Less than three months

I went to two Christmas dinners this week with former colleagues. The first, on Monday, was with the investigative team I used to work with. The second, yesterday, was some people from corporate services. What's astonishing, in less than three months, is how things have moved on already. The pace of change always seemed continental drift-like while I worked there. Now it seems merely glacial. They are recruiting mainstream investigators - the post from which I was made redundant - to fill the gaps left by secondment of existing investigators to the new work areas. This is stoopid, evidently, but I'm happy to have benefited from it.

There's a new knowledge management manager, and the intranet really is, after all this time, just about to get updated. Meanwhile, computer systems are being tightened up, and made more corporately uniform. I don't think I'd like that. My desktop had a picture of St Mary in the Marsh in Kent, which I found more attractive than an intranet home page is likely to be. (But I was always astonished by the number of people who hadn't changed the desktop background, and still had the windows default "teletubbies hill" picture. Presumably they won't mind.)

It's all overdue and inevitable, I suppose, but some things don't change. It was really nice to see Rita again. She's an HR person, and with two very young children she's been on maternity leave for a very long time, it seems. I can't deny I've a bit of a crush on her; she's very attractive, and has an infectious laugh a lot like Alesha Dixon's - only louder and dirtier. Her husband (curse him!) is a lecturer, and his job has taken them to Birmingham. So she asked the management if she could return to work but based at the Coventry office. With apparently not a moment's thought, the answer was no, so she's leaving. Such a waste.

Dreaming of work

This is a post about a dream I had last night. I state this as fair warning. Look away now, is the best advice.

Simply, the dream was that I was back at work, and that my desk was piled up with all the work I left behind three weeks ago, as if they were expecting me to come back and finish it. I felt really anxious about this.

OK. That's it. As dreams go, not very interesting for me, the dreamer, or for you, the tellee. But not very embarassing either. Quite obvious in its meaning: I'm just about coming to the end of the time a holiday might last; I need to decide inside if I'm going back to that job or not. It still feels as if I could turn up on Monday and say, hi, I'm back, how've you been? Obv, that's not going to happen, and dreams like this are part of interiorising that.

Also, I suppose, there's a statement that I believe they won't be able to manage without me. A wish that someone will say how indispensable I was. In reality, of course, they're more likely to shout at me for all the shit I left behind. That's the main reason I don't plan to go to the office anytime soon.

Hangover

I'm currently ambling through the best-deserved hangover in my life. Last night we celebrated the early retirement of the four of us, with an absolutely brilliant party at St George's Tavern in Victoria. The place was packed and rocking, and it was good to see so many people who'd come back - often many miles. People had turned up from Ludlow, Corby, Newcastle and even Normandy! It was the best leaving party I've ever been to, and not just because it was mine. It was so great to see so many old faces and to see them having such a good time. I can't remember feeling happier - I was beaming all evening like an idiot.

Thanks to everyone who came along - I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Photos, by the way, are viewable on my facebook page.

Thank you, colleagues. Can I go now?

Today saw the official speeches and presentation to mark my leaving (I still find it impossible to call it retirement). Never mind that I've got a week to go, it happened today because J, my fellow leaver, won't be back. I'm in denial about that because I really will miss her. She's one of the first people I met when I started this job, and she's been the ideal example of a good worker and a good colleague. She's the kind of person who ought to get a speech of thanks by management every year. I hope she wasn't surprised by the warmth and respect that was shown to her today. I can't think of anyone I've ever worked with who is so loved by her colleagues.

As for me, I've got a big card full of warm wishes and a new camera. It's tiny but lovely, a Canon Ixus 95. Well done, Tom, taking the hint that my Amazon wishlist might be a good place to look! According to the specification, this camera is cleverer than me. It can recognise faces. Good, maybe it can tell me who the person on the train tomorrow is, the one I will be sure I've met before. It can eliminate shake, detect blinking, and focus automatically. That's more than I can do most days.

Counting down

This is not an interesting post, tbh, just one of those people write to fill in the gaps.

The countdown really has begun now: in a month's time, I'll be retired. Retired! It hardly seems possible, I hear you gasp. At last, I've started running down the workload, but there's going to be lots left over. I've got yet another complaint about what qualifies a child to be a Catholic. I am becoming an expert. So I'll tell the story of why Pope John Paul II was not a Catholic.

