The Hermit on the Hill

(What Secrets is He Hiding?)

As you may be aware, I am British, ex-military and now an expat living in rural Spain, in a cave with friends.

For this, I am going to start with now, and the title “The Hermit on the Hill”…why…well, because I have come to understand that is the view that people (locals and expats) have of me. At which point you probably think “Ha, anti-social old boy” or “Hmmm, what’s he hiding”… and neither are true, as such lol.

I am a private person, a twice-divorced guy in his 60s who was always looking for a level of solitude and not because I disliked people or community. And I fell lucky when my friends were selling up and retiring from the UK, pre-Brexit, and they invited me to be part of the “clan”…Spain in one form or another had always been on my list as my departure from the UK.

Does that make me odd?

Not knowing and not caring are the two primaries here, but someone said something recently, and it stuck as a possible theme for some of my scribbles.

So let’s wind by the clock…and we have to wind it back a good amount at my current age haha.

I grew up on the backdrop and various relocations of my father’s Army career…born in the UK, lived in various parts of that, but also Germany and Norway…nice experience for a child…and then Dad completed 23 years of service and returned to the UK to be near his parents.

Whilst my “proper English” accent (taught within the associated schools to the Army environment), did encounter periods of “He’s not from round here… oddball”, I did have friends…I almost put a hand-selected group of friends, but it was never like that, people, of all ages, often gravitate to certain people and not ALL people.

I played out in the streets, playing football, climbing on building sites, investigating wastewater deposits until the street lights turned on, a signal to get home.

Leaving school at the age of 16 years, I jumped into the employment world. I did all the things you probably did at that time in your life…drinking, clubbing, burning the candle at both ends…meeting with friends, meeting with people from work.

My employment history is varied to say the least, and you would have to look back at some of my other autobiographical scribbles to get a take on it, which included my time in the Royal Air Force Police…

The military world is very much “work hard, play hard”…and for sure, I lived by the motto.

When I left the Royal Air Force, employment became a stretch of Senior Management Roles in the Security Industry…the kind of industry that, to some extent, echoes military order, but is ingrained in being a people person if you are to recruit, train and manage 350 plus personnel.

So, at this point, whether you have read my articles about my past, you have a broad overview of “The Hermit on the Hill”… a man who, by every measure that’s supposed to count, should be the last bloke up the hill on his own.

I was never short of people. I was, by trade and by training, a people person. I recruited them, rostered them, disciplined them, occasionally bailed them out of trouble, and went for a pint with most of them afterwards. Thirty-odd years of that. So you’d think the natural retirement plan for a man like that is a nice bungalow on a nice estate where he can pop round for a brew with the neighbours and complain about the council.

Instead, here I am. Up a hill. In a cave. With a small handful of people I chose, and a fairly committed policy of not bothering with the rest.

The “someone said something recently” I mentioned earlier… what they actually said was something like, “You’ve spent your whole life managing people, no wonder you don’t want to manage any more than you have to.” And it stuck, because it’s almost right, and almost right is the most annoying kind of right there is.

Because here’s the bit that doesn’t fit the tidy theory. I don’t think I’m hiding from people. I think I’m hiding from the version of myself that has to perform for them. Thirty years of being “on”… the uniform version, the management version, the chap who has to look like he’s got it together in front of 350 staff and two ex-wives… that takes something out of a man. Twice, I gave that performing version of myself to a marriage, and twice it turned out the marriage wanted the performance more than it wanted me. I’m not bitter about it. I’m just no longer willing to audition for company.

So when the locals look up the hill and decide there’s a recluse with a past worth gossiping about, they’re not entirely wrong, just wrong about the maths. It’s not that I dislike people. It’s that I’ve already done my time as a people person, properly, professionally, for free and for a wage, and I’ve earned the right to be selective about who gets the rest of it.

I still want company. I just want it on my terms now, in small doses, with people who don’t need me to be anything other than the bloke up the hill. That’s not a withdrawal from life. If anything, it’s the most honest version of “work hard, play hard” I’ve managed yet… I worked hard at being everyone’s man for forty years. Now I’m playing hard at being my own.

Whether that makes me a hermit, an old fool, or just a man who’s finally stopped clocking in… I genuinely don’t know, and as I said at the start, I don’t much care.

The clan can keep their theory about what I’m hiding up here. It costs me nothing, and on a quiet evening with the cave door open and a glass in hand, it’s actually quite good company.

Until Next Time