Stars Die

I handed in my letter of resignation today.  In three months' time I will no longer be working for the BBC, which I first joined in 1977 as a teenaged school leaver straight from 6th form.  A few months ago, I was filled with excitement and bursting with plans about what I was going to do once free from the constraints of working and commuting for five long days a week.  What I'm feeling now in the stark reality of having at last set the retirement wheels in motion is rather different, particularly in the light of all that has happened to my family and to me in the past two months of my Dad's illness and unexpectedly long stay in hospital.  Walking through the crowds of Christmas shoppers in London today, I felt like an outsider, a mere onlooker unable to take part in any of it, my star on the wane.  There's a sense of no longer belonging anywhere, and a sharp awareness that by next Christmas life will be almost completely unrecognisable from the way it has been for more than thirty-five years.  And yet the decision to leave was not hard, it was a no-brainer, inevitable, the only and obvious thing to do.  I have survived some exquisitely painful and testing times in the past five years, and that has given me the strength of character to deal with whatever might happen in the weeks, months and years to come.  When Stars Die new ones are born, created from the dust of the old.