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My January is pretty much clear. I am doing some studio podcast records on the 16th and then I am... nope, that's it. I could really knuckle down and get some good writing done.
Counting today as the first day of the year, because come on, what self-employed person is working the 1st January and the 2nd is a Friday and the kids are home and then it's the weekend.
The kids go back to school tomorrow, but they were spending the day with their grandparents, so time for me to get on with.... what? I have quite a few ideas for projects. Probably too many ideas if anything, but I have a whole lot of time....
If not I could be booking guests for the podcasts or just getting my to do list done.
Somehow the morning got away from me - not sure where it went or what I did. In the afternoon I tried to get a few things done, like find out what's going on with my prescription and get my dry cleaning done and recycle a Britta filter....
I ended up doing most of that, then sitting in Caffe Nero, drinking coffee and playing online poker and thinking, hey, maybe this is how I spend my life from now on. I am 59 this year. By this age my mum had already retired. I am doing OK at online poker. I mean I can't live on it, but a year or so ago I was down to a pound in my account and then gambled it up to £200 in a few weeks. Then I lost £199 and was down to a pound again, but again managed to gamble it back up to nearly £300 this time. I have lost about £100 of that, but over about 20 months I have made £160.... OK that's not enough to live on, but at least I haven't lost any money and played a lot of poker and made tenths of pence a game.
I sat drinking coffee and wasting my time on my phone and I thought to myself, would I rather be working or doing this for the rest of my life. Work is hard, but drinking coffee and playing poker is easy - especially if you don't mind losing. I've tried really hard to write stuff for the last four decades with limited success and the chances of getting any new success in my 60s seems pretty slight, especially given my apparent lack of hunger for it.
In my 20s and 30s I was starving for it. I would have worked 18 hours a day to be a writer and sometimes did. I had so many ideas and so little else in my life and if someone had just given me the commissions I could have done so much.
Now if someone came and told me I had to write a book about say, the bodies I've discovered buried in plain sight in Hitchin, you know... I'd give it a go, in the times I wasn't doing other stuff... but I've had Writers Ozempic and the appetite isn't there. Not in the same way.
I might have twenty more good years of writing ahead of me, but also I might not get that many years. And do I want to spend those last useful couple of decades writing? Or just kicking back doing fuck all?
The advantage my mum had at 58 was that her kids had pretty much become self-reliant and were ostensibly adults and she'd been paying into a pension all her working life. I got a pension two years ago and I am so old that I am, if I wish, allowed to take money out of it already. But there's not enough in there to see me through to being 88. Or even 59.
I can probably squeeze another couple of profitable years out of the podcasts though. And if I can die by then then my life insurance should cover the mortgage, so the family might be OK. I can't rely on dying though, sadly.
Tomorrow I will almost certainly be thinking having a go at writing is still worth the enormous and largely unfulfilling effort, but today I wondered about just stopping working forever and see how that goes for me.
I guess when these days vastly outnumber the days where I wish to create, then that will be when I retire. The problem with this job is there is always the tiny hope that the next idea will be the one that works and gives you enough money to actually never have to work again (though when you're making that kind of money other people don't let you retire). So on we merrily plod on a road that ends at a sheer downward drop and is littered with broken glass and broken dreams.
Happy New Year.
Not sure if this entry counts as me breaking my resolution.
As well as a fresh new RHLSTP on Wednesday, we're putting out a few Best Of 2025s this week.
Here's the first one.
