WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 6

Useful Until Further Notice

At three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in winter these days, there is a fair chance you will find me in the recliner waiting for the football to start. It is one of those wonderfully ordinary pictures of retirement that I presumably spent much of my working life trying to achieve. There is nowhere I particularly need to be, nothing particularly urgent waiting on the desk and, unless somebody has decided otherwise on my behalf, the next couple of hours belong entirely to me.

There was another version of three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, particularly during July, August and September in the days of Banks Consultancy. That Jeff would probably have been sitting at his desk in the office, working his way through the June GST work, financial statements and tax returns that represented the beginning of another tax season. We often did more than eighty per cent of our annual turnover in those six to eight weeks, which was either an extraordinary business model or evidence that accountants are every bit as capable of creating their own particular form of madness as everybody else.

Monday mornings during those weeks could be something to behold. Tax returns and financial statements would be strewn across the desks waiting for the support staff to process them, contact clients where necessary and get everything out the door. I had spent much of the weekend creating the mess they arrived to find, although in my mind it wasn’t a mess at all because every document lying there represented something that had been completed.

There was an absolute adherence to getting it done, and everybody who worked for Banks Consultancy knew what July, August and September meant. One of the hard and fast rules of the practice was that holidays were simply not approved during that period. It wasn’t something negotiated each year depending upon how busy we looked or how many people happened to be available, because we already knew how busy we were going to be. Those six to eight weeks could produce more than eighty per cent of our annual turnover, and allowing people to disappear in the middle of them made about as much sense to me as a retailer deciding to close for Christmas.

That probably sounds fairly uncompromising when I put it on paper now, and it was. There was nothing accidental about the rule because the workload was predictable, the window in which we had to complete it was relatively short and the entire practice had to be geared towards getting through it. Holidays could be taken at other times of the year, but not then, and anyone working for us understood that tax season wasn’t the period in which you suddenly decided a couple of weeks away sounded attractive.

The rule applied to me more brutally than it applied to anybody else because I couldn’t simply declare that my allocated hours had been completed and leave whatever remained for Monday. If the staff couldn’t get through what needed to be done in the available time, I stepped in and did it myself, not necessarily because I thought they were incapable but because the work existed and therefore somebody had to make it disappear. More often than not, that somebody was me, which was why three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon could find me downstairs at the desk while everybody else was doing whatever normal people did with a Sunday.

I don’t remember spending much time wondering whether any of that was fair, either to the staff or particularly to myself. It was simply the way the practice operated during the period that effectively made the year, and once I accepted that the work had to be done, the identity of the person who eventually did it became almost secondary. If there was still a return sitting there, a set of financial statements unfinished or June GST work preventing everything else from moving forward, then somebody had unfinished business, and I had spent most of my working life assuming that unfinished business eventually became mine.

There is a simplicity to that life which I probably didn’t appreciate at the time. I knew what I was supposed to do, knew whether I had done it and usually knew what needed to happen next. A pile of unfinished tax returns represented a problem, while a pile of finished ones represented progress, and accountants are reasonably comfortable in a world where progress can be identified by moving something from one side of the desk to the other. Retirement has proved considerably less accommodating because there isn’t always another pile waiting.

There are days now when nothing particularly needs to be done. Those were once the days I imagined I was working towards, yet when they actually arrived I discovered that apparently I had neglected to prepare myself for them. I can wander into the garden, disappear into the Man Cave, go into the office or invent some inane task that has suddenly acquired a level of importance completely unsupported by the evidence.

Perhaps learning how to do nothing is another of those life skills that should be taught at school, somewhere between compound interest, changing a tyre and understanding why the electricity company offers its best deal only after you threaten to leave. We spend an extraordinary amount of time teaching children how to become productive adults, how to meet deadlines, apply themselves, develop a work ethic and eventually contribute something useful to society. Nobody seems to include the lesson at the other end explaining what you are supposed to do when, after fifty years of following those instructions, society announces that you have done enough and are now perfectly entitled to sit down.