There's a Catholic boys' school in London that is very popular. So it gives preference to Catholic boys, and defines catholicism quite stricly according to canon law. This says that a child should take First Communion as soon as possible after they reach the Age of Reason, and that the Age of Reason is 7. So for a boy to be Catholic, he has to take First Communion before he's 8. But in Poland, they do things differently. Children don't take Communion until they are 9 or 10. The school turned down an application from a Polish boy because of this. I found out that Pope John Paul II, educated in Poland of course, had not taken Communion until he was 9 or 10. At this, the school changed its mind.

But they were right. Canon Law seems really clear on this, and it's universal: local Churches really shouldn't change it. So the Pope was not a Catholic. Most of Poland - which you'd assume to be the most Catholic country in Europe - isn't.

Second reason for celebration is Charlton's successful passage through the transfer window. No important players going and a little bit of back-up coming in. Since my last post, the winning streak has gone up to five games - Charlton's best ever start to a season. (Last season, they didn't record their fifth win until January!) And the next two games (home to Brentford and Southampton) look entirely winnable. It's utterly bizarre and intoxicating.

Surprisingly close

From March to June, time moved so slowly. It seemed like my leaving would never arrive. And at that time the amount of work coming in was so reduced, it was almost too quiet. But now, here I am, just over two months away from my early retirement, my self-inflicted poverty. Things are moving. I've got too much work. I won't be able to finish it. My colleague, J, frets about this. She's nicer than me, and worries about what she'll leave behind. Me, I'll just be happy to leave it.

We've arranged the leaving party - a room in a pub on 30 September, the exact and obvious date to choose. And I've booked virtually every Monday until then as leave, to use it up, but also to give me a taste of not-working.

On Friday I'm going to a pre-retirement course. Organised by some people called Laterlife, which sounds like the provisional wing of Senilitas. I'm dreading/hoping that everyone else will be much older than me, and talking about their plan to move to Spain, to get away from all the foreigners. Me saying, no actually I want more time to appreciate the innacity life, innit.

The course, funnily enough, is at UCL, so I've been provok'd to look again at the MA syllabus in Comparative Literature. It's got me wishing I'd gone for it this year. The best, most exciting, bit is the course on translation studies. I was talking about this to someone at work who clearly didn't see how translation could be contentious - for him, it was straightforward, a matter of knowledge and skill. Just reading the syllabus, I can see how it's much more than that, even beyond the concerns I have as a reader. This part of the course is the one where education is valuable for showing you what you don't know.

And also, I noticed in the marking scheme that this gets a pass mark:

The piece of work is relevant, shows signs of understanding, but nevertheless a rather thin or incomplete grasp of the material. There is little independent thought, ideas are not always well expressed, and the structure is deficient at some levels. The bibliography is rather thin, or inconsistent, or incomplete.

I think I can aspire to that.

Someone asked me today if I had had any second thoughts. I can honestly say, and I honestly said, that I really haven't. Given my genetic inheritance, I need to get my retirement done before I'm 65, and even if, by happy mischance, I live longer than that I can do it. Even if, eventually, my house is all tied up in equity release schemes. Sorry, nieces and nephew.

15 years

It's exactly 15 years today since I started working at my current employer, so it's fitting that today's the day I received my formal dismissal letter. For those who haven't been paying attention, this is good news. The more I think about it, the better it is. It's like a gift of many thousands of pounds, and even more important, of a lot of time. As well as the redundancy cheque, I'll be able to draw an unreduced pension. If I had just retired early, my pension would be reduced by around 40%. So my employer has had to make a fairsized contribution to my pension fund. And the even better news is that all this lovely money is coming from the institution formerly known as evil govt. I have five days in which to appeal (as if) and then roughly six months' notice, with my final day being 30 September.

My intention to go back to University is stalled at the moment. I found out last week that I need a transcript of my academic record, and have sent to Cambridge for that. Their website warns that it can take four weeks. The other potential problem is that with graduate unemployment so high, it's possible more new graduates will be applying for a master's, so by the time I can get my application in, it may be too late. That would not be the end of the world. I can wait a year, and in the meantime prepare myself better. Over on the Ezra Pound blog you can see my critical powers coming back to life. Some of what's there is really pretty naive and certainly lacking much theoretical thought.

