Gainfully Unemployed, Part I

Writing this comes rather later than I had hoped or expected, but perhaps that speaks well of how I have managed to occupy myself over the past three and a half weeks. Has it really been that long? The answer is yes, but I have certainly managed to keep myself busy enough, catching up with friends, spending just as much money as I did when I still had an income stream and doing a fair amount of reading (although neither as much, nor as completely, as I had planned). And now, back to our feature presentation:

The Beginning

The weather was good, then. This past weekend, a bank holiday weekend, was mostly a washout, but for the first couple of weeks the weather was warm, sunny and consistent enough to make having a lot of free time most palatable. I spent a lot of those early days sitting in the park across the street reading a book given to me by a former colleague as a parting gift. The book itself was rather appropriate, as when better to read “The 4-Hour Work Week” than in your first 0-hour work week? “This carefree lifestyle AND a decent income? Sign me up,” you think as the sun’s rays wash over you and the light breeze keeps you comfortable. The beginning of the book lingered rather too long on why working all the time is unhealthy and unnecessary, but you need hardly convince a man basking in sunshine and with no obligations of this truth.

I read the book at a rather leisurely pace, made even more leisurely by regular breaks to close my eyes, relax and soak up the warmth without any demands on my attention. The pace of reading, if not of my days, was made even more leisurely by the need to spend some of those valuable London sunshine hours looking for jobs. Somewhat strangely for those who know my usual habits (and my excellent metabolism), I also spent a lot of time in the first week or two exercising. Of course, once I rode far enough on my exercise bike that the trip computer gave up the ghost, my motivation for that went. Sadly, the weather went around the same time.

I imagine that I would have made it further through the book had I skipped ahead to the more pertinent bits (which I did reach by the time the weather turned), but clearly I didn’t learn take the first lesson of the book to heart early enough: if it’s not important, you can afford to skip it – the rules be damned. As things stand, the book sits next to the easy chair in my bedroom, a little more than half read. I have moved on to other reading material for now.