I would probably have failed the subject anyway. Advanced Nothing would have appeared on my timetable and within a fortnight I would have formed a committee to examine whether we were doing nothing efficiently enough. Someone would have been appointed secretary, I would somehow have become treasurer, there would be a spreadsheet measuring our progress towards absolutely nowhere, and before long I would be complaining that everybody else was enjoying doing nothing while I was stuck doing the administration.

The humour disguises something I increasingly think is important, because doing nothing is actually a skill when your entire adult life has taught you to measure a day by what was accomplished during it. There is a considerable difference between having nothing to do and being comfortable doing nothing, just as there is a difference between choosing to rest and finding yourself without a purpose. I had become very good at filling time productively, but nobody had ever suggested that one day I might need to become equally competent at leaving some of it empty.

So I manufacture things. A weed in the garden acquires strategic importance, a piece of timber in the Man Cave develops an urgent need to become something else, or I wander into the office and discover a task that could quite comfortably have waited until tomorrow but apparently cannot survive another twenty minutes. I am not always sure whether I am enjoying retirement, avoiding it or simply applying the work ethic I was taught to a completely different collection of activities, but at least by the end of the afternoon I can usually point to something and claim that I haven’t wasted the day.

Perhaps that is the lesson they should have taught at school. A day doesn’t necessarily have to justify its existence by producing something, and neither, presumably, does the person living it. I understand the logic of that perfectly well, which unfortunately doesn’t mean I have acquired the skill.

The Men’s Shed has been useful in that regard because I have developed what I generously describe as carpentry skills. I can then take those skills home to the Man Cave and attempt to reproduce what I have learned with tools considerably less adequate than the ones available at the Shed. Whether anything I make is actually required is another question entirely, but necessity has never been allowed to interfere too greatly with a bloke who has discovered a piece of timber and decided it needs to become something.

Sometimes the garden, Man Cave and office don’t provide the answer, and I do something entirely different by going back to bed. There doesn’t have to be anything particularly dramatic about it because sometimes I am genuinely tired. I head towards the bedroom, put the CPAP mask back on, put a pillow over my head and disappear into the darkness for a couple of hours.

Robyn will sometimes ask, just as I am drifting off, whether anything is wrong, and I tell her I am simply tired and need some sleep. Most of the time that is probably exactly what is happening, but sometimes I just need to escape. I am not entirely sure there is a useful accounting category into which the difference between those two things can be entered, and perhaps there doesn’t need to be.

The term retirement consequently produces a quiet laugh around here. Some of the clients who simply refused to abandon me have ensured that the word has remained more aspirational than descriptive, and their argument, if they bothered to construct one, would probably be that while my mind remains active there is still information in it that is useful to them. Apparently a retired accountant can become something resembling an emeritus professor, except that the professor probably doesn’t receive a telephone call asking whether somebody can claim a deduction for something they bought three months ago.

There are times when my reaction to another request is fairly straightforward: bugger that, because everyone wants their piece. More irritatingly, they tend to want their piece at precisely the moment they want it, with remarkably little consideration for the convenience of the person from whom the piece is being extracted. After decades of being available, there are times when the ringing telephone no longer represents an opportunity to solve somebody’s problem but an interruption to whatever I had decided I wasn’t doing.

I probably contributed considerably to that problem myself because one of the things contained in our accounting agreements was “reasonable access to Jeff Banks.” It was an important part of what I believed separated Banks Consultancy from the sausage-factory version of accounting, where the client handed over the records, somebody processed them and eventually a set of accounts and an invoice came back. If I was going to act more like the silent partner I always claimed an accountant should be, clients needed access to the person whose experience and judgement they were actually paying for.

The difficulty, of course, is contained in that wonderfully dangerous word reasonable. I had one definition and the client occasionally had another, and nowhere in the agreement did we include a schedule explaining that reasonable access to Jeff Banks did not necessarily mean whenever a thought happens to enter your head. To the client, the question had just occurred to them and therefore this seemed an entirely reasonable time to ask it. To Jeff Banks, who might have been doing something else, eating lunch, trying to finish another client’s work or, eventually, attempting this strange experiment called retirement, its reasonableness was sometimes considerably less obvious.

