'I'm officially retired now so, these days, while I still get up early, I am no longer up with the birds. That's supposedly one of the rewards of retirement. However, I'm also a marine biologist who works on seashores, so I work to tides, as opposed to clocks, and tides move each day. As my family has learned over the years, weekends, public holidays and vacations don't mean much to scientists.
I work on spring tides and, when it's a good tide, I'm out there at whatever time the tide is, as long as it's daylight - you can't do much in the dark.
In days gone by, when I used to scoff at astrology and horoscopes, my wife used to say, 'Your life has been ruled by the moon for years.' And she was right. It still governs my life, from the time I get up to deciding what I will do on any particular day.
Today, I'm in Hong Kong to help support WWF in proposing better arrangements for marine management in local waters, in particular the idea of 'no take' marine reserves. I'm here to tell people what has already happened in New Zealand in this regard.
I live 500 metres from New Zealand's first declared marine reserve and the laboratory where I used to work, both of which are located in Leigh [a coastal town on the North Island]. I head to the beach a few days a month. Earlier this year I decided to quit doing the monitoring I had been doing for 20-plus years on a little rocky reef down there because crawling around the shore for two to three hours resulted in problems with my arthritic knees. It was difficult to walk home. I decided I would restrict my seashore explorations to days when the weather was good. However, there has been good weather ever since, damn it, so I haven't yet managed a day off.
As with most academics supposedly retired, I still do the things I liked to do when I was working. My problem is I liked most of what I did prior to retiring, so I'm still doing most of it. For example, I no longer have to go to Auckland and lecture to students but during the first year of my retirement, I gave 50 per cent more lectures than I'd ever done before, some in New Zealand, some overseas. When, after six years, I stopped running the course on marine reserves for fourth-year masters students, someone else took it over. However, the next year, there I was, running the same course in Britain.