Right Now

Early-2025, sitting at my desk within a few hundred metres of, and overlooking, the wild Atlantic Ocean. Unhurried, safe, and beautiful northern Portugal. Tops in every important way for us.

For about 10 months in the year we have almost the entire place to ourselves. Just fabulous. The holiday makers, mostly Portuguese people in this part of the country, with a smattering of foreign visitors, will return in numbers in July and August. Then we head for the hiking and cycling trails in the wonderful interior areas such as Peneda-Gerês national park to escape, albeit very civil and well-behaved, crowds.

How and why northern Portugal?

It has always stood out as a preferred location for our post-career years, if it proved possible. We visited quite often before retirement, looked around at various locations, did quite a bit of hiking in the area. It ticked all the boxes, and then some – actually, and then a lot.

Having lived and worked for long periods in three countries up to that point, it didn’t take long to see that northern Portugal offered the best all-around quality of life by far than anywhere hitherto. The choice was easy, and the circumstances more fortunate that we had ever dared hope.

And what an active and fun time of life it has turned out to be! Long may it continue!

For me, the present and the future are what it’s all about, rather than the past. So we could wrap up the bio at this point without losing anything important. But, let’s spin it out a little, since there was life before Portugal.

Rewind

Probably a good place to start is to say whatever one’s idea of a conventional or ‘standard’ life, mine has been anything but. It was just how things unfolded, rather than the result of any particular plan.

But positive follow-on’s from all that included great adaptability to almost any circumstances, and ability to turn significant challenges into opportunities. A kind of ‘bullet-proofing’, I guess. Though that started from an early age!

The family roots are in farming in County Wicklow, southern Ireland. Lots of insight into the quirks of farmers and farming, of which there are many. And fun, including some hair-raising antics, which were all survived somehow. After all, boys will be boys!

Then on to boarding school, the equivalent to high school, from about age 12, in Drogheda, and another survival exercise accomplished. But hazy at the time as to where it was all heading, what the possibilities might have been, and few notable contemporary guiding lights. In rural Ireland then, young people who graduated even from high school were relatively few.

Back then, the 60’s and 70’s, tradition and age-old protocols ruled, without quibble or question. Things were done in a certain way, and little changed over long periods. Even today, customs and behaviour patterns still linger more than one might expect.

So, high school, à la boarding school, and college in Dublin, came and went, graduating with a Bachelors degree in science. A fair few bright spots in that journey. But hopefully boarding school has changed for the better. And then the time arrived to think about a job, likely outside Ireland.

This was long before shiploads of EU development money, and huge foreign direct investment by big US tech and pharma surged in the 1990s. The result was rescuing Ireland from its economic woes and lack of employment opportunities, and on the road to where it is today.

Travel

So, travel it was, and some chance events led to going to South Africa (SA) to work as a lab technician with Shell Oil SA in 1976.

South Africa piqued my interest as I had some good Indian South African friends in college. I picked up snippets about South Africa that were compelling for a young guy looking to see some interesting far-away places, political issues notwithstanding. And of course the work experience.

The vague intention was to return to Ireland after a few years with that valuable work experience under my belt. But, I ended up staying a long time in SA.

It was an interesting place to be then. Apart from a booming economy, for example, South Africa had lots of big gold mines. I remember one time the Government gave everyone a 3-month income tax holiday because the gold price had gone shooting up past US$800 per ounce. They were awash with US Dollars and didn’t need the tax money!

Nice! Very different story now, with China, and Russia as if they are the kind of allies anyone in their right mind would want, pulling the strings.

After a few years at Shell Oil then moved on to working in other technical, technical sales and middle management roles. During that time I added an Honours BCom business degree from the University of South Africa to my CV. But it was already past time to consider the longer term.

Return

I decided to re-emigrate from SA in the early 1990’s.

Ireland didn’t work out in terms of finding a suitable position. Hence I ended up working in the UK for more than a decade. Once again with Shell Oil, in Manchester for a couple of years, in technical sales and marketing middle management roles. Later moving on to a similar role at a small specialty manufacturing company on Merseyside.

That UK company was acquired by the German Evonik conglomerate. It was eventually closed and operations moved to one of Evonik’s main sites in Belgium. Disruption aside, it just made business sense. These circumstances provided an opportunity to have another bash at returning to Ireland in about 2004.

My interest in finance, and having been an active small investor on the Johannesburg and London Stock Exchanges led to an unexpected but interesting opportunity in a financial services brokerage in Dublin. The role was financial advisor and public sector pensions specialist.

While interesting and worthwhile, it was clear from early days at that brokerage that for me it was going to be a short term proposition. It turned out to be longer than I had expected – years instead of months.

This was followed by quite a few years of interesting contract work on the commercial side of the start-up and early growth phases in the digital technology space in Dublin, Ireland.

In the nature of contract work there was time and opportunity to add to my formal computing credentials. This culminated in achieving an Edinburgh Napier University MSc in Cyber Security. It’s one of the world-leading Masters programs in cyber security, and while very challenging, was super-interesting, even fun! The coursework and dissertation also provided a great focus during the Covid-19 lockdown periods.

The contract work phase led on to our wonderful post-career stage of life, which is happily where we are now. Still with several interesting personal projects on the go, including learning Portuguese, some web dev, online business ideas to pursue, and again stock market investing activity. Portuguese is a challenging language, necessary in these parts as little English is spoken, but also fun!

How Portugal

And explaining a little further about ending up in northern Portugal.

During a holiday break more than a decade ago now, I did a Camino Santiago de Compostela hike in Galicia, northern Spain. At that time it was still a truly amazing experience, and met so many wonderful fellow-hikers from all over the world. One of those friends had transited through Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, in the north of the country. She highly recommended checking the place out. I’m very glad I did.

And that’s were all things Portugal started. Today, the same Camino is uncomfortably overcrowded. But of course we now have access to so many other wonderful hiking and cycling trails in Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere that the crowds haven’t yet found out about.

The adventures continue – for sure there will be lots more…

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