As you reach retirement age, you may be thinking about taking up fishing, golf, or even knitting. But if Richard Hagger even considered the latter, it was only as an aside to his main interest.

Richard runs the only specialist spinning company in England, processing yarn from raw alpaca fleece.

Having grown-up in the wool industry in Yorkshire, Richard was always looking for a chance to get into the business. Not surprisingly, working as an auditor for the NHS did not present many opportunities.

Once semi-retired, Richard visited a local alpaca farm and discovered there was a problem getting the wool spun. So he decided to realise his lifetime's ambition.

Unlike his predecessors, Richard is not dealing in the declining trade in sheep's wool - but the increasingly popular alpaca wool.

Ironically, it was to Yorkshire that he returned to buy machinery from woollen mills that were closing down.

With alpaca herd numbers in the UK approaching 20,000, he is hoping the trade in the wool is about to take off.

Ask him why, at 69, he is doing this job and he admits to pondering the very same question himself.

"I think about that every evening," he laughed. "But I do love it, and although I am 69, mentally I feel about 30."

As the only company of its kind in England, Richard is well-known in the industry and people travel from all over the country to Hagger's Mill at Bodicote.

"It is quite a small community, so people get to know you very quickly," said Richard, who still works two days a week for the NHS.

"We get wool from Devon, Cornwall, Scotland, and from all over country.

"Sometimes producers ship to us, or often they bring it, as they like to see the operation," he said.

Alpaca wool is not as coarse as sheep's wool, so the process needs to be more delicate. At its best, alpaca is very soft - softer even than lambs' wool or cashmere.

"The wool comes to me as a fleece right off the animal. The process begins by teasing the fleece open," explained Richard, who only employs one other person at the mill.

"It then goes into the machine, which is 75 feet long. This produces rubbed filament, and the yarn is then drawn out and wound on to a bobbin," he said.

Although the process with sheep wool is different, Richard says he would love to spin wool from rare breed sheep.

"The machinery is so sensitive, the sheep fleece would need to be scoured first, but we would be glad to do it," he said.

"We are dealing with a natural product here, so it is all about instinct and technique."

A big problem for Richard is people do not know what to do with their alpaca produce.

"A lot of people are waiting to see what happens to the market," he said. "They are sitting on the fence, and storing the wool."

However, he believes it will take off over the coming years. Richard also sends the wool away to be woven, and displays the finished products - usually blankets and throws - to show clients.

"We have a shop in a corner of the mill where we display and sell samples of what can be done with the wool," he said. "The alpaca trade has got to grow. There are a lot of people with an urgent, vested interest."

Set in an old potato mill, Richard hopes one day to open his spinning operation to the public, with a pair of looms displaying the wool.

"But that involves a quantum leap," he said."At the moment there is just the two of us here with the machinery, so it is not feasible. We don't have the right insurance and couldn't have people wandering around. But we do have the room to open up as a site of interest in the future."

Richard looked all over for a suitable site before finding the old mill at Bodicote.

Although he admits that going into business was nerve-wracking, he gets great satisfaction from it. However it turns out, you get the feeling he will not regret the decision to go back to his roots.

"It was very tempting to do nothing after I retired," he confided. "But there is a real sense of achievement when you see that finished product. We have an accountant who does the books, and he said we are the only company he deals with that is actually producing something."

And does he own any alpacas?

"No, the machinery is troublesome enough," he laughed.

The Specialist Spinning Company, Hagger's Mill, Bodicote, Banbury, 07967 272022.