For those of us who have no care for the passport/bucket list lifestyle, it is said of retirement that having caught up with the backlog of jobs around the home and sorted out all those photographs, there remains only boredom.  Yet others, probably those with an absorbing hobby or ongoing family commitments, wonder how they ever found the time to go to work.

Speaking for myself, after a working life of technical writing and problem solving, none of it remuneratively game changing, what I craved of retirement was a tiny gravestone at the end of my garden and some blank pages upon which to alloy my knowledge of railway history with my imagination.  Should you be wondering about the gravestone, it reads: RIP alarm clock, the initials standing for Rust In Peace.  Until the unshackling of my imagination from working life’s alarm clock tyranny, the pace of my writing had been excruciatingly slow and intermittent, hampered by relentless and unexpected exigencies.  Having at last sprinted to the finish line of this project, begun in 1990, I shall now make a confession.  I find creative writing more demanding than writing computer code.  Which perhaps is not surprising.  A carpenter makes things out of wood, and an engineer makes things out of metal, but a creative writer’s raw material is but an elusive objective.  It is intangible.  It is merely an exciting thought.  In other words, in physical terms it is nothing, and working with something as abstract as nothing can be tricky.