Name: johnbailey.blog
Address: PL

Welcome.

This is a collection of thoughts, plans, and occasional mishaps as I make the shift from life in Putney to something rather different in Poland. It covers the practical side of planning an early retirement, the slow and frequently humbling process of learning Polish (progress currently best described as “enthusiastic but unreliable”), and a continued interest in technology that insists on evolving just quickly enough to keep me slightly behind.

Along the way, there are reflections from my time with the Royal British Legion, notes on work, purpose, and letting go of both, and a few observations on what it means to grow older in a world that updates itself overnight and expects you to keep up before your morning coffee. It is not a grand plan, more a series of considered steps, taken with curiosity, patience, and the occasional moment of wondering what on earth I have just signed myself up for.

Retirement or Repositioning? A Different View of Growing Older

The traditional idea of retirement no longer feels entirely convincing to many of us. The image of quietly stepping away from work, withdrawing from productivity, and settling into a life built entirely around leisure belongs to a different era. For some people it still holds genuine appeal, and rightly so. But for others, especially those who still have energy, curiosity, experience, and ambition, it feels strangely incomplete. I am increasingly convinced that what many of u

May 213 min read

Grandad’s Clock

My maternal grandfather, Reginald (Reg), retired from work in the mid-1970s. As was not uncommon at the time, he was gifted a carriage clock, which took pride of place as the centrepiece in his living room until the day he passed away. As a younger man, I was struck by the irony of this gift. In my ignorance, I saw it as an unkind and potentially cruel reminder that, for him at least, the clock was now ticking. There were fewer days ahead than behind. The clock was not warnin

May 153 min read

Why Keeping Busy Is a Poor Retirement Strategy

I am not suggesting that retirement should involve finding the nearest comfortable chair and become one with it. That would be absurd. What I am questioning is something more subtle. The idea of keeping busy for the sake of keeping busy. It sounds sensible, almost virtuous, but I would argue it is a poor strategy not just for retirement, but for life itself. Retirement offers something quite rare. A shift in mindset from I have to do this to I choose to do this because it mat

May 45 min read

Who Am I Without Language?

I am quite comfortable with a challenge. I have always enjoyed doing something unexpected, or resolving an issue that nobody thought was possible. Give me a problem, a bit of doubt from other people, and a narrow route through, and I usually feel more alive rather than less. But of all the challenges heading my way, learning Polish feels the most daunting. That is not because I think I am incapable of learning it. It is a difficult language by any measure, and I do not say th

Apr 206 min read

Is Being Nice Going Out of Fashion?

It has been a challenging few months. Not in a dramatic sense, but in the quieter way that leaves you replaying events and wondering how things became more complicated than they needed to be. Because, if I am honest, much of it could have been avoided by something very simple. A phone call. “Have you got a minute?” I was recently involved in a situation within a volunteer organisation I care about deeply. Nothing unusual on the surface. A difference of view. A few decisions t

Mar 253 min read

I Wasn’t Trying to Use AI

This started as a work problem. It turned into a lesson about how I think, how I work, and what AI is actually useful for. This is not a how-to. It’s simply a record of what happened. I did not start out trying to use AI. I was trying to fix something that had been bothering me for a while. Remedial works were being tracked, but not in one place. Some lived in spreadsheets. Some arrived by email. Others appeared in audit forms or were mentioned in passing conversations. Every

Jan 293 min read