Read Me First
This blog is a humorous reflection about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. It’s a collection of stories from the totally mad and absurd world of start-ups and major projects and then what happens when you jump off into the void of retirement. Read on to judge for...
Mental Health Positioning Statement
If you are one of those odd people who read the Read Me First page, you will know I referred to my mental health. Given that, I feel obliged to make a statement on the subject. Here goes. My mental health status is: almost normal, now I have taken action to improve...
You Want To Be An Entrepreneur?
I remember going to a postgrad’s formal hall (a dressed-up college dinner) in Oxford and looking at the glum faces of the boys and girls when I sat down amongst them. “Why us?” They were thinking looking at this grey-haired old fart. Anyway, as the starters were being...
Risking It All On One Turn Of Pitch And Toss
Can you risk every penny you have on one bet? To get your full entrepreneur’s wings you have to do it. I did. More than once. Want to know what that’s like? When you open that door it never leaves you. It visits you in dreams. It taunts you and tempts you forever....
Home Security For Newly Wealthy People
Last Sunday the police helicopter, two police dogs, policemen on motorbikes and a quad bike chased four Albanian asylum seekers in the field behind my house. I will leave it to Human Rights Watch to speculate on what kind of asylum they were seeking, but I was willing...
Entrepreneuring – It’s not about Porsches
When I tell this story only real entrepreneur’s get it. Most people, especially accountants, but even those who work in sales in big organisations guess the wrong ending. It was back in 2002 after the Dotcom meltdown, Enron, the stock market crash etc. A very bad time...
Most Stupid Thing Ever Bought on eBay
Can you beat buying 20,000 used golf balls on eBay "Buy it Now" and then flying to Phoenix the next day with $8,000 in cash to pay for them? Nobody has so far. But how did it happen? Well, it started on a bench. For a serial entrepreneur being on the bench is after...
Does An Entrepreneur Make Money Or Something Else?
In 2010, I was a postgraduate MSc student at Oxford University Said Business School. At 54 I was older than the professors, but I embraced the whole student thing. I even entered the university writing competition and finished as a runner-up. The judges asked if they...
Past, Present and Future
In those meetings where we had to force a senior exec to actually make a fricking decision and take a risk (instead of sitting on their security fence and sending us away with even more questions), I would say, “Let me pitch it. I am at the end of the career tunnel,...
Lawn Mowing
I want to make retirement stick. I’m counting down to the date. Three months to go. The signs are good. Work is drying up. Today was typical. A one-hour call where I easily swerved witless HR nonsense. “How can we prove the ROI of an individual person and link it to...
The First Retired Millennial
On the day I retired I got two cards. One from my Mum and one from myself. Inside the one from myself I wrote “Was that it?”. When I told my therapist she gave me a bollocking and told me not to be so negative. She said most people would envy my career and to buy...
Worst Nightmare
My worst career nightmare? In 2012 at a health inequality forum of medical experts that I was leading and had designed, a famous professor stood up and said. “This is rubbish. You are wasting our time”. Except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. About eighty people,...
Retirement Project
In my pre-retirement gardening leave, my family and friends suggested I needed a project as a sort of methadone to replace all that power and over stimulation from real work. Fellow drinkers at the Poltimore Arms, where I receive a lot of well-oiled advice, agreed and...
Retirement Blues
There’s no point doing this column without being brutally honest. And yesterday was brutal. It didn’t take long to surface. Last Wednesday we completed the build phase of the plane project. This Tuesday we moved out of the college to the airfield (where it will be...
Propellerheads Flying Club
What could be better on a sunny Wednesday afternoon When the fluffy white clouds start to form In a bright blue sky, and everyone else is hard at work Than to go to one’s flying club “Propellerheads” is the flying club where we will test fly the plane built by...
Non-Executive Position? … are you having a giraffe?
Like many people of my generation (the over fifties), I have retired from work and will not be going back. This is why. A friend of mine who is one, suggested I do some non-executive director work. I have a good enough CV, with a wide variety of operational and...
Film Script
I have started a new unfinished project to go with the unfinished plane, unfinished garage, and unfinished books. The latest idea is to develop a film script. I won’t say too much about it in case you nick it and actually know what you are doing and get it finished...
Garage Bars on Exmoor
Today was the third anniversary of when my garage didn’t get finished. My mistake was to share the idea before I had signed the contract. I had in mind a prefabricated oak frame four bay garage that would be erected by the supplier within 48 hours of delivery. Sadly,...
Pub Beer
Why does beer taste so much better in the pub? Surely, some of the countless millions spent on climate change research could be spared to answer the question. It’s not just the company and atmosphere that attracts us to pubs. Pub beer tastes different. Having explored...
La La Land Rover
No other car has made me laugh out loud. How did it remain in production for 60 years? Four days ago I had never sat in one. Now I am addicted. Crack must be like this. Last night’s journey to the pub took me down a road that transfers holiday makers from the North...
Successful Marriage
My wife recently bestowed me with the honorifics of “not completely useless” and “tolerable”. There was no irony or playful affection. It was factual cold and logical analysis. On the receiving end I accepted with pride and satisfaction. There is no intent to cause...
Re-fuel Car Cafe
I was told there is a café in Cullompton (16 miles away, next door in Devon distances) that is devoted to car and bike (motorbike) enthusiasts. Bored at 2.30pm on a wet Wednesday afternoon with nothing to do, curiosity got the better of me. I decided to take the...
Number Plate
Walking towards my twenty-year-old Land Rover Defender, I thought it looked very much at home parked in South Molton High Street, then I wondered why the rear number plate was propped up on the front windscreen. Upon examining the number plate, I found a piece of...
My Life Partner Is Me
Yesterday, I did an activity analysis of how I spend a retirement day. It’s a method we used at work where you interrupt yourself every ten minutes and then instantly note down what you are doing and what you are thinking or saying. You don’t have to do it all day...
Garrotting
Nearly bought it yesterday. in a reenactment of that scene from the “Guns of Navarone” or was it “Where Eagles Dare”. Anyway, I was on my bike and had crested a slight hill on Bishnym lane when I saw two figures ahead of me by a farm gate. That’s Alan and Oh Susannah!...
Should Your Therapist Laugh?
When my therapist bursts out laughing, I question “how does that help?” and if it happens more than once in a session I ask for a discount. Although I think she wanted me on tablets, or in a padded cell it was my wife’s idea for me to try therapy. Like most boomers,...
Haircut
“It could happen to anyone”. “No, it couldn’t”. A typical marital exchange. No sympathy there, not that I was asking for any. I had to say something as the visual impact was so obvious. I have been cutting my own hair with electric clippers (a practice that has saved...