People, especially of my age, tend to choose profile pictures showing them younger than they currently are. I thought I would take this to extremes.

Duncommutin started off as the blog of someone anticipating retirement; at that time the event was glimmering on the horizon, more than two years away. But now I have finally got there, and can truthfully, and perhaps smugly, claim that commuting is something I won’t have to do again.

I’ve had a reasonably interesting, if unspectacular career, in and around the IT area. I have never been one of those lucky people whose passions correspond with their jobs, but many years back I discovered that writing computer code was something I could do, and which gave me enough money and satisfaction to make it a perfectly amenable way of passing the working day.

I did have a period of working freelance, from home, which gave me several years’ break from the dreaded daily journey. But there was always the pressure of finding work and then,  when I had it, getting it finished; everything else had to take back seat – apart from my family, that is, to whom I could at least devote more time while they were young.

Photo: John Lutz

And then I was lucky to find an interesting job in a small company at the age of 59, and following a series of takeovers, I ended up eight years later as part of a multinational, household-name company – a small cog in a very big machine. I was contented enough in my role – but this cog is now feeling a new excitement as it starts to roll around in quite unmechanical surroundings.

In this changed world I want to continue writing about whatever catches my eye – an eye that’s now a bit freer to look around than it was. The literary-cum-philosophical themes will remain, along with anything else that I come across in my new circumstances that seems worth a mention.

I have surprised myself by managing to keep the blog going for over two years, if not writing quite as frequently as I originally intended. So maybe I’ll be able to keep it up until… well, no need to think about that yet.