It’s funny how your mind plays tricks on you at times. Take the morning we were heading up to Twickenham for the game between England and Wales, for example. In the front, Dave and Gareth, now both seventy years old, were waxing lyrical about their younger days - some booze filled caper with the lads on the way to a match in 1973. But in the back seat I couldn’t really hear them, and lost in my own little world I turned to a conversation I’d had recently with my two closest former colleagues - the ones I still see for lunch every few weeks. A little over a year after my departure, my former line manager in the senior team surprised everyone by announcing an early retirement of his own, and after much cajoling and sweet talking, the lady who replaced me eventually gave in and took the boardroom role - even though she really didn’t want to. When austerity comes knocking, it’s like that at times - you have to take the unwanted promotion and all that comes with it.
For a deluded moment I thought - “if I’d stayed, that would have been me with the telephone number salary, the big office and the senior leadership role, with entire summers on leave and holidays in the Maldives at Easter” Five years ago, in very tragic circumstances, I’d had to do the job myself for a year. Strange how easily I’d forgotten the long hours, the fact that you were still on call throughout the entire summer in the event of emergencies, that Saturdays and Sundays were no longer genuinely considered as leisure time. The endless Governing Body committee meetings. Going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark - who invented that? Then I thought to myself - “almost certainly a new government this year - new ideas, new changes.”
The constant changes - nothing was ever the same for more than a year or two before someone in Government or the Civil Service decided to bring in something new, adding to already overloaded diaries, probably just so they could get their name on the New Year’s Honours list. “When I started out, they put me with a bloke in his fifties,” says an old school mate of mine. “I was always saying to him, “what do we do that for? Why don’t we do it this way?” And he’d say, “no, we’re not changing things - it works this way.” And then he goes on to add, “Now I’m the bloke in his fifties who doesn’t want any new challenges, working alongside fresh faced youngsters who ask me why we don’t do it a different way.” “We have to keep changing just to keep standing still,” said the Principal at a Governors’ meeting once. It’s ok for the superhumans amongst us, but in the final years of work, most of us are just clinging on, being dragged along in their wake, waiting for the release date. Counting the days until they can enrol in that Tuesday afternoon watercolour class.
Odd, how for even an idle moment I might fantasise about that all consuming job. Glamour? No, definitely not. In the last few months I was so tired - barely out with the camera at all as I slumbered towards my retirement date. I’d made a plan and stuck to it - and I got out as soon as I possibly could. Two and a half years later I’ve never regretted it. Never regretted the days I’ve spent with the person who chose to share her life with me when I might otherwise have been toiling and barely seeing her at all, even on weekends. Those beautiful lazy mornings, with coffee and idle chat, when we both remind ourselves how much better life is when you’re not yoked to an endless plough. Nobody has ever made me laugh like she does. No more getting up and heading out into the filthy darkness in horrible queues of traffic - no more miserable journeys home in the pouring rain, contemplating all the things that haven’t been done yet. “Time is more important to me than money,” said my closest colleague once, and that stuck with me. In a simple sentence, she’d encapsulated just how I felt.
Here’s another thing. Three weeks in Fuerteventura. That would have been impossible back then. Three weeks off work was a non-starter most of the time - you had to ask special permission for such a long break. And then of course you didn’t have much leave entitlement left afterwards either. At this time of year, I might just have got away with a fleeting week, but I’d have spent it worrying about what wasn’t being done at my desk. Worrying about those urgent committee papers that needed doing as soon as I was back in the office. Even a weekend at the Rugby international brought its challenges - asking to go early on Friday, coming home late on Sunday. Now when we finally get the boarding call to return home, we’re going back to those lazy mornings with coffee and idle chat again.
We aren’t here for long. And somewhere along the last few years, I became acutely conscious that there are far more of them behind us than those that remain ahead. So it was always the right decision to spend as much time as possible with the most important person in my life, sharing moments together, no matter how small they might be. These are the days of greatness to me, and nothing I ever achieved in my career comes close. And just now and again, I might witness a sunset I’d never have seen from behind my desk all those miles away in another lifetime. If that’s not time well spent, I’m really not sure what is.