There was another problem with the wording that probably should have occurred to the accountant who approved it. We had sold access to Jeff Banks, not merely access to Banks Consultancy, and those are two quite different commodities. A client wasn’t necessarily ringing because they needed somebody to look something up or tell them when their BAS was due; often they wanted the accumulated judgement that came from decades of watching businesses succeed, fail and occasionally find astonishingly creative ways of doing both at once. The very thing that made the promise valuable was also the thing that made it impossible to delegate completely.

For years I was proud of that accessibility, and I still am to a large extent. There is little point telling clients you are different from the compliance factories and that you intend to act like a silent partner if the silent part means they can never actually get hold of you. The Soft Shoulder philosophy had simply found its way into an accounting agreement, although by then somebody had replaced the yellow appliqué with contractual wording and presumably thought that made it more sophisticated.

Retirement has exposed the conflict in the arrangement because apparently reasonable access to Jeff Banks did not come with an expiry date. Some clients refused to abandon me, others still know that there is a considerable store of experience sitting at Smiths Lake, and every now and then somebody decides they would like to make a withdrawal. Part of me remains pleased that they still value the judgement enough to ask, while another part hears the telephone ring and thinks, For Christ’s sake, surely somebody else can answer this one.

The contradiction is that sometimes the interruption is exactly what I need. I can be sitting in a rut, perfectly comfortable in my discomfort, when the telephone rings and somebody presents me with a problem. My immediate reaction can still be annoyance because I want to answer the question, solve whatever needs solving, get them off the telephone and return to the rut from which their call has temporarily extracted me.

That is where reasonable access to Jeff Banks becomes almost comically conflicted. The client believes they are exercising something I deliberately promised them, the retired accountant believes they are interrupting him, and somewhere underneath both of them is another Jeff whose mind has suddenly been required to stop contemplating itself and concentrate on somebody else’s problem. I can resent the intrusion, enjoy solving the problem and benefit from having been dragged out of the rut, all during the same telephone call.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that when the telephone doesn’t ring for long enough, I can begin wondering why nobody needs me. When it does ring, I can wonder why they won’t leave me alone, which makes reasonable access to Jeff Banks considerably easier to define in an accounting agreement than inside Jeff Banks. Apparently the perfect arrangement would be for everybody to need me while having the good manners not to bother me, and even I have to concede that might be an unreasonable term to put into the engagement letter.

There is something almost ridiculous about that when I look at it from outside. The interruption I resent has forced my mind to engage, given it somewhere to go and required it to use abilities accumulated across half a century. I may be impatient to get back to doing nothing, yet for the duration of that telephone call I am doing exactly what I have spent most of my life doing: somebody has a problem and Jeff might be able to fix it.

That instinct predates Banks Consultancy by quite a few years. Towards the end of my school days I owned a denim jean jacket decorated with various appliqués, as was the fashion when we were all considerably younger and apparently believed our clothing needed to make announcements on our behalf. On my left shoulder was one that said Soft Shoulder, black writing on a yellow background surrounded by a black border, positioned not as an epaulet but as a sign to anybody who wanted to think about what it meant.

I don’t remember sitting down as a teenager and developing a life philosophy around an appliqué. That would be giving both teenage Jeff and the garment industry of the 1970s considerably more credit than either deserves. If I am being remotely truthful about the motives of a teenage boy wearing a denim jacket covered in appliqués, Soft Shoulder was probably less an invitation to discuss the burdens of life and more a piece of bait thrown hopefully into the general direction of girls.

There was, after all, a fairly obvious double meaning available to anybody prepared to notice it. The sign sat on my left shoulder in black lettering against yellow, surrounded by a black border, and I suspect the intended message was considerably closer to you are welcome to try this shoulder than please tell me about your emotional difficulties and I will help you develop a structured response. Teenage boys have rarely required particularly sophisticated marketing strategies, and I doubt I was an exception.

