| The Good Life
To all the other fantasists planning an early exit from paid work: get ready for endless toil.
Ithink the Prime Minister might be broody. For a whole afternoon, she sat unmoving, staring bleakly into the middle distance, and brooking no visitors. She was still there, looking beady, when we went to bed. And when I went to check on her in the morning, there she was, brooding. Poor dear.
The fact that Jacinda, one of our four evil chooks, had chosen to do this in the one laying box – there is a choice of three – that all but one of her sisters like to use, too, caused no end of trouble. Or, as I call it, the “book effect”. All afternoon, her sisters protested outside the coop. Booooook-book-book, they chanted. Booooook-bookbook-book-book. The same loud complaints woke me the next day – at 5.45am.
I consulted our chook-rearing bible, the internet, on what to do with a broody hen. Evidently, they can be dangerous; they lash out with their beaks; wear gloves was the advice. And they can endanger themselves. Sitting for days on an unfertilised egg that will never hatch, they can starve themselves to death. Poor things.
And poor me. What to do about the PM was just the latest worry, the newest, puzzling undertaking, for me, a townie-turned-life-styling tyro who thought the good life of semi-retirement meant the slow life.
When we were first considering selling up in the Shining Traffic Jam on the Waitematā and moving somewhere nicer, I had a thought that if we sold high and bought low we might just manage to ditch the ugly business of work altogether and put our feet up. It wasn’t as though we deserved to, but if the finances worked, why not?
In this trying for an early retirement, we appear to be part of a vanguard of like-minded wannabe slackers. Or so I’ve learnt. Last week, the Guardian had a story about an online movement of 20-40-somethings dedicated to getting out of work and into retirement as soon as possible.
Called the “financial independence, retire early” (or “Fire”) movement, their “plan” inevitably involves having a well-paid job, an extreme saving regime and “sacrifices” such as living under a bush and eating only turnips (I may exaggerate).
What interested me most was what these “Fire” people thought they’d be doing with themselves when they were freed from wage slavery and had arrived at the broad, sunlit uplands of early retirement. Mostly this was vague. However, one already-retired couple in their early forties are flitting about Yorkshire’s canals on a narrowboat, while another bloke plays a lot of tennis and has learnt Italian, all of which sounds idyllic.
This week, my semi-retirement was rather busier. On Monday and Tuesday, I sprayed the driveway edges and mowed the lawns – the latter a two- to three-hour job. On Wednesday, I spent hours moving and stacking firewood.
That night, after a thunderstorm and a couple of hours of torrential rain, we found a ram lamb down and struggling for breath. I carried him to our shed, wrapped him in blankets and lay with him trying to warm him up while Michele rang Miles the sheep farmer.
Miles arrived with a shot of antibiotics for pneumonia, but neither the medicine nor my lying with the lamb for another half hour made a difference. The poor thing died in the night.
With more rain forecast, I spent time on Thursday morning building a bivouac from an old apple crate and tarpaulins for our lambs Xanthe and Elizabeth Jane. The next day, more hours went on stacking firewood, before the discovery of the Prime Minister and her lonely vigil in the laying box. On Saturday, I finished stacking the firewood … phew.
I have a tyro tip for those getting, well, all “fired” up about ditching work for the good life: remember, in real-life retirement, semi or otherwise, you never get a day off.
“Fire” is an online movement of 20-40 somethings dedicated to getting into retirement asap.