Mr Jefferies’ Retirement

Peter Norman Jefferies had worked 35 years in an accountancy job he hated. Well, hated may be a strong word. He had worked 35 years in an accountancy job he was totally indifferent to; hate was possibly a bit beyond him. For you see, Peter was not particularly a man of peaks and valleys in his emotions, or in his life in general. He entered the field of accountancy because upon completing his O-Levels he scored above average in Mathematics. Not very far above average, mind you (this tendency toward the middle of the bell curve being a repeated pattern in his life) but well enough as to gently nudge him toward a numeric-based occupation. Of all the options available to him, accountancy seemed the safest to fall into. And so, he fell.

After completing an unremarkable period of university training – achieving Upper Second-Class Honours in his bachelor’s degree – he accepted a job in the first accountancy firm that would hire him. As luck would have it, this was also the first firm he applied for. His lofty ambitions took him through the doors of Hughes & Hall, situated less than 2 miles from his parent’s house, where he was living at the time. Peter did not live with his parents these full 35 years, mind you; credit where credit is due. After two years had passed and he was well settled in the job, he moved to a convenient one-bedroom apartment 0.7 miles closer to the offices of Hughes & Hall, and then again into a modest two-bedroom house he could take out a comfortable mortgage for – a further 0.3 miles closer to his place of work – toward the end of his seventh year with the company.

And this is where he resided for the next quarter-century while he quietly (extremely quietly) worked away. He was not one to make waves and he was never promoted as such, but his position within the company osmotically improved over the years as he was increasingly viewed as someone with seniority and tasked with more and more responsibilities for training, coordination, team-leading etc. The odd change of job title or incremental increase in wage would then eventually follow, particularly whenever it was time for an organisational restructure. And so, he limped his way slightly up the company ladder as a sort of employment inflation meant his value had to be increased as the years dragged by.

Not that he was motivated by career advancement. In fact, he did not seem to be motivated by much. He had few friends (work or otherwise), no wife and not a lot you could speak of by way of hobbies. His life may have looked, to the outside observer, to be one totally devoid of passion.

But the outside observer would be very wrong. There was one thing Peter loved above all else. Something that lit a fire that raged deep inside him. Peter had a passionate love of crockery. In particular, he adored bone china. He had not just a love and appreciation for crockery, but an encyclopaedic knowledge. He could accurately value and age a porcelain gravy boat from 400 yards away. As one might expect, Peter had his own modest – but impressive – personal collection of bowls, plates, eggcups and what have you. But this was the one area of his life where he did not simply accept what he had. In the case of crockery, Peter was a man of ambition.

A lifetime of occupying the very middle of the middle of the road had one great advantage for Peter. He did not have a great many outgoings, save the need for basic foodstuffs and payments on his comfortable mortgage; payments he had in fact completed 18 months ago. All in all, this meant that Peter had a tidy little nest-egg saved which gave him the opportunity for early retirement. An opportunity he took.

On 6th July, there was an extremely subdued farewell party for Peter in the offices of Hughes & Hall where a few acquaintances (and plenty of people who had no idea who Peter was) wished him well, with those that did have any knowledge of the man fully expecting his retirement to involve sitting in his now mortgage-free house doing absolutely nothing of consequence. But they were oblivious to Peter’s singular source of ambition. Peter had taken virtually every penny of his nest-egg and invested it in a business of his own. For the first time in his near 60 years on this Earth, Peter had taken a chance.

Fitting again nicely toward the middle of the normal distribution for predictability, Peter’s retirement adventure involved first joining the ex-pat contingent of British retirees and relocating to Spain. Peter’s grand retirement plan was thus: he would spend his autumn years owning and operating his very own china shop in Northern Spain; to be precise, in the city of Pamplona. The city was perfect for Peter in a great many ways. For starters, the climate is categorised as ‘moderate’, with cool nights (at least by Spanish standards). Though Peter was exploring his adventurous side, the safety of ‘moderate’ was still greatly appealing to him. He took no small degree of comfort in the fact that the region was no stranger to rainfall (again, of the ‘moderate’ variety), meaning he could feel he had something of the familiarity of England with him in his new Basque abode.

