hanging on by my fingernails
Geoff 75. Married. Trying to be a retired seafarer. Electronic and computer engineer.
How are you?
I'm trying to pack up work but it's very difficult because I’ve been a barge engineer and sailor for quite a long time. I'm surrounded by barges and people that haven't got the experience are constantly asking me to sort stuff out for them and teach them skills. Required skills are different now. We are galloping headlong, eyes closed into a massive technological revolution. The likes of which most people on this planet can't even begin to imagine because it has accelerated so fast. Technology in 50 years time will be such that anybody living today wouldn’t understand it.
The people I help have chosen a lifestyle that harks back, if you like. They all live on old boats and nobody's taught them about old boats. There isn’t a course to learn about them either. Yet they come here to live on them knowing little about it so they come to people like me who do know something. When I say I'm trying to retire, I'd like to stop helping them but I don't feel I can. I don't feel sorry for them it’s just they're trying to cope with something they don't understand. I want to retire from actually doing the stuff. I’m quite happy to carry on explaining, fault-finding, troubleshooting and saying - ‘Oh, that's your problem’ but I don't want to get a spanner out and fix it for them anymore.
How do you see yourself?
Determined. If I decide to do something it doesn't matter how long it takes, I won't give up. I never give up. I am an identical twin. I used to hate being a twin. I wanted to be myself. People would come along and pat me on the head - ‘Oh, you're one of the twins’. We were close when we were little. We made up our own language. When we started school, we used to walk to on different sides of the road to establish our individuality.
My brother died last six months ago. He had leukaemia and died very quickly. He lived in New Zealand. I haven't seen him in the flesh for 25 years. He’d say - if we don't see each other for 25 years and bumped into each other in the pub, it would be like we've seen each other yesterday. We've always had that kind of connection but we weren’t clingy. His funeral was on Zoom. My sister said I frightened the life out of most people in the congregation. They thought my brother had recorded his eulogy before he died.