Whether the bait actually worked is another question, and one upon which history has been considerably less diligent in preserving the statistics. I certainly don’t remember girls forming an orderly queue to test the advertised softness, which suggests the campaign may not have achieved the market penetration its designer had hoped for. Had I possessed my later accounting skills, I might have demanded some measurable return on the investment, although that would probably have destroyed whatever limited romantic appeal the jacket possessed in the first place.

What amuses me looking back is not that teenage Jeff had somehow anticipated the man he would become, because he almost certainly hadn’t. He was trying to attract girls, not establish a lifetime commitment to being available whenever somebody had a problem. The symbolism came later, long after the jacket disappeared and the original advertising campaign had been abandoned.

Yet there is an irony in the fact that something originally worn as bait eventually became a reasonably accurate description of the role I repeatedly created for myself. The teenage invitation to lean on the shoulder may have been issued with entirely different activities in mind, but somewhere along the way people actually started leaning on it. Clients, family, friends, business associates and eventually golf clubs took the sign rather more literally than its teenage owner had probably intended.

Perhaps that is why I remember the bloody appliqué at all. It began as the sort of mildly suggestive joke a teenage boy thought might improve his prospects with girls, but decades later I can see an unintended truth hiding inside it. I wasn’t consciously advertising myself as somebody other people could depend upon, but eventually that is exactly what Soft Shoulder came to mean, whether the bloke who first wore it intended anything remotely so profound or not.

I like being the person people come to, although the consequences of that preference have not always been particularly convenient. There is simply something deeply embedded in me that sees a problem and starts looking for the answer. The Logical Bystander might occasionally point out that the problem belongs to somebody else, but apparently he has never been given control of that particular department.

It followed me into business and eventually became part of what Banks Consultancy was. A client could arrive with something they didn’t understand, something that frightened them or something that had become hopelessly tangled, and I could usually pull it apart into pieces that made sense. I probably still crave that to some extent, somebody metaphorically looking for the Soft Shoulder sign and coming over to vent, inquire or ask me to help fix whatever has gone wrong.

There was a cost to that, although I didn’t always recognise it as one. Clare, my first wife, believed I needed to spend more time concentrating on the family rather than the clients, and she voiced that objection often enough that there was no possibility I could claim ignorance. My view was quite different because I believed I was building an accounting practice intended to give us the income and wealth position commensurate with the effort we were putting into it, and in any case I was working from home.

The practice occupied the bottom storey of a five-storey terrace in Victoria Street at Potts Point. I was physically there all the time, and from my perspective that mattered because I didn’t understand, or perhaps didn’t understand sufficiently, that being physically accessible at any time was not necessarily the same thing as being available. It is an interesting distinction when the distance between work and family might be only a flight or two of stairs.

Both propositions could exist in the same building. I could believe I was working for the family while Clare could believe the work was taking me away from it, and neither proposition was automatically cancelled simply because I could walk upstairs. The accountant in me could calculate the income being generated downstairs rather more easily than he could calculate whatever else was being spent to generate it.

That practice grew enormously, and along the way I set myself one of those beautifully uncomplicated goals that appeals to someone who likes numbers. I was going to be a millionaire by thirty, and I achieved it. There was no ambiguity about whether the target had been reached because that is the great attraction of a goal expressed as a number: eventually the ledger either says yes or it doesn’t.

The accounting practice was burgeoning to the point of breaking at the seams, and we occupied an iconic Victoria Street property during a period of extraordinary property inflation when values seemed capable of doubling while you watched them. I had started with nothing and reached the line I had drawn in the sand, and the line was sufficiently objective that there could be no argument about whether I had crossed it. By thirty-one, however, I was bankrupt, which made the line in the sand rather less impressive than it had appeared twelve months earlier.

There is always a temptation when looking backwards to impose some grand psychological explanation on that sequence, as though becoming a millionaire at thirty somehow caused me to push harder, move the goalposts and engineer my own destruction. It didn’t, and I don’t want to rewrite history merely because it would create a convenient story. The bankruptcy resulted from a calculated error of judgement involving ourselves in a client’s business and signing a lease document, followed by that business ceasing to do what it had been established to do.

