Retirement?

I don’t think so. If I can retain sufficient fitness and faculty to keep working I will. I have ceased most of my businesses now and am just carrying on with the one stream of work, albeit on a part-time basis. That is not to say that I would not take on another piece of work though, just that I am no longer available for things that take me away from home overnight.

Anyone following me closely will notice that some of my business web sites, blogs and social media pages have gone. We no longer have the Florida villa, I am in the process of winding up Gulfhaven Ltd, DriverJohn has ceased trading and is no longer cruising the car shows and antiques fairs.

Covid had played a part in this because so much of what I was doing involved travel and personal contact, but there is also an element of it all becoming too much like hard work. The sale of the American vacation home five months before Covid began to bubble in China looks like a piece of strategic genius, but the reality is much more mundane in that it had always been a money pit, but after 17 years we had tired of it and when Wells Fargo sold our mortgage on to another company it gave us the excuse to just move on.

Gulfhaven had always had UK based clients, but in recent years most of its work had come from overseas and had seen me working in Thailand, Eire, Columbia, Libya and twice in China. All good fun and I feel privileged to have done it, but that time away from home was not something that I enjoyed. Covid shut down business consultancy in the form that Gulfhaven did it anyway. The adult education work became a pain in the arse through bureaucracy and a trend towards people being happier to study via on-line resources took away attendees so that work died.

As DriverJohn I traded though Antiques Centres and on-line, but a lot of that business came through events and auctions all of which dried up during lockdown and the hiatus found me doing other things with my time. I found that I enjoyed that more and so the trading has ceased. I do miss it to some degree because it was primal stuff; I made money using my wits and personality (or didn’t), but overall I am happier without the hassle. TV shows like Bargain Hunt have spoiled the fun in any case, but I can’t say any more about that.

So thinks are slimming down and, at some point, I shall have to look at slimming down some more, but I am still open to something interesting and will still do odd bits and pieces to supplement the paid work that I am about to enter into my seventh year of. Tempus fugit, and although I don’t have too much left now I have no intention of retiring any time soon.