I WAS going to pretend that I was a 70-year-old pensioner, but to be very honest with you I'm just a 17-year-old student in TCD, but that doesn't make my advice invalid, I'll be an OAP in time enough, and I don't think I'll have changed very much by then!
Remember one thing, you're retiring, not dying. Ignore all those weather-beaten, withered, retired gripers - they were never happy, and now they have time (too much of it) to realise it. Your retirement is another exciting passage in your life, don't think that your best times have passed, or you'll get lazy and start living in the past. They are yet to come, and do me a favour, write "Enjoy" on your hand every morning, in case you forget what you're meant to be doing for the day!
Don't print my name in the paper, I have yet to assess how "cool" or "with it" Maeve Binchy is considered in TCD.
Anon
Somewhere or other I knocked across an idea for retired people - a group visits the law courts when an interesting case comes up, and then retires for coffee and discusses the case and say if they think the accused guilty or not. It could be an interesting club, don't you think?
Margery Brady, Kilkenny
My Plan
There were hundreds more letters. Positive, reassuring, encouraging and affirming that we are not our jobs, we are ourselves. I have no fear that the summer will hang long and heavily in my hands. Or that the years ahead will be without purpose.
I've seen too many writers caught up in the treadmill of writing books for the mass market who grew old and crotchety having to deliver so many words every two years and tramp around the world promoting them. I've been at festivals, promotions, literary lunches and book signings with them and heard them sigh and groan. This is wrong, that is wrong, the distances in airports are getting longer, the audience out there is getting younger. And the publishers ever more demanding.
One evening last year I shared a platform with a much older writer who had the nearest thing to a nervous breakdown in public that I have ever seen. She sent back the food, kept tinkling her glass with her fork to complain that others were speaking too long, bit the head off anyone who asked for an autograph . . . which was, after all, why she was there.
"This is intolerable," she said to me over and over. "Why don't you stop, then, and give up?" I asked mildly. Stop? Give up? It had taken so long, it was so hard to claw your way up to here, how could anyone think of stopping at this point?
I unwisely suggested that she might possibly have enough money now, an understatement of colossal proportions.
"Nobody has enough money," she snapped. That was the moment I decided to retire, and since that time I have never changed my mind. There is no lingering regret, because in a way I suppose we all slow down anyway, without realising it.
I look out at the roads in Dalkey that I used to run down, yes run down, to get the train into the schools I was teaching at, or to The Irish Times office, and I can't imagine where the energy could have come from.
I see the Number Nine bus when I go back to London and remember how I caught that at Olympia for years at 7 a.m. and got out in Fleet Street for a banana sandwich in Chubbies and into a job which might mean going to any part of the map that day.
Nowadays, going to work is a walk up a spiral staircase to a desk so full of things promised, but not achieved, that the day begins with a monumental sense of guilt.
There has never been time to decide exactly which 80 per cent of the papers and files cluttering every drawer and every shelf should go and which 20 per cent should stay.
Any de-cluttering I have ever done up to now has involved throwing out things like my passport and my letter from Flann O'Brien, while retaining acrimonious correspondence with a dry cleaners 30 years ago about an outfit that had only been worn three times and had now shrunk to a doll's size. A very small doll's size. I don't remember either the outfit or the incident, but out of panic I kept the file.
There will be weeks and months ahead to sort things like that out. Many great happy trips to the dump in Ballyogan Road. There will be journeys without lugging the laptop along, and evenings sitting down in the garden, reading books written by other people instead of sitting upstairs at the desk writing lying faxes to publishers about my own books, claiming they are nearly finished when in fact they are barely begun.
I have this notion that when the phone rings it might be a friend from now on, rather than someone wondering where something promised is. And there could be times when there's lovely sunshine when we might take the DART to Howth for lunch instead of saying that it would take too many hours out of the working day.
I do not believe those who say I will regret it and find myself at a loose end at 11 every morning.
I will not be like a man I knew who woke at 6.30 a.m. every day for two years after his retirement and lay anxiously in bed wondering if the office was in chaos without him.
Nor a neighbour in London who said she was afraid she was very dull, because since she didn't go out to work she had no conversation. Actually her conversation about work had been excruciating, she was far more entertaining on gardening.
I will have another huge novel out at the end of August and of course I have plenty of short stories already written, published here and there, and collected neatly in a big ring file. They can appear from time to time in tasteful collections.
I do not believe that people get sluggish and brain-dead and go round in their dressing gowns when they retire, I think they get better.
Some of my best role models and the happiest people I know are those who have retired and cannot find enough hours in the day to do the things they like doing.
They are free from guilt and fuss and are very restful without having actually gone to sleep. I've been looking at them wistfully for about six months now. And it's not that I haven't had a great time at work. I've enjoyed every job I had in four decades.
The days as a waitress, though exhausting, were great; teaching in Cork, though lonely, meant I met a lot of great kids. I had eight years in Pembroke School, Dublin, teaching history, which I loved, and taught my pupils so well that they eventually became my bosses. I taught in Zion Schools, Dublin, met the entire Jewish community, who made me very welcome, and last week I met many of them again in Israel.
At the age of 28 I came as an ageing cub to The Irish Times, where everything was, and is, all I could have hoped for in a newspaper. They even let me follow my heart over to its London office when I was keen on a fellow over there, and they let us come back when the fellow and I bought a house in Dalkey.
Publishers in many lands have got my storybooks out there into the shops where booksellers have put them in their windows and people have bought them.
I am more grateful for all this than I can say.
When I was a child I was what was then called a Notice Box - someone who wanted a lot of attention.
And on behalf of us Notice Boxes everywhere, let me say that attention is not always easy to get. So for the very great amount I was able to grab from you all, thank you from the bottom of my heart.