'He likes the radio on. I don't'

HE LIKES the television on all day, she can’t stand the constant background noise. She keeps disappearing for coffee with friends, he wants to know where she is going and when she’ll be back. Meanwhile, their daughter has decided they should exchange full-time work for full-time babysitting of their grandchildren. With thousands of public servants retiring at the end of this month there will be a lot more negotiating going on in Irish homes and not just in the areas you might expect.

“It’s not as straightforward as it might seem,” says John Higgins, chief executive of the Retirement Planning Council. “People tend to avoid planning in the area of personal relationships. They will talk about money and maybe their health or what they want to do in retirement but they don’t talk about their relationships and how they might change as a result of their working life coming to an end.”

The basis of it all has to be “respect”, according to retired doctor and sometime sailor Larry Fullam, who lives in Portarlington, Co Laois. He and his wife Dolores, a retired teacher, have spent the past few years navigating the occasionally choppy waters of relationships after retirement. “You can’t just come home, barge in the door and start making rules for other people,” he says. “Neither can those whose kingdom it always was suddenly start imposing their own rules. It’s about respect and it’s about listening.”

For Dolores, it’s the “niggly” aspects of life at home together that they are still adjusting to. “He likes the radio on all the time so that he can listen to the news and I don’t, so that’s probably the biggest thing,” she says. “And we are both untidy so there is the mess of two people in the house now. The papers are all over the dining room table, there’s my cup, the milk jug and the radio . . . ”

There are also minor disagreements about the newspaper. “I like to do the crossword and Sudoku, so I feel guilty because I am not going fast enough for him; he doesn’t like to split the paper. We also argue about the heating. I like less of it but he is never warm enough. He thinks I am going to freeze him to death.”

“So there’ll be no marks on the body,” interrupts a mischievous Larry, who is listening in.

Apart from these niggles, they are enjoying retirement. Larry has plenty of interests, including forestry, membership of a small choir, continuing medical education, a shed full of records and the boat in the back yard. Dolores reads a lot and writes book reviews for the local paper. She says that while the house can be quiet during the summer time when Larry sails, both of them facilitate each other’s independence. “I like the fact that he has his sailing and he doesn’t mind me going off and doing my own thing. It’s never a case of, ‘What will we do now?’”

It’s not all plain sailing though. “If you are rubbing up against someone the whole time, you notice things more, you also have more time to brood about things,” says Larry with a smile. “Sometimes I write it down in poems, light them and they go up the chimney. I recommend that as a coping mechanism.”

For those who need even more guidance, the Retirement Council are currently preparing a workbook aimed at retirees who want advice when it comes to relationship issues. They suggest couples each make a “wish list”, each taking a sheet of paper and writing down what they want to achieve over the first year, which, according to Higgins, is often the most difficult part of retirement.

“This list should include issues such as how much time they want to spend together, how much time apart, what were the things that appealed to them about working life and what appealed least. They should set down whether they want to travel, their view on retirement finances, shopping, cleaning, gardening and how much time they want to devote to grandchildren,” he says.

Once the list is made they should hand it over to each other, encouraging conversations and debate. “There’s a fierce lack of communication about the kind of retirement people want sometimes and that’s the biggest mistake people can make,” he says. “We also suggest a family conference where the wish lists are shared. Retirement is not just about the people retiring, it’s about the whole family, so the whole family needs to be involved.”

He mentions a woman on a recent retirement course that took place on a Monday and Tuesday. “She told us that she usually babysits for her daughter’s children on those days and when her daughter was told about the course, she suggested her mother do the course on Thursday and Friday instead.” The woman skipped the babysitting and did the course, despite the inevitable row. “When it comes to childcare we’d recommend communicating the fact that plans can change and nothing is set in stone; otherwise you might end up being taken for granted,” he adds.

For Ann Fitzsimons, a retired secondary schoolteacher, the most challenging part of retirement was suddenly being “answerable” to someone, in this case her husband Michael when he retired from his job as chief fire officer of Co Kildare. “He retired before me and I had this feeling that instead of going for coffee after school I should be coming home because he was now there . . . I think he found it hard to adjust at first. He had been in a position of authority, running the county, and now he only had me to run.”

And did he try to run her? “A little bit,” she says laughing. “At the beginning it was questions like where was I going, what time would I be home. I had to get that out of the way immediately saying, ‘I have no idea, I’m not committing myself.’ Then he started the cooking and that gave me a bit more freedom. It was great to come home to a dinner after I’d been doing it for all those years. It completely surprised me how he took to it.”

