A book with this title could be about many things. It could be about the concept of retirement, and how this may be changing, at least among the chattering classes. It could be about the central issue of how you distinguish the joys and challenges of aging from the same aspects of retirement. It could be about the special impact of personal characteristics upon retirement; pre-existing illness, personality, and attitudes to work, children, grandchildren and other issues, financial status, or relationships. Equally, it could be about the impact of retirement in special circumstances; retirement through illness; redundancy in late middle age with no later re-employment; retirement from the armed forces or the clergy (with concomitant de-institutionalization); retirement after long-term unemployment; retirement on the minimum wage; retirement abroad, in rural or inner-city areas; retirement plus relocation, etc., etc.
There are also many readers for whom it could be written. It could be for academics, interested in the research literature and data, in risk and protective factors, interventions; it could be for policy-makers (whoever they are), interested in mass psychology, demographics, in fiscal or economic policy; it could be a self-help book for people planning retirement or for people already retired and struggling; it could be for psychologists, psychotherapists, and counselors working with retired people; or it could be for other people aiming services or products at retired people.
I am not saying that you cannot find interesting and relevant material in this book. You will. It is how you find it that is remarkable.
On the front cover is a picture of a man of a certain age (not the author) in walking boots and carrying a knapsack, leaping between moorland rocks on a warm, blue-sky day. I imagined that he has just retired and joined the Ramblers’ Association, and that other ramblers are nearby, out of shot. Now ramblers do not ramble at all; the Association stole the word for their evil ends. In fact, they walk purposefully from one spot to another. But a central fantasy about retirement is that it will bring the freedom to really ramble; to go where the wind blows, to fill the days with spontaneous actions and reactions, to have the time to “stand and stare,” and sometimes to be completely and thrillingly lost. The book cover captures this fantasy perfectly, and so has its contents. Mr Milne really rambles.
He rambles through a selection of definitions of retirement, randomly italicizing one (he randomly italicizes elsewhere). He rambles around a selection of the literature. He falls into a bog, misunderstanding the difference between aging and age, only partially extricating himself. He rambles around official statistics, falling into another bog. He rambles briefly into and out of vignettes before they appear, so we cannot understand what he is talking about. Donald sings in the choir. This is apparently bad. Who is Donald? We wait for ten pages to find out. He rambles into, and then away from, into again, and then again away from his acronym for successful retirement (“RECIPE”), to which he returns with a full explanation right at the end of the book. He rambles around ancient Greek philosophy (apparently hedonism is “flawed”), architecture, town planning, NIMBYism, 9/11, and the travails of a (non-retired) woman kidnapped by guerrillas in South America.
Alas! the style is not consistent either. The cover says it is a self-help book. Yes, it is sometimes informal and chatty, but we also find sentences like the following: “This is in accordance with the aforementioned definition concerning adapting to the demands we face in life, in the same way that Darwin discussed evolution as a struggle for survival as a species.” (p 35)
As you might expect from a jolly good ramble, the chapter/section headings reveal no organization of material; they are whimsical, with “RECIPE” appearing only as the last subheading in the book. If you pin your hopes of finding a topic via the index, you are likely to be disappointed. Interested in the issues of retirement from the armed services I looked up “Army” only to find a case vignette of someone who had once been in the army a long time ago.
I have not yet fulfilled the fantasy of real rambling in retirement; neither through the countryside, my town, nor indeed through ideas, books, and papers. Mr Milne has obviously got the latter taped, and I envy him for it. His rambling is marvelous, and clearly brought him pleasure. But if, one day, I actually manage to go real rambling, like this, I want to go on my own ramble, and I would not expect anyone else to like it.
