Retirement Has Given Me Something the Working Years Never Did

The watercolour is terrible.

I know it’s terrible.

I can see it’s terrible.

The harbour is the wrong shade of grey — which is an achievement, given how many shades of grey the North Sea actually offers — and something has gone wrong with the perspective of the breakwater that I cannot correct without making it worse.

I’ve tried correcting it twice.

It is now worse.

I made a cup of Yorkshire Tea, sat back, and looked at it for a while.

Then I went back to working on it. Not because I thought I could save it, but because I was enjoying the process and the process was mine and nothing about what happened next mattered in the slightest.

This is new.

Forty years at sea, nothing I did was permitted to be terrible. Competence wasn’t an aspiration — it was the floor. The minimum. The thing below which consequences arrived that nobody wanted. A ship’s captain who is bad at his job doesn’t receive a gentle note about areas for improvement. People get hurt. Cargo goes wrong. Careers end, and sometimes that’s the least of it.

So you become very good at things, or you find a different profession. And in becoming very good at things you absorb, without quite knowing you’re absorbing it, a set of beliefs about the moral weight of competence. Being bad at something is a failure of character. Being bad at something is a warning sign. Being bad at something is something you fix.

I carried this off the ship and into retirement without declaring it at customs.

It took me several months to notice it was there.

The first sign was the bread.

I’d decided to bake bread because I had time and flour and a vague idea that this was something retired people did. The first loaf was dense in a way that suggested structural ambitions beyond its abilities. The second loaf had a crust that required some commitment to get through. The third was better but still not what you’d call a triumph.

What I noticed was the response in my own head to each of these failures. A low-level unease. A sense that I should watch a video, read a book, sort this out. An uncomfortable feeling that being bad at bread-baking was evidence of something.

Evidence of what, exactly?

I couldn’t have told you. I just knew that being bad at the bread made me slightly anxious in a way that seemed, upon reflection, completely disproportionate to the bread.

Nobody was eating the bread who needed the bread to be good. There was no crew. There was no log entry. There was no review. The bread was between me and the bread, and the bread had already lost the argument, and the consequences were roughly zero.

This took a while to settle into.

The watercolours arrived about four months in.

I’d been passing a small art shop and there was a beginner’s set in the window and something made me go in. I think it was the idea of making something rather than writing something — a different kind of attention, quieter, less verbal.

I am, as established, not good at watercolours.

What I am is interested in them. Genuinely interested in the way the water moves the pigment and the way you can’t entirely control where it goes and the way the result is always slightly surprising regardless of what you intended. Forty years of navigation — of absolute precision, of knowing exactly where you were and where you needed to be — and now I’m finding something pleasurable about a process that resists precision.

I don’t know what to make of that. I’m not sure I need to make anything of it. I’m just noting it.

There’s a garden too.

I should tell you about the garden because it is in some ways the fullest expression of what I’m trying to describe. The garden is large enough to be ambitious and I am ambitious in it. I have plans. I have schemes. I have planted things in places where they have subsequently made clear they have no intention of growing, and I have planted things in places where they have grown with such enthusiasm that they have entirely colonised the surrounding area and I’m not sure what to do about it.

A colleague who knows about gardens visited in May and surveyed the situation with an expression I recognised from my own professional life — the expression of a person looking at a problem that has several layers and is not sure where to start.

She was very kind about it. She said it had character.

She meant it was chaotic. She was right. It is completely chaotic. I am not a good gardener.

I was outside in it for three hours on Monday.

The paid section is where I try to work out what this actually means — for a man who spent forty years in a profession where being bad at things had consequences — and why the guilt hasn’t entirely gone.

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