Sunday 28 February 2016

All Over by Christmas?

It's alleged that this was the cry at the beginning of the First World War. People thought that this was merely a storm in a Balkan tea-cup, and it would all be over by Christmas.  Tell that to the chaps who were sinking in the mud of Passchendaele in the summer and autumn of 1917!  This is one of many linked thoughts that have been going through my mind this week.

I like to watch stuff on BBC i-Player while I eat my dinner and, in the last few days, I've discovered a collection of interviews with WW1 survivors, recorded in the early 1960s.  Some of their memories are quite traumatic, and I found myself wondering about their reaction had they known at the beginning of the war just how things would develop.  It's a problem I'm grappling with myself at the moment, still in the early months of my retirement.  I've never been good with uncertainty; I like to know the end at the beginning ... perhaps that's why I rarely read novels!

This morning I awoke from a dream in which two mothers were sitting at a kitchen table with the son of one and the daughter of the other, who had just fallen in love.  The young ones were discussing their likes and dislikes about where to live, and the mothers aggressively supported the conflicting views of their respective offspring.  Suddenly the young man spoke sharply to the older ladies, telling them to keep their ideas to themselves.  Seizing his beloved's hand, he made for the door.  Stunned, the mothers came to realise that they had been trying to live the lives of the young people for them. After a while, the boy and girl returned, announcing their engagement, as witnessed by the daisy chain around the girl's finger.

After marriage, of course, come children.  At a recent gathering at church (I can't recall the context; simply to whom I was speaking), I spoke about being present at my daughter's birth and how, many years later, my children were looking after me.  "If there's something wrong with the computer," I said, "I have only to e-mail my son, and he's always willing to come and sort it out.  And, look! I'm wearing socks knitted by my daughter." I'm sure that, when I made my way home bleary-eyed from the hospital all those years ago, I gave no thought to the possibility that the bundle of joy I'd just seen enter the world would one day be keeping my feet warm!

Last November, following a newspaper obituary, I started a project to extend my coverage of the family of my great-grandmother's brother-in-law.  Since I was already aware of some of the generations, I thought at the outset that it would, in those famous words, be over by Christmas.  I finally despatched the results to my 'non-cousin', a great-great-nephew of that brother-in-law, last weekend.  By the middle of this week, as I mopped up the aftermath of the exercise, my eye was already on the next such task.  Having now discovered at least fifty new names, descendants of a Suffolk family who had migrated to Lancashire in the mid-19th century, I'm not making the same short-term assumption about them!

And just to complete this current set of outset-outcome discord, this week I've been tweaking some of the investments in my pension fund, in order - hopefully - to increase the income therefrom.  Not surprisingly, I've been wondering just how long that fund will last, once I start using it.  As ever, I want to know the end from the beginning.

I wonder when - or whether - I shall learn to take things as they come, and be content with the present, instead of worrying about the future!


Friday 19 February 2016

... and Rest!

One of the facets of the working life that I'm a little bit sorry to lose is 'knocking-off time'.  Even with such an unpredictable working life as mine was, there was always a point when the van was parked and the engine switched off.  These days, I can sit at my desk from the end of morning prayers until bedtime ... meal preparations apart.  That's anything up to fifteen hours a day, if I should choose, with no one to tell me off and no one - like a certain dear man who died recently and who, some years ago, did just that - to see the lights on and come and tell me, "Go home, Brian; you don't have to be here at 10:30 at night!"

So, it's been a busy week; a week of endings, beginnings and plans for the future.

Many hours a week have been spent lately on family history; not my own exactly, but that of an old lady who died last October.  Her great-uncle was my great-grandmother's brother-in-law, so she was not related to me. However, I'm in touch with a friend in Canada who is her second cousin once removed (I think!) and, he having confessed that some of the information he'd given me several years ago might contain errors, I decided to carry out a major exercise into this family to see just what is and what is not correct.

This exercise is nearing completion and, for a couple of weeks now, I've been saying, 'one more push and it's done' only to find another little puzzle that takes hours rather than minutes to resolve.  This afternoon, however, I metaphorically 'pulled the plug' on it.  There's now no more data to add, and all that remains is to determine just how to present the results in a form that can be transmitted by e-mail and overcome the absence of all the links that won't be passed on once the files leave my computer.  While I dare not make any actual promises, I firmly believe that by this time next week this will all have happened.

