Changing your role and way of life is a trial by ordeal. This trial, this ordeal, is exacted by the groups we leave and join, but also by ourselves as it seems to help us visualise ourselves anew.

The giving of the gold watch that used to be the symbol of the rite of retirement is one of these ordeals. Those that had suffered it wore the watch as a sign of their changed life, just as in some tribes it is necessary to bear the pain of widespread tatooing before you can be accepted as an adult member of the tribe.

I instinctively avoided any public show when it came to be my turn to finish working. Since I was 11 years old I have always found transitions difficult. I stayed on an extra year at school but even then my grades didn’t thrive. I joined the Merchant Navy and re-took my exams so that I could go to university, but once having achieved this I was again reluctant to move on and I returned to the navy between the second and third year of my first degree.

This is a photo of a post card I sent to my university tutor showing me playing at being a sailor when I should have been sitting my finals. This turned up many years later when one of the alumni, who had become a professional collector, gathered all the remnants of that time together in a web site ‘most dear to those that know’.

If I had found it hard to leave school, it was four times harder to leave university. I managed to extend my time there to seven years. But that ‘was in another country’, and is a story for a different day.

For the point of this little essay is to heap praise upon myself for the incredible despatch and smoothness of my retirement. I delayed only one year after the traditional age of 65. I made the announcement of my leaving date in March, and duly carried it out in October. Now is my autumn of good content, and the rite of passage that I have designed is a sea trial, an ordeal by water, a marine odyssey.

Read on for adventure!