![\"Richard](\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/site\/blog\/icons\/bmjh7648e.jpg\")
Lots of my friends have recently retired or are retiring. None of them, as far as I know, have been on preretirement courses. They launch into retirement, which may be very long, ill prepared, perhaps reflecting on stories of people quickly fading and dying after retirement. I have a proposal for them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve not been on a preretirement course and am in fact accumulating jobs (12 at the last count) rather than shedding them, but I imagine preretirement courses to be sober affairs: preserve your energy, be financially cautious, don\u2019t move to a house with lots of stairs, make a will and a living will, plan your funeral, tell your children you love them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve got a different idea, which came to me this morning while reading Kevin Jackson\u2019s Constellation of Genius. 1922: Modernism Year One<\/em>. My proposal is that you follow the spirit, or even repeat the actuality, of the ten days spent in 1922 by Raymond Radiguet, poet and (probably platonic) lover of Jean Cocteau, and Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i, the Romanian \u201cpatriarch of modern sculpture.\u201d<\/p>\n In your retirement, putting your carpet slippers aside, you don either a dinner jacket or a designer cocktail dress (depending on your gender, orientation, and taste) and go to the opening night of the coolest nightclub in the world. For Radiguet and Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i it was the Le Boeuf sur le Toit, haunt of Cocteau, Picasso, Chaplin, Chanel, Hemingway, Les Six, and the Aga Khan. It was \u201cthe very cradle of caf\u00e9 society.\u201d<\/p>\n As is common among retirees, Radiguet and Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i soon got bored, so they grabbed Nina Hamnett,\u00a0 the \u201cQueen of Bohemia,\u201d who was sculpted nude by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and had love affairs with Brzeska, Modigliani, and Roger Fry, and headed for Montparnasse.<\/p>\n Around midnight they understandably got \u201cthe munchies\u201d and went to the Gare de Lyon for some bouillabaisse, that most tricky of French soups to get right. They were disappointed with the soup at the Gare de Lyon. They presumably went there because the ingredients, which are uniquely Mediterranean, could be taken fresh from the express from Marseille.<\/p>\n This is where your retirement begins to get interesting. Radiguet and Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i thought that the obvious thing to do to get decent bouillabaisse was to go to Marseille. So, ditching the Queen of Bohemia, who must have got boring by this stage, they took the night train to Marseille.<\/p>\n Naturally they drank all the way to keep their spirits up. Although unlikely to be recommended by your doctor, heavy drinking is probably essential to this proposal. It would be hard to carry off sober.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the bouillabaisse in Marseilles was also disappointing, so Radiguet and Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i continued their search for the perfect soup by taking a boat to Corsica. The book doesn\u2019t reveal whether they ever found the perfect bouillabaisse (obviously a version of the Holy Grail), but they did spend 10 days in Corsica drinking brandy to keep themselves warm (it was January). As a retired person, you will be allowed thermal underwear in addition to the brandy, which, as every doctor knows, doesn\u2019t keep you warm, but opens the blood vessels in your skin, making you more at risk of hypothermia.<\/p>\n You keep this up for 10 days and then return to Paris (or Didsbury, Croydon, or wherever you started). Although your life may be shortened, your retirement will undoubtedly be enriched.<\/p>\n