Having finished all the renovations three years before, we'd been enjoying the fruits of our labours in terms of our immediate environment, the house, the courtyard. I'd been making music in my studio in the basement, Ticia had been getting more and more involved in an organic lifestyle, trying to make our food, the products we used, as natural and as harmless and as effective as possible, whilst producing the occasional painting in her own studio, her atelier, in the converted attic space.
I would catch a plane to go to work in London most Monday mornings, and return early Friday evening to spend a weekend writing music, eating (and sometimes cooking) the latest inventions to issue forth from our kitchen and our imaginations, and generally enjoying the city life and the seasons in the south-west corner of France.
The only real problem was money. Life was very expensive. In addition to a mortgage on the house in Bordeaux, another on the apartment in La Rochelle we hadn't yet managed to sell, and the rent on a flat in Earls Court where I stayed during the week, there was the cost of my flights every week and the expenses and upkeep of three properties, two of which were lying empty. But still, if all we wanted to do was keep that lifestyle going, it didn't really seem to be a worry: debts built up over the course of the year and then in February, a hand reached down from somewhere, lined the bank account with a bonus, and everything reset to a little above zero again.
So life was bumbling on in a comfortable kind of way, and then two things happened that made us reconsider. One - Lucie decided to move in with her boyfriend and we realised that, if we had seen her being at university in Bordeaux as a reason for us to be there, that reason was gone. And then in the same week...
...in the aftermath of a storm that lasted just half an hour, the road in front of the house was flooded with water that rose up out of the drains as the underground system overloaded. And it flooded the basement, where I had built my music studio, again... After the first time it happened, back in 2008, I was always a little wary of having my gear down there, with all those electrical connections. This time I started to get depressed about the whole idea. If it had happened twice, it would happen a third time, and a fourth...
The two things together - Lucie checking out of home and the wet basement - catalysed our thinking, and over the next few weeks a plan emerged. We'd sell the house in Bordeaux, and the apartment in La Rochelle. If possible, we'd sell the house in Sonnac too, but that was more of a difficult one to find a buyer for. In any case, we'd pack up all our stuff, and we'd move to England, where - if we had just one house and one mortgage and no rented flat, and if we watched out for the pennies a little - we could think about me taking early retirement.
As the plan hatched, and then developed, I worked out that the date of my retirement could be three years after we sold the two properties in France and bought a house in England. We put a big effort into advertising and selling the apartment in La Rochelle, and by the following spring, we'd found a buyer. After that it was time to try to sell the house in Bordeaux. That took a little bit longer. After a lot of promising starts that came to nothing, and a big part of the summer spent installing Lucie in an apartment in Toulouse,where she had been accepted for a Masters degree, we'd still not found a buyer by the time our plan reached the next stage - moving over to the UK to start out in rented accomodation. But in December, two months after taking up temporary residence with Djé and Pastelle in a freezing cold flat in Porlock, we found a buyer for the house and set about our own search in the UK in the run-up to Christmas. And in the last week of February 2013, we completed on the purchase of Vexford House, and there we were.
And as the plan said, three years after that date, I could retire from my job in London... And here we are, we've been in the house for two years and nine months, and I have just 16 weeks of work left to go...
It is going to be strange to stop. OK, I tried it eleven years ago - I gave up work, and for eight months, I stopped living by the clock, but that was kind of different and life was complicated. This time, everything is more simple. And giving up work is for real, it's based on a stronger financial position - I can't wait. It's not that I don't enjoy what I do - sometimes it can be really quite fulfilling. But ask me whether I really want to get myself out of bed at 4am on a Monday morning to get myself to the station for the early train to London, ask me whether I can truly be bothered about what the audit trail of my sales activity looks like on the management information systems, ask me whether I truly believe that what I am doing is bringing people a better future. Much as I am sure somebody, somewhere would like me to say "yes" to all those three, the enthusiasm and the belief are starting to wear a little thin.
