a letter to his (not so) younger self (it has all turned out well)

'it's almost as if everything is waiting' - jacques tourneur, circle of danger (1951)

round about this time four years ago horsemouth's then employer was moving to make horsemouth (and his work colleagues) redundant.

there was a long (if already decided) consultation.

as horsemouth has remarked before the argument they made for closing down horsemouth's department was not convincing but maybe they had more convincing arguments elsewhere they didn't feel the need to use relying on the redundancy payment to do their arguing for them. 

horsemouth was not tempted to try some other role within the organisation. 

redundo beats no redundo every time. 

despite the fact that horsemouth's wages were (by the end of it) really quite low he had been there for a long time and was thus eligible for a fair old chunk of it. as he was over 55 at the time he was also eligible to start his works' pension early. while this was only about £60 a month  it was very welcome.

these, together with his savings (made when the job was comparatively well paid and horsemouth was a hard-working young mule) are what has carried him through the succeeding years. that said  the redundo and the portion of his pension taken as a lump sum only carried him for about a year and a half. 

and (as he says) that was about four years ago. 

now horsemouth would gladly have continued with the employment (despite the fact that he was sunk below the poverty line) because he had cheap(ish) rent and low costs (his only real expenses were rent, food, and beer). he liked the work and having a paycheque coming in reassured him. 

some money beat no money in his humble opinion.  

at one point horsemouth was considering retiring to portugal (where rent was roughly half what it was in london at that point and where his money would have gone further), later (post his redundancy) he was pretty much reconciled to remaining in london (there were interesting things to do with the communal endeavour) but following on from the death of his father he suspects his life is not destined to be in either of these places. 

the pandemic convinced him that life without work was a possibility by showing him it was possible to live on very little (even less than he had been living on).

with this as his motto horsemouth knows he can stretch it out to his old age pension. 

and so it has proved. soon enough horsemouth will be half way there. 

he hasn't missed work. (he has missed the people). it has all turned out well. 

his brother and family arrive later on. they will be disgorged by the car. before that the re-arrangement of the rooms to permit everyone to have a place to sleep. horsemouth suspects he will have to shift. he's not sure if his mum won't have to shift. 

in the evening he watched most of jacques tourneur's circle of danger - american comes to the uk searching for news about his dead brother, killed on a commando raid before d-day, only a few of the 12 men on that raid are left alive. but there was a thirteenth man...