So that's one major ending.  A minor one to keep it company has been the final completion of lesson twelve of the Welsh course.  It culminated in the longest translation exercise I've faced so far, and out of 33 sentences, 29 were either completely correct or contained only minor vocabulary variations, things like 'small' for 'little', 'not any' for 'no', and so on.  I'm beginning to feel that I'm really making headway there.

And the beginnings?  Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that most of these are church connected.  Wednesday saw the first of a series of supper discussions, at which about forty of us shared a meal in the church hall, and were then joined by a handful of others who weren't able to make the meal, but wanted to take part in the discussion.  Unlike last year, I was able to go along slightly earlier and help make the place ready.  To complement this during Lent our prayer gatherings, which usually take place at 7.0, 1.0 and 7.0 on the last Friday of the month, are happening every Friday beginning today.

Yesterday's post brought me the long-awaited cheque from the insurers of my lately-lamented work van.  Fortunately, the brokers had placed cover with one of the very few companies who are prepared to refund unused premiums on a day-for-day basis so, with less than two months having elapsed, the sum was not inconsiderable, albeit I had had to wait over two months for it to arrive!  Perhaps rashly - I hope not - I decided to treat myself to a few pleasures on the back of it.  I've booked a trip to London in a couple of weeks to attend a pair of (free) family history talks, and a seat at the play 'Crosslight', which will be performed later next month by a national company who have included a church in Letchworth in a country-wide tour.

I've also started thinking about where to take the motorhome later in the year, but that's all speculation at the moment, so more news on that front when things begin to take shape.  Roll on summer!

Saturday 13 February 2016

Re-shuffled

At the start of this retirement 'game', I thought back to time management techniques and, even earlier, to schooldays, when there was a regular fixed timetable.  If things are going to get done, I felt, it's important to assign a definite time for their execution.  At the turn of the year, I decided to abandon a paper diary and started using Mr Google's very handy electronic substitute.  This made it very easy to assign a regular weekly slot for, e.g. shopping and cooking on Wednesday, my Welsh lesson on Tuesday, and so on.

This week everything got re-shuffled.  For a start, I had decided that it was time that I treated myself to a cooked breakfast once in a while.  It was no good planning this for Monday because I regularly attend a breakfast fellowship-and-Bible-study gathering at church.  So, Tuesday it was.  One way and another, this shunted other things along the week.

Wednesday was a family birthday, which required my travelling some distance and being away from home for twelve hours and more.  This neatly knocked out both shopping and cooking, which I mentally re-scheduled for Thursday.  Now, Thursday is the planned day for washing, which in turn means changing the bedclothes.  By the time this was in hand and the shopping done, it was far too late to think of cooking, so this was further shunted to Friday ...  and so the week resolved itself.  Almost.

One thing that was overlooked, I realised, was the Welsh lesson.  I had spent some while on Monday finishing off the previous week's lesson, and I may get around to the exercises this afternoon.  That's a definite maybe.  No doubt there'll be an important rugby match on the radio!

But why Welsh? I hear you ask.  Several people have expressed surprise at this and although all questions have been accorded an answer, not all my answers have been the same.  The truth is, that there are several reasons and the available time has usually determined which one I've offered.  The easiest one to dispense is simply that, with a surname like mine, Evans, it 'goes with the territory'.  Well, it might seem to be logical but is not, in fact, quite so reasonable as it appears on the surface.  My family history investigations have not as yet unearthed any Welsh ancestors, having ground to a halt in late-eighteenth-century Suffolk.

Many years ago, soon after leaving school, I planned a holiday in north Wales with my girlfriend and began a 'Teach Yourself' course.  Relationships change, of course.  She found another boyfriend, the holiday was cancelled and the course abandoned after only five - confusing! - lessons.  Retirement gives me the chance to have another crack at it.  Last summer I spent a couple of very relaxing days in north Wales and the exposure to hearing the language spoken freely on the street and in shops whetted my appetite again.  After my return, I decided to take up the challenge, sought out that same Teach Yourself book and got stuck in, helped this time by my computer.  In seven months of not quite regular sessions, I've now reached lesson twelve.

