The Holiday I Didn't Come Home From

Six weeks in, and it still feels like a holiday rather than a life. I've just come back from an actual one, a week in Cornwall, and for the first time it had nothing waiting on the other side of it. Which is roughly when I worked out what a holiday was really made of, and why this doesn't feel like one.

August 2026 : 6 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.

We got back from a week in Cornwall on Saturday. It was a good week, sun, the coast, time with my wife. It was also the first holiday of my working life that I didn't have to come home from. There was no Sunday-night weight to it, no mentally packing the bag for Monday. And instead of the usual small relief of a break, I felt something flatter. I'd come back from a holiday to more of the same. The holiday hadn't really ended, because nothing was waiting to restart.

This Wednesday it will be six weeks since I officially stopped, and the days have kept that same shapeless quality. A lie-in, some guitar, an hour on the Xbox. The one fixed point is the sixty-minute round trip to take or fetch my son from work, until he passes his test. Some of this is by design. I decided not to fill the early weeks with structure, to actually decompress rather than swap one full diary for another, so a shapeless day is partly the point. What I didn't expect was to spend the shapelessness quietly taking notes on it.

It still doesn't feel like retirement. It feels like being off.

That word, off, is the giveaway.

Off from what? For thirty years, time off meant a break from the default, and the default was work. When the children were at school we built the year around the holidays, and the holidays were what you looked forward to. Six weeks until the next one. The counting down was half the pleasure. Even in my last few years, long after the kids had left school, I bought the extra holiday weeks the company offered, so there was always a break on the horizon. I told myself it was for the rest. I think it was for the shape.

So I've retired into the thing all those holidays were rationed portions of. Time off, permanently. But a holiday was never really about rest. It was about contrast, and about there not being much of it. Take away the work it was a break from, take away the scarcity that made it a treat, and what's left isn't an endless holiday. It's just time. Cornwall was the proof. The same trip that would once have been a golden week off was, this time, a nice week among all the others.

I've caught myself reaching to replace that missing machinery in odd ways, and the clearest is LinkedIn. I barely touched it in thirty years of working. Since I left I've been on it steadily, writing, and reconnecting with people I worked with going back decades, and I've genuinely enjoyed it. But I can see part of what it is. Work used to supply the social side of my life without my having to think about it, the colleagues, the calls, the being in the mix. Now it doesn't, and I've quietly wired up a replacement. It's the same move as buying the holiday weeks after the kids had gone. Keeping a bit of machinery running after the thing it was built for has stopped.

There's a stretch this all reminds me of. When COVID hit I was furloughed for the best part of eight months. Home, movements restricted, no idea when it would end. Each month we thought we'd be called back, and each month it got extended. It had the texture these weeks have. And in the middle of it, I built a shed. Actually built it, with not much idea what I was doing.

The garden this time is on hold. We've had the hottest, driest summer I can remember and I've no appetite to be out in it, which is true and probably not the whole story. During furlough I thought it would end, and I built a shed. Now I know it won't end, and I've built nothing. The deadline I was so glad to be rid of, the return to work, might have been the very thing that made me use the time. Take it away and the days stop pressing. There's no urgency to build the shed today when every day after this one is also available for it.

So, six weeks in and just back from a holiday I didn't come home from, I'm mostly noticing how much of my life had a shape I didn't put there myself. Whether I can make my own now, without the job to supply it, is the thing I don't yet know. The garden's still waiting on rain. I'll find out what I do when it comes.

Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.

Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.