And so it begins...

	It is odd to realise that I've just had my last meaningful bank holiday weekend.  I'm about to start a new chapter in my life where Monday mornings no longer represent the end of a two day break and a return to the office.

I've worked since my early teens, my first job being on a local farm at weekends and during school holidays.  I then had the good fortune to be sponsored through university by ICL and thus as a student, my holidays were spent working for them. After university I joined a small IT firm in Watford and I've been in full time work ever since.  Gap years weren't really a thing in those days.

So it's going to be a big change.  An exciting change.

In the lead up to retiring, several people have expressed surprise at my choice to take early retirement, but to me it seems an obvious choice.  It's not that I dislike work and cannot wait to stop, but rather the fact that given a totally free choice of what I could do today, there are many things that I would enjoy more.  If I can afford not to work, then pursuing those things is the logical choice.  I'm also struck by much that has been written on "deathbed regrets" - the number one for men being that "I worked too hard".   I'm pretty certain that no-one on their death bed uttered the words "I wish I'd spent more time at the office."

What will I do?  It's hard to know where to start - throughout my life I seem to have collected interests and hobbies at a ridiculous rate and I have a study house full of partly completed projects that were embarked upon with enthusiasm until the next new thing distracted me.  I've always hung onto the associated stuff, knowing that one day I'll get back to it.  History is often a good guide to the future, so the stuff I spent time on during my working life will probably get even more time spent on it moving forward: those other interests.

And why blog?  A good question.  A blog is clearly a vanity project, a little patch of the web I can call my own.  I've thought about blogging in the past and quickly dismissed the idea with a vague "maybe when I retire" thought wafting through my brain.  But the idea appeals to me.  I'm vain enough to actually believe that some of you might be mildly interested to know what I'm up to once I've finished work.  Maybe we have shared interests and there's something that can be learnt from my mistakes and successes.  But there's another reason that drives me.  It's a way of setting targets and it keeps me publicly accountable.  I suspect it's easy, in retirement, for one day to drift into the next, without a sense of urgency.  I can imagine myself in three months time, looking back, disappointed at what I've actually achieved.  By writing plans down, they somehow become more real - harder to ignore and even more so if you share those plans with others.  So I've written a page with some of my plans for 2019 and at the end of the year, I'll review how I've done.

Of course, this blog could be yet another one of those interests that starts with enthusiasm and gradually peters out.  But until then, I'm delighted to have you join me for the ride.