Now, who's playing whom in the first Six-Nations match this afternoon?

Sunday 7 February 2016

(Translation) A Strange Week

Thass bin a rum ow week! ... but I'll come back to that.  There wasn't any great highlight to last week, which is why there was no post here yesterday. It wasn't until ruminating this morning that I realised that I hadn't written a blog.  So here goes.

It started off with a meeting on Monday morning with the churchwardens, following my submission of a report about the 'state of play' that I found on taking office as Health and Safety Officer.  I feared that this encounter would be a condemnation of 'this upstart trying to tell us what's what', but it turned out to be very productive and I learned that, based on my report, they had formed the opinion that - despite my admission of learning on the job - I was the right man for the post.  Time alone will tell on that one!

It's true what they say, 'novelty wins'.  In the first week after I'd accepted that position, I was scanning websites galore and downloading booklets to read about what should be done: lots of theory, and most of it applicable to large industrial establishments; little of relevance to the day-to-day running of a church and a church hall.  Then came a guided tour of a property that I thought I knew so well, and the detailed analysis of the existing policy document, giving rise to that report.  Now boredom has set in, and trying to focus my mind on a draft for a questionnaire to be issued to all relevant parties in the coming weeks was very much an uphill struggle!

I've been struggling over the last few months with a family tree I've been working on for my distant relative in Canada.  Addiction triumphed on Tuesday and Wednesday, although it highlighted for me many of the frustrations of family history.  In two fairly solid days I managed to add fifteen new names, but it was only after the agonising wait, time after time, for the screen to change after I'd asked once more to 'edit the search details'. Not only were there difficulties in imagining how first the census enumerators, and then the 21st-century transcribers, had interpreted the name I was looking for, but also the internet itself was not working at anything like full speed.  It was as if 'the lights were on but no one was at home'.

In the face of this technological rebellion I was very glad of what I have described as my 'little white friend'.  This is variously identified as a 'my wi-fi' or 'my-fi'.  I obtained it about a year ago when I visited my local mobile phone showroom, complaining about a warning message I'd received when trying to use my phone as a wi-fi hotspot.  After learning how old my contract was, and that I had no desire to exchange my phone, the salesman helpfully came up with the suggestion that I take out a new SIM-only contract for the phone and, alongside it, another contract for this little gadget, which has its own link to the mobile network and acts as in the same way as the internet 'hub' that sits in my lounge.  Considering that the new combination costs me less than the former phone contract, I was well pleased!

Yesterday, for the first time for quite a while, I joined in a monthly ringing meeting of the local bell-ringing association.  I met lots of old friends and new, and it was a very pleasant morning; I seem to recall spending more time chatting than actually ringing.  One method we rang was one of the oldest and yet still very familiar today.  Called Grandsire, it's name is usually pronounced as if it had no final 'e', the last syllable rhyming with 'fur'.  My own tower captain was also present at that point.  He knows me well; perhaps better than I give him credit for.  As the method was called for ... by someone who pronounced the name the way it looks, i.e. to rhyme with 'tyre', he turned to me and said, with a twinkle, "I expect that's how they say it in your part of the world, Brian."

I rose to the bait.  "W'no, master," I said, in a mock Norfolk accent, "we allus say Gran'sir, jest like all tha rest!"  Somehow, it's usually when with fellow ringers that I find it easiest to lapse into that old way of speaking ... not that I was ever as broad as I like to make out.  I suppose it's because it's an activity and an atmosphere that echoes my roots better than any other; perhaps, too, because there I'm more relaxed.

At another point in the morning, I found myself in conversation with two ladies, one of whom is thinking of learning to ring.  The other mentioned the very recent introduction in one of our towers of a 'dummy' bell linked to a computer, which allows a beginner to have almost limitless practice without annoying the neighbours.  She turned to me and said, "I don't suppose they had such luxuries when you were learning."  Out came the Norfolk accent again as, with only a little exaggeration, I replied, "That we han't; that was 'jest a few rown's fer tha boiy afore we pack up'!"

So now you can see why this post began the way it did.  And later this afternoon I shall join that perceptive octogenarian, along with four others as we attempt a quarter peal ... but not of Grandsire, whatever way you choose to pronounce it!