He already had a shopfront property purchased long before his 6th July retirement party, though everything was carried out via an intermediary, and he had not in fact visited the shop once. Or the city. Or the country, for that matter. Adventurous though he was becoming, dropping everything and flying to the continent for a few days (without having planned and booked everything at least 10 months in advance) was still a bit beyond him. And besides, he had a notice period he was expected to honour. But he was by no means going into this endeavour half-cocked. He researched and prepared for this project with the dry meticulousness one would expect from an accountant of 35 years with no friends or wife. He had purchased a space in the heart of Pamplona’s ornate old town; a surrounding suitably grand for the magnificence of the crockery he would soon display in his glass-fronted little shop.

Moderate climate was not the only benefit of the city to Peter, it also had excellent rail links with both Madrid and Barcelona meaning he could import easily from these major metropolises. Indeed, he had already made an arrangement with a fellow in Barcelona, placed his first crockery orders and arranged delivery to Pamplona, meaning he would have a fully stocked shop waiting for him when he stepped off the plane. Peter had researched everything: climate, transportation links, local economic situation and standard running costs for an average-sized retail unit with adjoining apartment.

As noted, this was Peter first foray into anything remotely exciting, so he had not the experience or the inclination to research things such as social events or cultural traditions. Such things were simply not on his radar and as such left completely unexplored. Had he been a man wired differently, he would have discovered that Pamplona was most notable not for its growing expansion into the renewable energies technology sector, but for the Festival of Saint Fermín (known to the locals as Sanfermines); a festival that coincidentally begins on 6th July. But Peter was wired the way he was wired, and so remained completely oblivious to the festival as it tended far too far towards the fun and interesting.

Peter wasted absolutely no time following the end of one extremely long, dull chapter of his life on 6th July in beginning his next chapter of overseas adventure. He commenced his travels to Spain at the absolute earliest opportunity he could after leaving the offices of Hughes & Hall and set his bags down in his Pamplona property at 7:15 am on 7th July. He took just under 45 minutes to stow his cases in the adjoining apartment (unpacking could wait, he was too excited), splash his face with some water and boil a kettle for a cup of tea (the teabags in his suitcase being the one exception to his postponement on unpacking). By 7:59 am he was unlocking the glass door to his shopfront and switching the sign hanging in it to ‘Abierto’.

At 8:00 am, the most famous event of the Festival of Saint Fermín began.

No sooner had Peter flipped the sign in his shop door did he hear what sounded like four fireworks being set off. Exciting, he thought – his Spanish adventure had literally begun with a bang. Or at least, a series of four small bangs. But Peter could not relish his amusement at this thought for long, as he had to quickly shift gears into bemusement. Shortly following the fourth bang, the ground beneath him began to shake. He had enough time to mentally form the first two words of the question “what the hell is going on?” before his eyes registered exactly what the hell was going on. He turned to look down the streets of the old town and beheld an enormous crowd of people running straight towards his shop in a cacophony of shouts and cheers.

He had been quietly optimistic his business venture would be a success – after all, he had thoroughly researched every aspect of it before committing – but he certainly didn’t expect to be literally beating back hundreds of patrons roughly 43 seconds after opening his doors.

Then Peter looked beyond the crowd.

And then he saw it.

The throng of people Peter saw were not running toward his shop, but rather running away from it. ‘It’ in this case being an 1100 Ib black bull (or rather, a 500 kg black bull as he was in Spain, after all).

The bull locked eyes with Peter. Somehow, in the crowd of thousands it had zeroed in its focus on him and him alone. The rest of the people melted away for the beast; there was suddenly nothing in its world but Peter.

Peter ran inside his shop, locked the door (he did not bother to switch the sign to ‘Cerrado’ on his way in) and hid behind the shop counter.

The bull did not deviate from its course – that course being a direct line to the glass front of Peter’s retirement dream (at a speed of roughly 24 km/h; 15 mph for those clinging to their imperials).

From the moment he unlocked the doors to the moment he hid behind the counter, Peter’s shop had been trading for exactly one minute and thirty-two seconds.

On 7th July at just after 8:00 am, Peter Norman Jefferies, chartered accountant (retired), was about to have the extremely rare distinction of being a man to actually live an idiom.