Retirement: an olive bough but not a bed of roses

Retirement, I had been led to believe, was a period of life in which one rested a while and recovered from the exhaustion of working life.

That, it seems, is not so. It’s just the opportunity to replace one form of work by another. Or, in my case, numerous others.

To be honest, and I think it’s probably best to be reasonably honest since I’m not leader of the Conservative Party (a role so much in the stratospheric elite that such bourgeois considerations as truthfulness simply don’t apply), to be honest, as I say, some of these tasks should soon come to an end. They involve such chores as submitting requests for pensions, which in turn require documents to be hunted down, copied, occasionally authenticated by a lawyer, and posted and all sorts of other exciting and life-enhancing bureaucratic tasks.

Picking olives in November

Others, however, are only just starting. One such was, it appears, the harvesting of olives. Not that we have an olive tree or anything. But Danielle and I went out walking the woods a couple of weeks ago and came across a rather sad and lonely olive tree which clearly didn’t belong to anyone, so we picked the olives.

It was an eye-opening experience for me. I tried one of the olives I picked, since I like olives, only to discover that it was horribly inedible. It seems it takes weeks of processing to turn them into the kind of delicious appetiser that I enjoy so much. Off the tree, they are neither delicious or appetising.

You may have already known that but I didn’t. Among other things, retirement seems to be turning into quite a steep apprenticeship in things I never previously realised I needed to know.

This all happened on 9 November. And one of the more attractive aspects of the experience is that we could be out there in light clothes. In fact, I was in shirt sleeves, Danielle in even shorter sleeves. Just this weekend we were out on the beach. Not actually swimming, you understand, although there were some swimmers there – one of them claimed to keep swimming right through the winter, so I dismiss his judgement of the temperature as having any kind of rational basis at all – but we did paddle a little. And it certainly felt warm.

November beach walk

So it’s been a bit of a shock to discover in the time since then that the temperature in Valencia really can fall. It can even become wintry. That’s particularly clear if you’ve mistimed overdue work on your radiators.

The radiators in question needed work because they had been removed from the walls when the painters were in this summer. They’d put them back up but radiators apparently need various technical things done to them, involving things like air (which I believe needs to be removed) and pressure (which needs to be raised). Clearly, this is something that, as a retired person, I should now be learning to do myself, but I’m glad to say Danielle was sensible enough to book an appointment for a plumber to come and see to it.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t be there until this morning, and this morning, when I took the dogs out, there was actually frost on the grass. Yes. Really. Proper frost.

Central heating is just one of those things most of us take for granted these days. Well, I can assure you that nothing teaches you not to take it for granted quite so much as not having any when the conditions turn frosty. Why, yesterday we had to go so far as to open the windows to let in some warm air.

It’s good to have central heating again. I promise not to take it for granted again. I truly appreciate what a blessing it really is.

In fact – it’s time for me to get rid of this jumper and be back in shirtsleeves. As though ready to go olive picking again.