Thursday 1 January Happy New Year!
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Heaven-Haven
2004 is the year when my partial retirement takes effect, and I'm already feeling some of the benefits of it. The alarm clock is beginning to gather dust – it won't be needed until the end of September, when I start teaching again. It's great to think that during the winter months I won't have to struggle out of bed long before daybreak in order to get in to the office. And at long last I'll have time to catch up on some of the maintenance and repair jobs around the house that have been neglected for the past ten years.
The thing I'm most looking forward to about retirement is that life will be almost completely free of stress. I can't pretend that academic life is exactly stressful in comparison with most jobs. But I was beginning to get tired of the way jobs kept piling up on my desk faster than I can deal with them. I haven't retired completely, so I'll still have a trickle of jobs like writing references for students and refereeing papers for journals. But there should be plenty of time to deal with them, and I won't any longer have the feeling that life is a perpetual struggle to keep the email inbox from overflowing.
I always like to start the New Year's Day journal entry with a quotation. Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Heaven-Haven perfectly sums up the feeling of wanting to escape from the storms of the world and retire into a stress-free sheltered harbour. The subtitle of the poem is 'A nun takes the veil', and I suppose that in some ways retirement is a bit like entering a monastic order, away from the hurly-burly of everyday life (except that in my case there won't be any religious observances involved).
You probably noticed on your way here that the design of the site has changed. I decided that the time has come to move to standards-compliant xhtml, and I have renovated the entire site (except for the archived journal pages) accordingly. The content of the site has hardly changed at all, except in a few places where it needed to be brought up to date. The only change you should notice on this page is the link buttons in the left column, which should make it easier to navigate around the site. The other pages, notably the home page, have been redesigned so as to give the whole site a more unified style (I hope). I'm not very pleased with the look of the home page, but then graphic design was never my strong point. Perhaps my leisurely retirement will give me time to have another go at redesigning that page some time.
I found it reasonably easy to write xhtml code that is correct according to the validator. (The code fragments for the site counters don't validate, but there's nothing I can do about that.) But that doesn't mean that what you see on your screen is what I intended. The fact is that even that latest browsers fail to implement the code perfectly, according to its specification. I have tested the new site on as many browsers as I can get hold of. On the Macintosh, Netscape 7 and Internet Explorer 5 give almost perfect results, and Opera 6 manages reasonably well. In Windows on a PC, IE 6 is very good and IE 5 is just about acceptable. If you have an older browser (version 4 or earlier in Netscape or IE) the whole site will look pretty crappy, but it should still be readable.
Please let me know if you have any comments or criticisms about the site.
Sunday 4 January
Four weeks from today we set off on our round the world trip. On 1 February we are due to fly from Manchester via Heathrow and Los Angeles to Honolulu. It's the London–Los Angeles leg of the journey that has me a bit worried at the moment. The American aviation authorities are getting all twitchy about supposed terrorist threats, and several transatlantic flights have been severely delayed or cancelled recently. It's hard to know whether this is because they have genuine intelligence reports of likely terrorist activity, or whether they are just using this as an excuse to bully reluctant European airlines into accepting armed guards on flights into the USA. Either way, I hope that things get back to normal by the end of the month. If our flight into LA is delayed sufficiently for us to miss the onward connection to Honolulu, it will really mess up the first day of our trip. Even if all the flights arrive on schedule it will be an arduous day. Taking into account the ten hour time difference, we'll be travelling for about 24 hours.
We're due to stay in Hawaii for eight days. I'm really looking forward to going there, if only for the geeky reason that it will bring the tally of American States that I have visited up to 48. I don't know if I'll ever get round to visiting the other two. I can imagine that we might one day decide to go on a cruise to Alaska, but I can't think of any valid reason why I should ever want to go to North Dakota. Apparently other people feel the same way about North Dakota. I read recently that there is a plan to evacuate the State and hand it back to the buffalo (and, I hope, to the native Americans whose land it rightfully is). Seems like a good idea to me, though it probably wouldn't appeal to the present regime in Washington D.C.
