediately caught up in the next - the General Election. It became obvious that we were about to be hit by an SNP tsunami that would sweep everything before it, but I still had to give the fight everything I could. That too became a full time job, organising Sandra’s last campaign. It turned out to be one we could all be proud of in spite of there being no chance of winning. We had a brilliant town centre location for our shop and rooms; we took to the high streets every weekend and knocked doors and telephone canvassed daily. We tried bus advertising for the first time since 1992 and hired space on the video screen in Ayr’s busy Whitletts Road. It was strangely satisfying to know we had done everything we could have even though the tide was firmly against us.
Any idea that I could now sit back and enjoy my retirement was dispelled when Sandra was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2015. 2016 was given over to supporting her through radical surgery, chemotherapy and a slow recuperation. So it wasn’t really until 2017 that I could say my retirement was properly underway - ten years after I had first applied for it.
2017 was the year of two major events - our younger daughter Karen got married to Mark at the beautiful setting of Dumfries House in Cumnock, and we got a dog. The wedding gave us all a focus and provided a joyous family celebration that we will never forget. Rosie, our cavapoo, became the centre of our attention bringing nothing but happiness into our lives. My health had taken a downturn and I had to make a number of hospital visits before things settled down and became more stable. There was however one constant that became a major part of my life after retirement, - creative writing.
I have always written. In the early years when I was a minister it was weekly sermons, then when I worked in local government, committee reports and policy papers and all the while, leaflets, press releases and political research for the Labour Party. Now I had retired I could start writing for fun. I began a blog called ‘What’s Left’ which has now run to over seventy posts (including this). I began writing for other journals including regular articles for the wonderful Scottish Review, an online weekly, started by the greatly missed Kenneth Roy. Lots of people suddenly find time for the novel they knew they had always wanted to write. I started messing about with a few of my short stories and finally managed a novella of around 14,000 words called ‘Denunciation’.
Then there was COVID and the lockdown. From the vantage point of retirement I have to say that it meant being denied the opportunity to do lots of things we had no intention of doing anyway. It was horrible to have little or no contact with our family and I never want to do a video quiz ever again but with fixed incomes it had no financial impact whatsoever.
With two jags behind me, what does the future hold at 73. I’m not quite ready to embrace Dylan Thomas’s injunction - “Do not go gentle into that good night”. I always preferred Roger McGough’s plea:
“Let me die a young man's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holy water death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death”
At very least, I think it would be nice for once to be able to do anything I want or just nothing at all.