There’s no graceful way to do this, so I’ll do it quickly and we can both move on.
I’ve been writing here since June last year. Most of it before six in the morning, because forty years at sea left me with a body that refuses to accept the watch has ended. There’s a kettle now instead of a ship. Poor substitute for command, better for the nerves.
Almost none of you pay for this.
That’s how I set it up and it suits me. But I’ve been quietly hoping the money side would sort itself out without my ever having to raise it, and that isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish with a clipboard.
I once talked a Greek harbourmaster out of impounding a ship using nothing but a clipboard and an air of total confidence I did not possess. Yet here I am at sixty-eight, sweating over a paragraph that boils down to please.
So: please.
If these have been worth something to you — if you’ve forwarded one, or read one twice, or let a cup go cold because a sentence caught you sideways — a paid subscription keeps it going. It comes to twenty-two cents a day. I spend more than that on the tea I drink writing the things.
No countdown timer. No fake deadline. No bonus PDF you’ll never open. Just the longer and more uncomfortable pieces, and a retired man still getting up at half four for a reason.
And if you can’t, stay anyway. Nothing goes away and there’ll be no wheedling.
I assumed retirement meant the end of being useful for anything.
It hasn’t.
It just turns up now as a stranger writing to say that’s exactly it, I couldn’t have put it into words.
Better return than most of what I earned properly.
That’s the ask. I’ll not do it again for a while.
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