Profit on day £175
(A better day. Some discipline restored. Unfortunately, it’s now Cheltenham for the next three days, the place where discipline and I become arch enemies. And in these forays, sometimes you get the bear…)
My best friend retired yesterday – aged 56. He’s not the first of our (very lucky) University friends to do so, but is the first of our little gang. Our chatgroup wished him luck on his last day at work, and indulged in some jealousy-tinged badinage.
“I now have the disquieting feeling of having lost a race I didn’t know I was in to a finishing line I couldn’t locate,” said one.
“Indeed, as if someone has just brashly run past, elbows out, wiggling his back-side” said another.
“Actually, Gary won that race years ago,” said a third.
“Yes, but he was running in a different race” said the fourth.
Which is true. I was never running in the same race, nor in reality, in a race at all. Which I have to say, back when I was working for the Man, was often very confusing for some of the aspirational men (and it was always men) I worked with. They assumed I was some sort of competitor and either didn’t trust that I wasn’t, or lacked the imagination to see that I wasn’t, or resented me for not being in their club. Plus, I was an arsehole.
Still, I’ve never regretted, in effect, retiring from that world aged 37. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance…