After the last working day

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

For thirty years, people asked what I did and received the name of my job. After retirement, I discovered how much of a conversation that answer had performed for me. Without it, I felt required to produce a list of activities impressive enough to justify the spare hours. I joined two groups in the first week and began describing an ordinary walk as a project.

Eventually I stopped trying to make retirement look employed. I help at a repair workshop on Thursdays, visit my sister and sometimes spend a morning doing very little. I miss colleagues and the satisfaction of being needed, but I do not miss every demand attached to them. The old job remains part of my life without being its current timetable. I am learning to answer the question about what I do with something smaller and more accurate than a title: today, perhaps, I am fixing a chair.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Friend, you congratulate me upon laying down my tools, but I have not yet found complete idleness as agreeable as your letter predicts. The workshop supplied more than wages. It gave shape to the morning, brought particular problems to my bench and allowed me to see when an hour had been usefully spent. Freedom from those demands has also removed their welcome order.

I do not propose to continue at the former pace. My hands and eyes have earned some consideration. Yet I intend to undertake small repairs for neighbours and teach my grandson what I can. This is not a refusal of rest; it is a way of keeping a familiar skill in company with other people. A trade need not remain a master in order to remain a companion. I shall choose the work and stop when tired, but I would rather loosen its hold than cast aside everything it has taught me to value.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on life after retirement and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.