There were consequences, enormous ones, but there wasn’t a mysterious emotional progression connecting the two events. Sometimes you make a mistake and sometimes the mistake is bloody expensive. Life does not automatically provide a deeper explanation simply because, forty years later, an author would find one useful.

What does interest me now is something slightly different because I had set the millionaire-at-thirty target, reached it and had not established the next line. For somebody whose life has so often been propelled by the existence of something that needed doing, the absence of another clearly defined destination raises a question that money itself has never satisfactorily answered. The question is not necessarily how much more I wanted, but what enough was supposed to look like once I got there.

I can reduce most financial propositions to numbers. Give me the desired income, assets, return, retirement capital or cash flow and I can build a pathway towards it, test the assumptions and tell you whether the arithmetic works. The problem with enough is that somewhere along the way it stops being arithmetic, and that is a particularly inconvenient development for an accountant.

Robyn and I are comfortable now, although even that word becomes slippery as soon as I try to define it. Comfort as a financial proposition can be calculated, but comfort as a state of mind is something else entirely. Somewhere beyond the spreadsheet sits the subjective version of the question, the supposed nirvana we are all heading towards without anybody ever having bothered to establish precisely where it is or what we are meant to do when we arrive.

“Retirement” has brought that question closer because some of the old measurements have disappeared. There was a time when usefulness could be seen scattered across the office on a Monday morning in the work I had completed over the weekend, the problems solved, clients serviced, staff supported and revenue generated. There was always another return, another client and another deadline capable of providing the answer to what I was supposed to do next.

Curiously, one habit from those years has followed me into retirement because I still find myself doing a surprising amount of my work on weekends. I have an entire working week available to me now, largely without appointments, staff meetings or most of the other things that once dictated when work had to be done, yet Saturday and Sunday remain strangely attractive. Apparently retirement has given me the freedom to work whenever I like, and after considering all the available alternatives I have chosen the same days I used to work when I wasn’t supposed to be working.

Part of the reason is entirely practical because the telephone doesn’t ring nearly as much on weekends. During the week, sitting in the office seems to place me within some invisible communications network that tells everybody I am available, even though nobody can actually see me sitting there. The telephone rings, an email arrives, somebody has a question and reasonable access to Jeff Banks once again proves to be a clause with an extraordinarily long tail.

Weekends are different because most people assume I am doing what retired people are apparently supposed to do. They don’t ring because it is Saturday, which leaves me free to go into the office and work, a piece of logic that probably deserves closer examination but which makes perfect sense to me. I can write, think, play with an idea or finish whatever project has captured my attention without somebody else’s problem suddenly becoming more important than the one I have chosen for myself.

There is also something strangely familiar about the quiet. During the busiest period of Banks Consultancy, weekends gave me the same thing because the staff weren’t there, clients generally weren’t ringing and the normal movement of the practice had stopped. I could sit at the desk with the June GST work, financial statements and tax returns spread around me and simply work through them without interruption, knowing that every completed file was one less problem waiting for us on Monday morning.

I liked those weekends more than perhaps I should have. The workload might have been enormous, but there was a peace in being alone with it because nobody was creating another priority while I dealt with the priorities already in front of me. By Monday morning the evidence of those quiet hours would be scattered across the staff desks, ready for processing, and I could physically see what the silence had allowed me to accomplish.

Decades later I find myself recreating much the same environment, although the piles of tax returns have largely been replaced by manuscripts, ideas and whatever other project has managed to convince me that it needs attention. I don’t have to work on Saturday or Sunday and there is certainly nobody waiting on Monday morning to discover what I have produced for them. Nevertheless, there is something about closing the door on a weekend and knowing the telephone is unlikely to ring that takes me straight back to those tax-season Sundays when uninterrupted time was probably the most valuable commodity I possessed.

