I was on leave last week when I picked up a voice message from my boss. She was alerting me to the Voluntary Redundancy programme my company is offering and letting me know I’m eligible. There have been several of these downsizing efforts over the past few years, most of them voluntary but some (not many) people have been made redundant. This is the first one in the last few years that I’ve been qualified to apply for.

Previously I haven’t been interested in going anyway. But this time it’s different because I’m able to take up my company pensions. One of them is fully paid now that I’m over 60. The other isn’t, but is worth much less anyway. My working to age 65 won’t make a tremendous difference to that one.

Of course there is a downside. If I don’t draw them, both pensions will continue to grow: the smaller one if I keep working and the other increases each year that I don’t take it (and at a generous rate of 9% a year.) In addition, obviously, I’ll lose my monthly salary.

On the upside, I’ve calculated I can replace pretty much all of my salary with a combination of pension and investment returns, so I won’t be much worse off than I am now, working full-time. And if I’m careful and my investments work out well I could even beat my salary in future years.

Then there is the big plus of having my life to myself. That really is very tempting.

So the position right now is that I’ve applied for a “no strings attached” redundancy quotation. I’ve told my boss I probably won’t take it. But as the days go by I’m more enthusiastic about the prospect of freedom. I’ll get the figures tomorrow or Friday, I have to decide by next Tuesday at noon. If I accept, I’ll be gone by the end of the month. It’s all designed to rush through but if I’m going to go that will suit me fine.

In anticipation, I’ve asked for pension quotes, based on them starting in October.

So now I’m all ready, just awaiting the figures before I decide.

My gf and I went to Pennington Flash near Leigh yesterday. It’s a regular place for a walk for us as it’s just a few minutes by car. Pennington Flash is a sizeable lake and has a large population of birds - ducks, swans etc. There are hides for the keen twitchers to use.

When I have more time I might take up an interest in birdwatching, at least to the point of recognising more than just the most common ones. Can’t see my girlfriend being too keen though so I won’t be going on birdwatching expeditions any time soon. Not unless I can pair it with shopping to keep her interested.

I’ve read again what I wrote last year, and history repeats itself, or at least I do. Ironically, I’m cash-strapped again, after resolving last year to sort my financial situation out.

We went to Kent, near Hever Castle for a week and had a great time. Really good weather and lots of interesting places to visit. We included a 5.5 mile walk so that gave us some good exercise, and a sun tan.

After a long break from the blog, I’m back. More posts will follow.

I start back at work today, after a two and a half week break.

Our holiday in Crete is over and we’ve come from blazing sunshine and temperatures around 100 degree F every day, to showers and temperatures in the high 50s F (if we are lucky).

It’s not all bad though, at least not to my mind. The summer days in Greece are too hot for me to bear for more than a couple of weeks.  And, unles I’m doing a fair amount of sightseeing and exploring, just lounging around by the pool quickly loses it’s attraction. To be back now in a temperate climate, with work and hobbies to resume and friends to catch up with, is actually very welcome.

Whether I’ll be quite so happy after a full day at work remains to be seen. Apart from the shock of being back at my desk for over 7 hours, there may have been some significant changes. Including the possibility that I may no longer have a role.

Before I went on leave there were moves to restructure and remove resources in my group. I may have been absent at a crucial time. Not that my presence would have made much difference,  I’m not in a position of influence in these matters.

I’ve again got myself into a situation where I’m asset-rich but cash-poor and it is a little uncomfortable. Because of the house price boom in the UK of the past years, I have an asset worth much more (double at least) than I paid for it. Similarly I have stock market investments, mostly held in an ISA, that are probably of about the same value as my house.

But right now, I don’t have a lot of cash available. And I’m about to go on holiday, so I’m experiencing a cash squeeze.

I can’t easily make use of the value of the house, at least not without taking risks that are not worthwhile. And my ISA stocks are intended to provide an additional income for when I retire. That is too important for me to mess about with.

To get by in the short term, I’ve taken out a loan with my local Warrington credit union, NEWCU. Hopefully that, together with moving some money from my reserve bank account, will just about tide me over.

For the future, I’ve already taken steps to cut back significantly on my unnecessary monthly outgoings so hopefully, I’ll be able to rebuild my reserves.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I wanted to install a new distribution of Linux, called Sidux, on my home fileserver. See the post “Moving To Sidux, Part 2“. At that time the Sidux installation still didn’t work.

I’d found that I had to make space at the start of my 200Gb drive as Grub couldn’t see the boot information due to bios limitations. The boot info was beyond the bios limit of 170Gb.

Well, after moving the old Kanotix /home partition further up the drive to create space for two new partitions at the beginning, I met another problem to fix.

Booting my new Sidux installation, now at the start of the drive, failed again for a different reason. It turned out that the partition table of that drive was no longer in order.

