The Encore Years - How to succeed in retirement
Jun 22, 2026 · 20 min · 12 segments
Ray, a retired lecturer, now a Queer Tango enthusiast and historian, has great advice for others. He expresses the euphoria of learning to sing and performing in public Go gently into retirement…
Ray BatchelorGuestNigelHostColinHostAnd, you know, thanks very much for your time.
And how
are you feeling today,
I'm perfectly well, perfectly happy, very busy, but they are all things that I have chosen to be busy with, so I'm not complaining.
Great.
Okay.
1932 onwards, I was a university lecturer lecturing in the history and theory of design to design students.
So they weren't historians, they weren't theoreticians, they were in the business of designing furniture or ceramics or graphic design or advertising, all sorts of things.
And each of them had this bit of their course, a sort of fifth of their course, which some of them took in their stride and some of them were terrified by, which was history and theory.
So they were comfortable about devising what a mobile phone might look like or something like that.
But to have to think about those things and not produce an object, but produce an essay or something like that.
And so I spent 28 years essentially taking away the fear from students about this being an interesting, not just interesting in itself, but something that could be genuinely useful to them in their practice.
Okay.
So you did that for 28 years and then retired? Yes.
And, you know, thanks very much for your time.
And how
are you feeling today,
I'm perfectly well, perfectly happy, very busy, but they are all things that I have chosen to be busy with, so I'm not complaining.
Great.
Okay.
1932 onwards, I was a university lecturer lecturing in the history and theory of design to design students.
So they weren't historians, they weren't theoreticians, they were in the business of designing furniture or ceramics or graphic design or advertising, all sorts of things.
And each of them had this bit of their course, a sort of fifth of their course, which some of them took in their stride and some of them were terrified by, which was history and theory.
So they were comfortable about devising what a mobile phone might look like or something like that.
But to have to think about those things and not produce an object, but produce an essay or something like that.
And so I spent 28 years essentially taking away the fear from students about this being an interesting, not just interesting in itself, but something that could be genuinely useful to them in their practice.
Okay.
So you did that for 28 years and then retired? Yes.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