There is an irony in deliberately avoiding the telephone because, elsewhere in this story, I have admitted that sometimes the ringing telephone is precisely the interruption I need. That contradiction doesn’t disappear simply because it is inconvenient because I can resent being interrupted, benefit from the interruption and deliberately arrange my working habits to avoid it, all while claiming to be retired. Apparently consistency is another of those things retirement does not automatically provide.

Perhaps the weekend office is not really about work at all. It may be about control over whose usefulness I am serving, because during the week the telephone can turn my time into somebody else’s almost without warning, whereas on the weekend I usually get to choose the problem I want to solve. In the old Banks Consultancy days that quiet allowed me to deal with the avalanche before Monday arrived; now it allows me to create something at my own pace without somebody reaching through the telephone and reminding me that reasonable access to Jeff Banks is apparently still available.

So one of the measurements hasn’t disappeared as completely as I first thought. I can still sit alone in a quiet office on a Sunday, become absorbed in whatever is in front of me and eventually look up wondering where several hours have gone. The difference is that Monday morning no longer provides a row of desks upon which I can scatter the evidence, leaving me with the more difficult task of deciding whether the hours were worthwhile simply because I enjoyed what I was doing.

Now usefulness has become considerably harder to audit, although apparently that hasn’t stopped me trying. The Sandbar Golf Club is one example of what can happen when the old instinct encounters a new opportunity. I didn’t become involved because retirement had left me wandering around desperately searching for a committee; I became involved because at the initial meeting I could see a mate heading towards a rabbit hole that potentially threatened everything he owned, while the people sitting around the table were principally interested in playing golf.

I had considerably more business experience than most of those gathered there. I could see the need, knew I possessed skills capable of filling it and did what I have apparently been programmed to do since somebody attached Soft Shoulder to a denim jacket. The old see a need, fill the need instinct came to the fore, and if the truth be known I totally regret it.

That is worth remembering whenever I become tempted to treat usefulness as some wonderful protective mechanism against the Black Dog. Being needed can provide purpose, but it can also become a bloody nuisance, just as filling a need can make you feel valuable while simultaneously leaving you wondering why everybody else gets to enjoy the thing and you are worrying about whether it functions. Apparently even purpose can become irritating when enough of it arrives at once.

Perhaps that is one reason I have never been particularly interested in constructing a theory explaining every rise and fall in my depression. I haven’t spent my life examining each downturn and trying to discover which combination of circumstances caused it because I am not convinced life provides answers that neatly. I am not sure a clinical psychiatrist would agree with my approach, but my experience has largely been that life happens and the more useful questions are often how is it happening? and what do I do now that it is? rather than believing I can always uncover a satisfactory why.

There have been periods when I have been extraordinarily busy and periods when I have had almost nothing required of me. The darkness has never shown sufficient respect for either condition to allow me to declare one the cause and the other the cure. I can fill a day with useful activity and still feel it arrive, just as I can spend an afternoon doing very little and feel perfectly content, which rather ruins any convenient theory that keeping busy keeps the Black Dog outside.

When the darkness does arrive, however, and I am sitting there contemplating my navel, one question has a habit of pushing itself further forward than the others. If there is no goal, no contribution and nothing meaningful requiring something from me, what exactly am I here for? That question has always been somewhere down deep and dark, although for much of my life there has been sufficient noise around it that I haven’t had to listen too closely.

It is important that I don’t make that question say something it doesn’t. It is not the same as asking whether I want to be here tomorrow, because I do, and one of the things that has repeatedly kept me interested in tomorrow is waiting to discover what the people I love will surprise me with next. Giving something back to those who have helped keep me going is one of the great joys of my life, particularly when it comes to my children and family.

The question is about purpose rather than survival, although in the darkness that distinction can still make the question uncomfortable. I started with nothing, built an empire, lost it and then built again to the point where Robyn and I are now comfortable. I have spent decades solving problems, creating businesses, advising clients, raising a family, pursuing ideas and generally finding something that needed doing, so remove the next goal and a life that has so often been driven by purpose can begin to feel as though it is being driven merely by survival.