It's said that as we get older we get more cynical about things. I don't really want to think of myself as a cynic - a sceptic, yes, but not someone who has no faith in anything. All the same it does seems to me that a lot of what I hear from a corporate level these days has a bit of the unreal about it. I have a picture in my head of increasing stress in the system, in me, in those I work with, in the whole environment. A few years ago, people were far more relaxed. The working day had some holes in it - for example when travelling to and from client meetings, or when entertaining, or being entertained. These days the ubiquitous iPhone or Android or Blackberry is always there, always alive, always giving you that guilt feeling - the vaguely uneasy realisation that someone is watching you. There is no escape, and unfortunately, we're not actually paid more for the added burden or stress of being permanently connected by the technological umbilical cord to the office. I feel quite sorry for those in the generation after me. They will likely never know the feeling of freedom that we had in the past, the space that existed for those of us who were prone to laziness. There is no opportunity to be lazy these days. And that's a shame, because some of my best thinking - professionally speaking that is - probably came from those moments of idleness.
I pick up a Times from my hotel reception each morning I am in London, and I attack the crossword on the tube. The stress of the coming day is there, in my head, and sometimes I find it really difficult to make those lateral connections, to solve those left-field clues, on the way to work. But coming back in the evening - if I feel I've one a good day's work - the answers seem to flow out of my pen without thinking a lot of the time. It's because I've switched off, and I can free my thinking and get it away from that structured, time-constrained pressure that is the working day. Periods like that used to happen within the working day too, but now there is no time - there's always a list of goodness knows how many things that shout for my attention in my inbox.
The stress in the corporate system is increasing. Everyone has to become more efficient and more productive every year, or - well - the system doesn't work. Because there isn't often much focus on investing to grow the business - now it's all about maximising existing assets, and if possible, stripping the asset base a little. And those assets, in a business like the one where I work, are the people. So much so that there is (I discovered last week) a "human capital committee" in my organisation.
For me, the rather nasty inference of that title - the "human capital committee" is that the capital belongs to the firm, in the same way as financial capital or intellectual capital. I rather prefer to think that my own "human capital" belongs to me, and that if I choose to, I can rent my skills to an employer, but I never become a part of their capital - I never become a part of their balance sheet.
OK, so I agree, it's not a nine to five job. We get paid a lot of money in the city. But this relentless grind upwards in terms of activity levels, technology, efficiency, connectivity, productivity, it can't go on for ever. Something, somewhere has to crack. Either it's the people, because they are pushed too far, made to run too fast, or it's the company itself. And if the company cracks and the profits fall, then the market will beat up the share price, and there'll be cutbacks and down-sizing and more efficiency drives, and a proportion of those people - even the ones who didn't crack under the pressure - will be out of the door and on the market again.
I'm not saying that life in the finance industry has not always been very competitive and relatively high-risk in terms of job-retention in the bad times. But things have changed a lot over the past five years or so. It's like those dustbin men in France. I'm sure that ten years ago, they could walk around the city, lobbing the bin bags into the back of the lorry as they made their measured way around a familiar route with the lorry keeping up with them and following their pace. Clearly the demands from management to squeeze more collections into an eight hour shift have increased, because now, those bin men seem to spend the entire day running in order to keep up with the progress of the lorry. So where once the lorry was a useful tool for them - effectively their servant as they went about their business of cleaning the city of waste, now the lorry is the tyrant and it inflicts its hard regime on the bin-men, who are forced to run in order to a) keep up with it, and b) keep their jobs. And that is pretty much exactly my picture of the asset management sector now. Where once, the company's progress and velocity was the result of its collective employees' individual progress with some benefits of synergy, now the company says what it is going to do, and God help the employees (and the share price) if they don't keep up with the corporate forecast.
All I can say to that is thank God I'm retiring next year.
And yes, the weeks tick by...
As I'm eating my breakfast on a Monday morning, I usually write Ticia a little note to leave under her laptop on the kitchen table. Around two years ago, I started noting down how many weeks remained until i could give up work - so the number was around the low 100s. And now, it's down to just 16... March 2016 is D-Day - or maybe R-Month would be a better description. In any case, the tax year 2016/17 will see me return to being a basic rate taxpayer for the first time since about 1990 I think.
There's loads to do for a couple of years anyway - finishing off the earthworks in the garden, and getting on with the house, which has been somewhat neglected over the first three years, apart from the bathroom and our bedroom, which is still not finished. But also, I'm going to spend a certain amount of my time meandering round the country lanes on my bike and getting fit again, writing some new music (God I'm bored with all that stuff I did in 2009-2011!) - yes there will be time for all of that, and maybe even time to spare. After all, if you can get by on a limited income and be wide awake and healthy, then what is life but to be enjoyed?.
Come on, March 2016, I'm ready for you
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