Last night we celebrated the first departure - Jill, one of our team admin staff, is off at the end of March. Her dream is to buy a property in Sligo, and spend her retirement there. Currently the exchange rate and the dead property market make it difficult but she made it sound so attractive! It's years since I've been to Ireland, but I feel tempted by the thought of somewhere like Galway - a lively town with a lot of charm, as I recall.

I shall be released

Finally, so many months later, the news is in that I can take voluntary redundancy/early retirement. Not quite yet, though. At the end of September, in fact. So it will have taken about a year from decision to departure.

There was a feeling of happiness among the four of us today, though certainly for my part tinged with fear. I think it will be hard to live on the reduced income. But if I'm successful in getting onto an MA course, at least it'll be more than a year before I go mad with loneliness and boredom.

Here's the course I'm probably going to apply for. Really full details of the progamme there. A lot of it is fairly familiar to me from my first degree, but I only really got into theory towards the end, and after. Some of it, like post-colonialism and queer theory, was still very new then. On the whole I'm a bit surprised that the main approaches don't seem to have moved on that much. It doesn't look as if anyone with the impact of a Barthes or a Derrida has appeared in the last 30 years or so.

Exciting times ahead, probably.

When good news goes bad

We finally had the budget news today and it's totally unexpected. Evil govt has searched down the back of the settees and found more money. Not only an increase on the basic budget, but some extra money to deal with anticipated new demand, and even more to set up more new services in 2010/11. So the organisation is getting more money than ever, and will in overall terms need to lose nobody - in fact it will grow.

So this puts in doubt whether those who want to leave can. The only hope is that the change in our business will need a change in personnel. Broadly speaking, we may need fewer generic investigators, like me, and more people with specialist knowledge and experience in social care and education. Da management knows that those who volunteered for voluntary redundancy have completely mentally committed to it and will be hard to motivate, so there may be efforts to get evil govt to look at it this way. At least, it's not ruled out. But once again, it's going to be a long time before we know the outcome.

About redundancy

I haven't discussed this much - the strand of this blog that covers my possible early retirement. The background is that evil govt has slashed my employer's budget for the year beginning in April 2009, so there have to be redundancies. When this was first mentioned, I got the figures for what I could expect. As I'm over 50 if I took VR I'd be entitled to collect my pension. It's not a huge amount but it's probably surviveable. At least it would provide a nice background income, enabling me to work from time to time. I'd also of course get a fairly large lump sum of redundancy money and pension. In those days, I imagined this would earn me some interest, but that seems less significant now. I can't believe they're seriously talking about 0% - is the whole world forsaking usura?

Anyway, I formally applied and today we were due to hear the outcome. It seems that so many people have applied for VR that whatever happens there will be no need for compulsory redundancies. This probably means that some of those who've applied for VR won't get it. There's a complicated points scheme to select them. We won't know anything more until probably January, when the final budget figure is given to us by evil govt. So there's a chance I will have to keep working after all.

In other news, my Brain of Britain was broadcast today. It still seemed to me that the other people got easier questions! But I was amazed that I got one question (what's the name of the biggest satellite of some planet?) right - where did that answer (Ganymede) come from? I can't even remember the name of the planet now. And I am glad that three of my correct answers were the following: Fidelio, Leporello, Elgar's 1st Symphony. Come on, Counterpoint, I'm ready for yuh.

A rite of passage

This evening I am officially a grown-up. I had a meeting with a man from the Pensions Fund and as a result have acted swiftly to maximise my tax advantages in the time before I expect to early-retire. Basically it's this: I've requested that half my salary from now on goes into an AVC - additional voluntary contribution. It means the pay is tax-exempt, but I can't get at it until I retire - ie, if the plan works, in April. Then I claim it as a taxfree lump sum payment, which will mean I will have lawfully avoided paying nearly £2000 in income tax. It's also a fairly extreme way of forcing myself to save some money, and should give some idea of what life after work will be like.

And it's with the Prudential. I love the Pru ever since the surprise they gave us after Mum died. She had an old, penny-a-week, life policy with them, that had long been considered paid up. I remember the charming young man from the Pru who used to call every fortnight to collect the premiums. Mum's policy had been sitting in a cupboard with a face value of about £50. I sent in the claim and somewhere in the Pru's cupboards was their fading copy, which in the meantime had increased in value to about £2000. Mum would have loved that!