That question probably didn’t suddenly appear with retirement. It was simply buried deeply enough, and usually covered by sufficient activity, that there was little reason to go digging for it. Retirement has removed some of the noise, and occasionally the silence underneath is not quite as peaceful as all those advertisements for retirement villages would have us believe.

Writing has become one of the unexpected places where I now fill some of that space. I didn’t begin writing books because I had developed some grand ambition to become an author, but as an outlet, documenting what was happening during the day and trying to take some of the negative thoughts rolling around in my head and put them somewhere else. There was something attractive about throwing them onto paper where, at least theoretically, I could leave them behind.

The process has since become something I genuinely enjoy. I enjoy the interaction with ChatGPT (OpenAI 2026), throwing thoughts into the conversation, reacting to what comes back, correcting it when it has misunderstood me and watching something that began as memories and half-formed observations turn into something readable. Occasionally somebody else reads the finished product and likes it, which remains rather satisfying despite my apparently magnificent inability to convince anybody to promote the bloody things properly.

There is usefulness hiding in that process as well, and I don’t think enjoyment and usefulness have to be separated simply because nobody is paying an hourly rate for either of them. Some people who discover the books become avid readers, and knowing that thoughts pulled from my head can become something another person chooses to spend their time reading provides its own peculiar sense of contribution. Nobody necessarily needs another Jeff Banks book in the way somebody once needed a tax return completed by a deadline, but perhaps usefulness doesn’t have to retain the same definition forever.

The same applies when I disappear into the Man Cave and attempt to make something nobody has commissioned and nobody particularly needs. Part of it is enjoyment, part of it is occupation and part of it is still the satisfaction of producing something where previously there was nothing. Apparently I can retire from accounting more easily than I can retire from the idea that a day feels better when something exists at the end of it that didn’t exist at the beginning.

The Soft Shoulder appliqué is long gone, but apparently the sign survived. Clients still ring, family still asks things of me and friends still arrive with problems, although helping family occupies an entirely different emotional space because giving back to those who have kept me going is something I treasure rather than endure. Sandbar has demonstrated that filling every available need is not necessarily an intelligent life strategy, while retirement has demonstrated that removing every need is not necessarily attractive either.

Somewhere between those positions is a line I have never managed to define, perhaps because enough usefulness is no easier to calculate than enough money. Enough work might be measured in hours, enough clients in numbers and enough tax returns by whether Monday morning’s desks are covered with completed files, but nobody ever established the rules for enough purpose. For somebody accustomed to operating against targets, that is a surprisingly difficult set of accounts to reconcile.

At three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon now, none of that necessarily requires an answer because the football will shortly begin. I can sit in the recliner without a pile of tax returns waiting downstairs and without eighty per cent of the year’s turnover needing to be manufactured in the next few weeks. If the telephone doesn’t ring, that is probably a good thing, although if it does ring I will almost certainly answer it and may even be annoyed that somebody has interrupted me.

Then somebody will tell me what the problem is, and despite myself my mind will begin pulling it apart, looking for the simple answer hidden somewhere inside the complicated question. For a few minutes there will be something that needs doing, somebody who thinks I might know how to do it and an old yellow sign with black writing that apparently never really came off my shoulder. Afterwards I can go back to the football, the garden, the Man Cave or the office to write another few thousand words that nobody specifically asked me to write.

On some afternoons none of those things has sufficient attraction, and I can put the CPAP mask on, pull the pillow over my head and tell Robyn I am simply tired. Most times that will be true, while occasionally there will be a little more to it than that. I don’t necessarily need to know which category every afternoon belongs in, although the accountant in me would undoubtedly prefer that I did.

The question waiting underneath is not new, and retirement certainly didn’t create it. Retirement has merely removed enough of the surrounding noise for me to hear more clearly the question that usefulness has allowed me to avoid answering for much of my life: what happens when nobody needs me to do anything? After all the businesses, clients, targets, committees, books, problems solved and things made simply because I could make them, I still don’t have a number for that.