Et tu Brute?

This post might seem like a "poor me" or parts of it even like boasting. Think that if you want, but I am trying to make a point.

If you know me or you've followed my blog you'll know that I excelled in my school A-levels. My parents told me to do my best, so I did. Although I grant that, in my O-levels, I failed History and only just passed English Literature even though I could (and still can) quote from memory Et tu Brute? and Let me have men about me who are fat... yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look... such men are dangerous. My English teacher had said quotes were like the plums in the pudding.

I excelled at college too, leaving with a First Class Honours degree. And did pretty well in my first job working in the prestigious BBC Research Department during which I was granted MIET and CEng which title I have retained (by paying an annual subscription) until recently.

After a few years doing odd jobbing building work while playing at radical church, I started my own electronics design business and completed a number of projects for various customers. To facilitate this work I have a home office cum workshop and have taught myself how to hand solder down to 0.4mm pitch, how to program embedded devices in assembler or 'C' and some PC programming as well.

And then, all of a sudden I retired and electronics work dried up. True, I continue to provide occasional technical support for that one active project, but otherwise my office and its equipment and stock of components has become largely redundant.

I had wondered about teaching - trying to pass on the skills I have learned, for the benefit of the next generation. But so far no one appears to be interested. The parents of young children in the community here have decided to quit the assisted home schooling we have assumed to be the norm for oh so many years, so it looks like there will be no need for my usual maths and physics teaching here. So instead I am helping my son doing some building renovation work here, and stoke the wood-burning boiler, weed the drive and mend things around the place that others have broken. Come the summer (if we haven't already missed it) I may take a day or two to go exploring now that I have a Senior Citizen free travel pass. But otherwise it is a strange feeling, this being retired is. I have always considered myself as being highly motivated and never, dare I even utter the word, bored. No, I'm not bored, really I'm not, but sometimes I'm not sure that I am fully motivated and I wonder what life is all about. We come and go like a ripple on a stream.