The old home partion labelled hdb1 was now at the end of the drive, and had two other partition, hdb2 and hdb3 before it in the physical layout. Grub or something else in the boot process didn’t like that and Sidux refused to start.

I found the solution, thanks to advice at WebServerTalk.com, was to rewrite the partion table so that the partitions were listed in order from hdb1 to hdb3. By booting from the live Sidux CD (another advantage of Sidux), I could edit the partition table and I now have a fully functioning Sidux installation.

It only remained to ensure everything was OK with my old Kanotix boot, by editing it’s fstab to point it’s old /home to it’s new partition name of hdb3 .

My never-ending quest to have a tidier house continues. I am making some progress, I think. No, I definitely am, it’s just that there is so much to do that it is daunting. I think that I’ve mentioned before how my poor habits lead me to leave things lying around and not clean up after myself.

Despite this, things are slowly improving at the moment. It goes in fits and starts but if I just focus on doing a little at a time I can make inroads into the piles that I’ve accumulated.

One technique I have learned that works for me is to start with my back bedroom, which is full of things thrown in haphazardly. There is no room for the bed; I’ve had to leave that dismantled. Anyway, I file or throw things out from there. Then when I’ve made a small space I move things from other rooms into it.

That way my living area gets an immediate benefit and I don’t have to view the debris every day.

I was listening to a programme on the radio at lunch time yesterday when there was a discussion on social evils. This was prompted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation who are conducting a survey on social evils in order to direct their work over the next 10 years.

The first caller to the programme made a very good case for inequality in society being one of the major social evils.

The amount of inequality from it’s richest members to the poorest in society is correlated to many severe problem. In health, heart disease and cancer are both higher in countries with greater levels of inequality, along with other medical problems. Also related are increased levels of crime and drug abuse.

So, even though we are much better off in absolute terms than we were a century ago when Joseph Rowntree set up his trusts, our societies in the UK and the US have problems.

We are less healthy and have more crime and other issues than countries with less inequality. And this may well be getting worse: inequality has shown a striking increase in recent years.

My car is due for both a service and it’s annual MOT. I have a knocking sound from my right front suspension that I’ll have to get fixed before it can go in for the MOT certification. I’m guessing it happened when I rode up on the kerb a couple of months ago. I thought at the time that something might have broken.

I’m going  to the National Tyre depot in town this morning to have them check over the suspension. If they have the parts to fix it, I can leave the car with them. Otherwise I’ll need to return tomorrow or later in the week.

Then, once the suspension is fixed, I can arrange for an MOT and service to be done. In the past this would have been straightforward.  For several years now I’ve had my cars loooked after by a small backstreet garage where David, the head mechanic (and usually the only one), has been very helpful.

However last year the garage owner died and there was no-one in the family left to run the place . It looked like it would close and leave David without a job. This had just happened when I rang to book a service and David was very upset.

I haven’t heard since then what happened to David. I just hope he found himself an alternative place to work.

The next Formula One Grand Prix, in Hungary, is coming up this weekend. I’ve been drawn into watching Formula One motor racing on two separate occasions in the past.

The first time was when Nigel Mansell was in his prime. His daring overtaking and sheer exuberance made him great fun to watch. However to listen to him being interviewed was in complete contrast to the way he drove the car.

After Mansell retired, I lost interest in Formula One, that is until I became aware of Michael Schumacher. He was just awesome. He was in complete control of the car and himself on the track and he  was a major contributor to the development of the car. When driving in the wet, no-one could compare. His ability to come through the pack to win was amazing.

Nowadays, with Michael’s departure from racing, I’m more ambivalent about the sport. I’m still interested enough to watch every race but I’m not sure if that will continue.

If Lewis Hamilton maintains the spectacular way he’s come on the scene this year, I will very likely stay being a fan of Formula One racing. But I haven’t yet taken to him in the same way I did with Mansell and Schumacher. I guess we’ll all have to see how Hamilton develops.

Are there real benefits from buying organic food? At this point, I’m sceptical of the idea.

The first claim made is that organic food tastes better. However the few tests of this that I’ve seen reported  cast doubt on it. Is it actually true? The problem with answering this sort of question is the same as that posed by testing the efficacy of drugs in treating illnesses. If the person doing the tasting knows that the food is organic, it will influence their judgement when reporting the taste. So the only valid test is a blind one, and preferably a double blind one. This is where neither the person taking the test nor the person administering it knows which food being tasted is organic and which is not. Maybe such tests have been done, but I haven’t seen them reported.

The other main claim for organic food is that it is healthier. But even more so than the claims about taste,  this needs to be rigorously tested, and for the same reasons. We can’t rely on common sense to provide accurate answers.

So at the moment, I prefer not to pay the extra cost that the supermarkets add on for organic food. Especially as most of the charge goes onto their profits and very little to the farmers.