Category Archives: Menton France

Retiring, doing, being

Not doing anything important or worthy of a salary left me feeling a bit lost at first. For all my years of freelancing and part-time employment, I still had the attitude of a career professional. Even if I was no longer career-minded and shimming up the greasy pole, I had made a connection between earning and doing something purposeful and meaningful to someone aside from myself. Being aware that I felt uncomfortable in my retirement skin and deconstructing the reasons for it has weakened the intensity of these negative thoughts. Awareness is always a first step. I no longer think about not earning and its social link to what is important.

I’m still deconstructing the concept of doing – doing something rather than nothing – doing something purposeful or meaningful (words laden with subjectivity). An article by the science writer Ed Young in the New York Times has put perspective on this. He was writing about his fascination with birds and all his bird-watching activities. He writes, interestingly with bird as a verb:

‘Of course, having the time to bird is an immense privilege. As a freelancer, I have total control over my hours and my ability to get out in the field. “Are you a retiree?” a fellow birder recently asked me. “You’re birding like a retiree.” I laughed, but the comment spoke to the idea that things like birding are what you do when you’re not working, not being productive. I reject that. These recent years have taught me that I’m less when I’m not actively looking after myself, that I have value to my world and my community beyond ceaseless production and that pursuits like birding that foster joy, wonder and connection to place are not sidebars to a fulfilled life but their essence.’

Indeed, some of the things I’ve been doing in my retirement have fostered ‘joy, wonder and connection to place,’ or in my case places – Ely, England and Menton, France. Perhaps doing in retirement connects one more to being.

What I’ve been reading

La Decision by Karin Tuille (available in English) is a novel set in the world of the French judiciary soon after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. It’s a glimpse into the world of terrorism and the law that other books and certainly films rarely jump into with such depth and introspection. Told in two narrative strands it has a first-person narrator, Alma, an examining magistrate, recounting her forensic examination of the life and motivations of a young terrorist suspect at a time when her marriage is falling apart – it too, receives an intense examination. The second strand has the terror suspect being interrogated by a judge, presented in the style of a courtroom transcript. Both strands carry personal and social weight, encouraging the reader to experience a range of emotions along the way.

Pompeii by Mary Beard is a book I heard the author speak about several years ago on the back of her TV series of the same name. This historical account updates what we know about the life in the famous town at the time of the volcanic eruption. Savouring the details of daily life, the coverage might be too precise for some readers, and I confess, at times it made for a good bedtime read. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Beard speak live about Pompeii and again more recently about Roman emperors. What I like about her work is that she spends considerable time looking at the assumptions held by other historians and archaeologists, punching holes in their views and admitting that there still is a lot that we simply do not know. Incidentally, Mary Beard is 69 and is clearly busy doing.

Arrival Menton

My pause from blogland can be attributed to one thing – moving and settling in Menton. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that David and I have had a second home in Nice for nearly 15 years. We sold that and most of the furniture in it back in September and waited five months for the deal to close on our new apartment in Menton, up the coast from Nice. We’re still in the same neck of the beaches, the Cote d’Azur, famous for its year-round sunshine, clement winters and history of artistic and celebrity residents.

Recreating a home in the south of France has involved an embarrassing amount of shopping – from a flatpack bed to drill bits, with a second-hand sofa, dining table, chairs and curtains along the way – and intensive decorating, featuring the massacre of butterfly and floral decals and the removal of in-built wardrobe and cabinets, leaving behind the tasks of scraping off wallpaper and filling vacant screw holes marks with buckets of Polyfilla, soon to be followed by painting. Luckily, no major renovations are needed. We have a tastefully tiled bathroom with walk-in shower and a fully functioning kitchen, albeit with a temperamental washing machine that prefers to work in the mornings.

My bloggery silence hasn’t been just about furnishing and DIY in extremis. This move marks the start of my retirement in earnest, the deletion of the prefix semi before retirement to describe my academic position. I’ll finish my last contract with my final doctoral student in the autumn. That’s all that’s left. My life is now devoid of course writing and research and the publish or perish culture. That is strange – as strange as a local bus trip to Italy, as strange as swimming in the winter sea. Like so many retired people, I’ll continue to ‘keep a hand in’ as they say, taking on the odd editing assignment that comes my way. The difference now is that for the first time in my adult life, I’m not looking for work or trying to keep the work I’ve got.

This naturally makes me think about my other career as a writer. I haven’t considered myself semi-retired from that. I used to think that writers never retire, but some writers have packed it in (Phillip Roth and Wendy Cope come to mind). I’m starting to wonder if I should take at least a partial retirement from writing. This means working to my own pace on fiction and creative non-fiction and still calling myself a writer (it’s too sexy to shake off). This isn’t too different from what I have been doing in recent years, since I stopped scriptwriting and therefore applying for funding, managing a theatre group and delivering workshops. Yet something different is palpable, my ambition, my desire for writer recognition, ended around the time we put in our offer on the Menton apartment.

I can’t stop all together – writing is as natural as breathing and as necessary as meditation. And there still are things to write about – nature, personal growth, language, books…

What I’ve Been Reading

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara makes for a long book (700 plus pages) but is also one of the best novels I’ve read in decades. It tackles difficult subjects, like abuse, torture and self-harm, and this can make for painful reading at times. But there are payoffs. The psychological depths of the story, revolving around the friendships of four men over the years and one man in particular, Jude, presents a complex and believable narration. Jude is a perpetual victim, but also a survivor that other characters (and this reader) agonise over and applaud in equal measure.

The Authority Gap byMary Ann Sieghart,written a few years ago, covers the myriad of ways in which men are assumed to have more authority, more knowledge and experience than their female counterparts. By the author’s own admission, you would have thought that this has all been said before and that we have moved on to a more equal co-existence. Yet, it’s something that we know still happens and have become desensitised to and have stopped talking about. Or in my case, being all too aware of this, occasionally I have used my bone-dry sense of humour to point out that I’m the Supervisor and not a mature student or that yes, I really did this [fill in the blank with something technical] all by myself without causing grievous injury. Seighart points out how the authority gap is played out in our actions, individual and institutional, and in our use of language. Specific examples come from a hefty dataset of anecdotes from powerful women, including some of my heroes like Christine Lagarde, Julia Gillard and Madeleine Albright, who have all been undermined and underestimated. Amusing and cringeworthy at the same time.

Seven Days to Tell You by Ruby Soames is a remarkable thriller, full of twists that go beyond the plot-driven variety, questioning the ideas of love and commitment. Since I don’t want to give anything away – discovery and speculation are key to reader enjoyment – I’ll have to be brief. A woman’s husband disappears for three years. To say more than that would even spoil the curious first chapter. I will say this – it takes place mostly in London, but also has flashbacks to the French Riviera, hence, I conclude this blog from where it began.

Our new street in the Carei valley in Menton.