In retirement you lose routine and I’m struggling to establish a new one | Peter Goers

For the first month after retirement I stared at the walls and spent days and nights in a daze of inaction, writes Peter Goers.

Life is very different in retirement. Having retired from my 20 years on ABC Radio I feel lazy.

I’m not a lazy person but I seem to be doing less, badly.

I can do nothing very well but perhaps that’s always been apparent.

For the first month after retirement I stared at the walls and spent days and nights in a daze of inaction. I found it difficult to concentrate on anything.

Perhaps recent retirees share this condition?

The more you do, the more you can do. If you want something done, ask a busy person. Indolence ain’t much fun. I miss the energy, drive and discipline of the workplace, and the camaraderie of shared application.

I also miss the printer. I don’t have a printer at home and nor do I want one.

There’s no room for it and I don’t want to stuff around with ink cartridges. I’m still trying to find room for the air fryer that a kind friend gave me. So I use the printer at the Glenelg Library which gives me an outing.

Sunday Mail columnist Peter Goers signs off from his day job at the ABC. Picture: Brenton Edwards

I feel constantly distracted. I have a slew of visitors which is nice but it’s even nicer when they don’t come, as I feel I have nothing to share. I both crave and resent doing nothing.

I need more self-discipline. In retirement you lose routine and I’m struggling to establish a new one.

I can’t volunteer at an op shop because I’d just bring everything home and I do that already as a volunteer op shopper.

I do have a new gig as a simulated patient at the University of Adelaide Medical School.

I follow a script and act out all kinds of symptoms and situations as medical students diagnose me.

What fun. Both the students and I get to work on our bedside manners.

Here are my ambitions for the next part of my life as I fight the feeling that life is running out.

The first and most important ambition is the one we all share – to keep breathing. Secondly. I’m trying to write more.

I’m working (all too slowly) on a third book and I’m writing poetry for the first time in 30 years. Of course, the world does not need another bad poet but who cares?

This column is in its thirty-third year and is always a touchstone in my life. The trouble is, I don’t like writing, I like having written.

My third ambition is to keep working in the theatre (my first love) and I have two Fringe shows this year and some prospects. I’ve achieved my fourth ambition which is volunteer at Vision Australia Radio (for the blind and vision impaired) and my gig of choice is reading the death notices from the Saturday Advertiser and hope I’m not among them. My fifth ambition is proving elusive.

I want to be a prison visitor. It’s a captive audience.

Police checks for volunteers are necessary but very vexing. I don’t imagine I’ll ever travel overseas again as I can’t afford it. I hate airports and the only places I really want to go to –North Korea and Afghanistan – I can’t.

I’m lucky. Often times, people retired at 65 and dropped dead. The secret of life is a nap every day and also to hope and keep busy until you retire from life.

There’s no such thing as a cheap school lunch

I smiled wryly reading the cost of school lunches from a canteen or tuck shop if you’re at a private school.

My mother would give me, I blush to say, two shillings for my school lunch on Mondays because the baker didn’t deliver on Mondays.

With that I’d buy a ham roll, two Balfours sausage rolls and a kitchener bun at the Woodville Primary School canteen.

I ate that lunch of choice for the next 30 years and would still choose it. Today it would cost at least $25 which is money very well spent but one has to chose something healthier. Dammit.