August at Last

August at last!  We've finally arrived at my favourite Summer month.  For me, this is when Summer really starts, when everything seems to slow down and it starts to feel as if the entire world is on holiday.  As I've mentioned many times before, August is the month of my rekindling childhood memories of long ago family trips to the beach.  To this day, sitting on the beach at Lepe brings it all back - the smell of damp towels after coming out of the sea, curling up at the edges sandwiches in plastic boxes and bottles of warm orange squash.  My seventies childhood remembered.  So, I have my leave from work booked for the latter half of August, so that I can spend some quality time in my own company, back in the places I love. (A fellow I used to sometimes drink with at the local once told me that the older he got, the more he preferred his own company - over the years I've come to appreciate his wisdom more and more. I increasingly find other people tedious to be around.  Not all of them.  Just most of them).  This year, with luck, should also encompass a meet-up with Frank Nora from the Overnightscape Underground, who is planning to be in London for a couple of days.  My annual Summer break is also traditionally the time when I try to catch up with my schlock movie viewing and I have a number of films I'm hoping to finally get through. 

Holidays notwithstanding, August has already got off to a good start.  I got my latest Civil Service Pension statement today.  Which might not sound terribly exciting, but believe me, when you get to my age, such things start to become important.  The significant thing about the paperwork I received today is that it finally got my pension entitlement right.  For the past couple of years, the statements have been under counting my pension contributions, claiming that I had only six years reckonable service rather than than the actual figure of twenty odd years.  The difference this makes to my annual pension payout is pretty big, as you can imagine.  It seems that when I reduced my hours at the start of this year, they had to recalculate everything and this time finally realised that I was right and they were wrong and that I had fourteen years more pension contributions than they kept trying to tell me I had.  Anyway, the end result of this is, provided I manage to make those additional years of National Insurance contributions, (thanks to changes in the State Pension in 2016), and receive a full state pension, then I should be reasonably well off in retirement with the two pensions combined.  I won't be getting a fortune, but it should provide me with a decent income.  Something to look forward to, although in the meantime I'm only looking a couple weeks into the future, to my forthcoming Summer break.