Michael says taking up cooking gave him an objective and helped him through those early months of retirement. “It would take me half the day between shopping and thinking up the recipes. It was therapeutic and very hands-on,” he says. When Ann retired, his new role as cook became more challenging. “There was two of us in the house, so there were little clashes over the cooking. She was watching what I was doing and I am a bit of an experimenter. I don’t tend to rely on the recipe book, so I’d be doing things a bit differently.”

“There were a few conversations about stew which I’ve been making for 40 years,” says Ann. “Definitely an element of teaching your granny to suck eggs.” There is also ongoing negotiation about one of Ann’s passions, which is travel. “She wants to see every country in the world where I am more, ‘Do we have to?’” says Michael.

They both enjoy how retirement has meant having more contact with their children. “We are delighted to be more involved with them; we’d run errands or give them lifts but they are very fair about it,” says Ann. “When my daughter-in-law broke her elbow I drove her around a lot because I had the time and as a result we got to know each other much better, which was great.”

Still, adult children seeking favours from parents with endless free time can sometimes be hazardous. One issue John Higgins of the Retirement Planning Council highlights is the inevitable demands on the time of retired people who are handy around the house.

“DIY savvy retirees need to watch out that they are not being called upon too much. We tell people to hang the first sheet of wallpaper upside down – that way you won’t be asked back again,” he says.

‘Don’t believe a word those experts tell you’

IF YOU happen to see a strange, bearded, grey-haired man lurking around supermarkets in south Co Dublin dressed in full mountain walking gear, armed with a shotgun, carrying a fishing rod and singing sea shanties at the top of his voice, say hello to me.

I am quite harmless but you see, I have just retired, a move that I did not believe would have the same impact on me as getting out all my teeth and having them replaced with a badly fitted set of new dentures.

To explain the garb, I was told at pre-retirement meetings I would be free after 44 years working to indulge myself in the pursuits I love so much: fishing, shooting, hill-walking, singing and doing the odd bit of sailing.

God forgive me, I believed them but, in fairness, they probably had not reckoned I would begin my new life by getting this damned cold or flu. I acquired this at a family party attended by my seven grandchildren. It was not so much a party as a germ factory where we all ended up sniffling and coughing.

This brought an abrupt end to my plans to eat some pheasant before the end of January and to climb Lugnaquilla at least three times before winter ended. By the time I had shifted the cold, the hunting season was over. And, of course, the fishing season has not started yet and my sore throat meant I could not sing properly, so I was well and truly retired.

But as I said earlier, don’t believe a damned word those experts tell you at pre-retirement meetings. It’s very interesting that the people who run these courses are normally people who have retired but where are they now? Back working.

I am not surprised, as they all skipped over the most difficult part of retirement: attempting to acquire a space in your own home, which you have had to vacate for your working life.

No woman wants someone who has been absent from early in the day until late at night and sometimes for days on end – for a working lifetime – to be permanently back, hanging around the kitchen or livingroom watching television.She never came to my office and sat at my desk in her pyjamas asking stupid questions while I was working, she explained.

But what to do? Do I join the other grand old men who shuffle around Marlay Park all day telling youngsters how good it is to be retired? Do I emulate one man I know, a life-long agnostic, who avoids domestic strife by attending Mass at 10 o’clock every morning?

Perhaps I could join another person I know of who has spent his early retirement taking cheap flights to the continent and smuggling cigarettes and booze home to his contacts. I suppose he is at least getting a bit of excitement in his life.

"This is not the end of your life but the beginning of a new era," they told me. How right they were. SEÁN MAC CONNELL

Social life Finding new friends

THE EXPERTS refer to it as “social replacement” in retirement. Many persons about to finish work will suddenly lose daily contact with a readymade group of friends and colleagues. According to Brian McIvor, a course leader with the Retirement Planning Council of Ireland, that social contact needs to be replaced.

“When you retire you lose up to 80 per cent of your social network. You spend a massive amount of your waking time with people at work,” says McIvor. Replacing that network is hugely important from a mental health point of view, but also to help put distance between the retiree and their former workplace. “It is unhealthy to go back and get involved in your job again. The thing is to look around within your community or organisations you belong to, and say, where are the areas I can replace that type of company?”

How hard is it to make new friends in older life? "Part of it is governed by your natural preference. Some people are extroverted and will find it easier, whereas introverts will tend to share with relatively few people. In retirement courses, it is important we flag the social transition and tell some people that they will have to move outside their comfort zone to find replacement friends." BRIAN O'CONNELL