Tuesday 6 January Twelfth Night
In the Christian church, today is the Feast of Epiphany, commemorating the baptism of Jesus and the ending of the twelve days of Christmas. In Spain it is known as Dia de Reyes, Three Kings' Day, and it is a bigger festival than Christmas itself. What could be more appropriate than to mark it with a scan of the Christmas card that Liz gave us?
I can't pretend to have spent the day in religious observances of any kind. But we're sufficiently traditionally minded that we keep this as the day when we put away the Christmas decorations. It took me all morning to take down the cards and decorations, untrim the (plastic) tree and put it away in its box in the attic until next year. The sitting room looks a good deal bigger, but much more bare, now that it's back to its normal state.
Note the correct use of its and it's in the previous sentence. What makes you think that I gave Mary a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves as one of her Christmas presents? (Not that she needs instruction in punctuation, but she had asked for this book.)
Wednesday 14 January
I keep meaning to do a journal entry on what it feels like to be retired. But this is difficult, because I don't yet feel as though I have retired. I still have my office in the University, although I was supposed to move to a smaller one now that I have gone part-time. But they haven't yet found a smaller office for me, so I continue to have the old one for the time being. Not that I have been using it much – I looked in there a couple of times last week to check the mail, and both times I was waylaid by lines of students wanting help with their revision for this week's exams. There wasn't time to deal with all of them, so I agreed to come in again on Monday morning to see the rest of them. Apart from that, I have kept well out of the way of the University, until today when I had to go in to collect the scripts of the exam for one of my courses. I'll be busy for the next few days marking the 120 scripts, together with another exam later this week that I'm also responsible for.
At home, we're both busy making plans and preparations for the round-the-world trip (countdown: 17 days until departure date). Mary is stressing about what clothes to take, so that she'll be prepared for everything from the sticky tropical weather of Fiji and Queensland to the cool mountains of New Zealand's South Island. I'm more concerned with arranging that we can continue to pay the utility and credit card bills while we're away. I can deal with most of them over the internet, provided that we can find internet cafes along the way. (I guess that won't be difficult – when Liz was travelling in the Far East several years ago she found that she could email us from internet cafes deep in the jungles of Malaya and other unlikely places.) Ensuring a continual flow of cash will be less easy. The banks make outrageous charges for using foreign ATMs, so we'll probably have to take large quantities of travellers' cheques with us.
So one way and another, I have not yet had any time to sit back and enjoy the leisure of retirement. But that's what everyone says when they retire. They all claim to be busier than ever and they wonder how they ever found time for work. Maybe that's what retirement is like – life is as busy as it was before but at least it isn't tied to a fixed routine any more, with the added bonus of never having to set the alarm clock.
I'm sure there were other things I meant to say about retirement, but I can't concentrate at the moment because I'm more interested in listening to the radio, one of my favourite operas, Peter Grimes, in an excellent live performance on Radio 3.
Tuesday 20 January
Just occasionally, someone says something that you know you'll never forget.
Actually, there are some people who never forget anything that they hear. I have a colleague in Philadelphia who can quote word for word a conversation that he had twenty or thirty years ago. He'll remind me of incidents that I had totally forgotten, and repeat every word that was said. I'm certainly not like that. I have a terrible memory. But once on a while someone will say something so special that I know it will always stay with me. This happened to me yesterday, except that on this occasion it was something written rather than spoken.
The background to the story is that Steve has recently signed up with LiveJournal and become a blogger. I won't give a link to his journal here, because he is keeping it carefully anonymous, disguising names of people and places. But he emailed me a few days ago saying "Here's something of mine that you might find interesting, by way of a present...", and giving me the url of his site.
I have to say, he has a real gift for writing. It's fascinating to read his stylish account of his daily doings, and I would want to read his journal even if he wasn't my son. To give you a sample of his writing, here's the opening paragraph of his latest entry: "I jibbed at getting up today. The wind had blown all night from polar bear land, as [Tom] justly put it." Steve has the nice idea of dedicating some of his entries to people he knows. The thing that stood out for me, and that I'll never forget, is the closing line of his entry for last Saturday:
Dedicated on his birthday to my dad, who I admire respect and love more than the telling of it.
Isn't that sweet? I added a comment to the entry: "Believe me son it's mutual. Dad."
These are things that neither of us, with our reserved English ways, would dream of saying to each other in real life. I like the way that the internet gives you the freedom to express yourself in ways that the inhibitions of background and upbringing would otherwise make impossible.
So yes, Saturday was my birthday (the 63rd since you ask). I suppose I should have marked it by a journal entry, but I tend to be very low key about birthdays. In fact, we have been away in Gran Canaria for my birthday for the past few years, and the last time we were at home for it was in 1999. I see from my journal entry on that day that we didn't do anything particular to celebrate it, and the same was true this time. We didn't even go out for dinner, because we have been eating out a lot recently and Mary is concerned about getting overweight. She wants to lose a few pounds before we set off on the Big Trip (countdown: 11 days until departure). So I spent my birthday at home, grading exams, which is what I have been doing every day for the past week.
Liz knows me too well. On her birthday card to me, she wrote: "Hope you have a lovely birthday and let your hair down as only you know how!"
Cheeky girl.
Wednesday 28 January
The news today has been dominated by the Hutton report. Lord Hutton has produced his findings on the circumstances surrounding the government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction and the suicide of the chemical weapons expert Dr David Kelly. When the enquiry was set up, I said here that it remained to be seen whether the report would be anything more than a whitewash. So guess what the report says? That's right, the Prime Minister and his office were blameless, the Ministry of Defence was blameless, the secret services were blameless. But the BBC and its reporter were said to be seriously at fault in suggesting that the danger of WMD had been exaggerated. The report doesn't even begin to address the fact that there haven't been any WMD in Iraq for 12 years or more. That's not surprising, because the terms of reference of the enquiry were carefully drawn up to prevent it looking at such embarrassing facts.
I suppose it's too much to hope that a senior member of the Establishment like Lord Hutton would rock the boat by openly criticising the government. But one might have hoped for at least a veiled recognition of the way the WMD scare was manipulated to bounce Parliament into approving the invasion of Iraq.
"Whitewash" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Countdown: three days to go until we leave. Our friends Allan and Pat came to stay with us last weekend. They are also going to New Zealand next month, and it was interesting to compare plans with them. We talked about the possibility of meeting up with them out there, but soon dropped the idea. We both want to be flexible in our itinerary and not commit ourselves to being in a particular place on a particular day. If we happen to bump into them out there then we'll all go for a meal together. I suppose that could happen, after all it's only a small country, right? In fact, it looks like being a pretty crowded small country – we know several people who are escaping the British winter by going to NZ next month.
The British winter arrived last night, and it was a bit of an anticlimax. They have been warning us all week that a bitterly cold front was on its way. But we only had about an inch of snow overnight here. This morning, most of it melted and washed the salt off the roads. Then the temperature dropped a bit below freezing and there was another snowfall. It wasn't much, only another inch or two, but the traffic compacted it into ice. I had to go out this afternoon to buy a loaf of bread, and the road from our house to the supermarket was really treacherous. I had to drive at walking pace and still skidded once or twice.
Mary has been stressed for the past few days. She always dislikes the run-up to a holiday, and she had a checklist a yard long of things that had to be done before we leave. Most of the items have been dealt with, but there are still quite a few things to do, like stopping the milk and newspaper deliveries, setting some of the house lights on timers to deter burglars, and sorting out some family photos to show to the relatives we'll be visiting. That's before we even start packing the suitcases. I think Mary will freak out if I spend much more time on the computer, so this had better be the last entry before we leave. I won't be able to access this journal while I'm away, so the next entry won't be until the beginning of April (it's just possible that I might post an occasional short note to my LiveJournal page from an internet cafe, but don't bank on it). I hope I won't have lost all (or should that be both?) my regular readers by then. If you would like to get a reminder when I'm back, please let me know.
