Around lunchtime yesterday an email arrived from the Railway Touring Company offering to take me and my partner to Weymouth on a train hauled by a steam engine. There was a generous last minute discount and I inquired of my partner if she fancied a day out at the seaside. My diary is less full today than at other days of the week and I contacted my team to ask for cover, We are going to the seaside from London, for the day.

This is how I imagine retirement will be, There are no plugs on this train , there is no wi-fi, my day to day work will not take place. I will not have to worry about the outputs of spreadsheets.

Yesterday I wrote across an article written by Scottish Widows that told me that without a financial adviser , my retirement was going to be a struggle. This was news to me, though I’ve heard this a thousand times. My idea of a happy retirement does not involve me meeting my financial adviser on a regular basis , nor plugging in to find out the lates valuation of my portfolio , nor planning my income month to month. I do not want to worry about the meaningless stock-market “routs” and whether my drawdown will be at a time of financial crisis. None of these things compares with the simplicity of spending time with my darling of 25 years , chugging though Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset.

I really want my later life finances done for me by my pension plan which I have funded since my early 20s and which is sufficient to pay off my mortgage and pay me a comfortable retirement. I would like to give my money to a pension fund and in return get a pension the shape of which I might have some control of and the value of which I could be sure of.

I really would like to opt-out of financial management and instead the simple pleasure of growing old with a glass of wine, a good book and the pleasant company of my partner and friends.

I know I am not alone in this, if I ask my college friends, who I spend happy evenings with, what retirement means to them, they say as one “no more work”.  They do not want to talk to me of flexi-access drawdown, UFPLS and the MPAA (even though they know I know about these things). Jim is retiring after a career in energy , James has been an academic, Rob a scientist , Nick a gardener, Vic ran hotels and Martin  was a  barrister, but all that is behind them, if I ask them what they do – they say they are retired – they do what they like not what someone wants them to do. A bit like me today! I do have female friends but we were the Selwyn lads!

Alone among them, I carry on working, not because I have to, but because I am determined to leave pensions as I found them, a way of getting paid after we stop work.

The best thing to have happened to pensions in the past 20 years has not been auto-enrolment, certainly not the demise of DB schemes but the increased value to pensioners of the state pension which is now paying nearly the minimum retirement standard of living recommended by the PLSA. Most people of my generation will not live in pension poverty  and there is a benefits safety net for those who need it.

For those, like most of us, who have a bit of this and a bit of that and not much idea of what to do with it all, we have the promise of help- but precious little help at hand. We have MoneyHelper and we have the promise of a dashboard and we have a fast diminishing advice sector who remind us that they really don’t want to talk with us unless we have £250,000 in manageable cash.

But currently, most of us don’t have any way to turn pot (s) to pension, no way to banish the spreadsheet from our retirements. I will hold this thought in my head as I travel through the New Forest , through Bournemouth and Poole and Wareham to Weymouth. And while we eat our fish and chips on the seafront and paddle like Prufrock and try not to think of the humiliation of Yeovil losing last season’s derby.

Because today is a most unexpected red letter day for me and my girl, a day when we turn the spreadsheet off and get on with the shortest holiday of our lives, a trial run for a rather longer one!