Hobbies and Interests

If you have some time on your hands, you may be thinking about taking up a new hobby or developing an existing interest further. As you are no doubt aware, the list of hobbies and interests is endless so this series of pages is not intended to be comprehensive. What it might do, however, is to help you think about this whole area of your life a bit differently, so that you make the right choices when deciding what to take up. Clearly, we have to enjoy the hobbies that we do – that’s the whole point of them. However, as we get a bit older there is a need for us to do some or all of the following:

• Make the most of our money
• Keep fit physically
• Keep fit mentally
• Maintain or increase our social contacts

Therefore, if our hobbies can help us do these things, so much the better. For example, if you like reading, which is essentially a solitary occupation, try joining a reading group, or book club, which will enable you to meet other people through your reading. Similarly, if you like walking, this will help keep you fit, enable you to meet people if you join a walking group and might even save you some money because you’re not using the car so much!

So we have grouped some examples of hobbies and interests under various headings, not just those shown above, to help you think about what you might do and how you might use them to achieve other ends as well as enjoying them. The headings are not definitive and you might feel you would have used different ones. Sometimes we might stray into the realms of what you might think is voluntary work. Neither of these things matters. The point is that if it helps you think about hobbies and interests in a constructive and useful way, we have succeeded in our objectives.

Some of the things we haven't included are collecting things (anything!), model-making, amateur dramatics, wine and beer making, astronomy, photography, graphology and about a million other hobbies. Please don't be upset if your particular favourite isn't here. Remember that the objective is to get you thinking about the many wonderful hobbies and interests that you can have in later life, not to list each and every one of them.

If you have a particular Hobby or Interest and would like to research and write about it on the web, take a look at our Associate scheme.

Now, take a look through the following pages and see if anything takes your fancy – or something might trigger another inspiration. If you don’t find what you want, however, take a look at the Sports and Activities section, or go to Amazon where you will be certain to find a book on the hobby or interest of your choice

 

Visit our Pre-retirement Courses section here on laterlife or our dedicated Retirement Courses site