The Times, They are a-Changing!

"Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom of the blanket and have a longer blanket."  So runs the American Indian proverb.  My own theory - sadly soon to become somewhat irrelevant, thanks to Brexit - is that if we were simply to adjust our start and stop times, we could just as easily live in the same nominal time zone as our European neighbours, without prejudicing the efficiency of our timepieces by deliberately interfering twice a year with the way they work.

Notwithstanding the above, I remarked this week - as I seem to every year - on the sudden change, even allowing for the change in our clocks, in the time of twilight.  I'm doing things easily this week without artificial light at 7.15 BST that I would have scarcely have seen to do at all at 6.15 GMT only a week ago.  It's rather like jet-lag; it requires adjustment.  Failure to adjust in this way has meant that some nights I've forgotten all about my dinner until 6.30 or later, when it's usually 5.30 or 6.0!

Talking of adjustment, I realise that I'm still in recovery mode following my mental exertions recently producing those family trees for the golden wedding gift.  I'm finding it difficult to concentrate for more than a few minutes on anything and frequently get up from my desk and walk around trying to determine what it is that needs to be done ... before sitting down again to pick up what I'd just left off.

The other morning, in the bright sunshine, I took myself off for a wander in town, stopping frequently to rejoice in my freedom and decide which road to take next.  Everywhere, it seemed, there was new-mown grass and the smell of it (they say it's the strongest of our senses) took my thoughts back to childhood.  In particular, I recalled a patch of worn ground at the side of the playing field next to my primary school.  That part of the boundary wasn't vegetation like the rest of the field-edge, but the galvanised metal wall of a shed on the neighbouring property.  It was thus an ideal venue for football games in winter and quite a heat trap in summer, attracting many pupils to gather there at break-times to sit and play, or read ... or just to sit.

One of the favourite games was 'families' or 'mothers and fathers', and girls and boys would indulge in role-play based on what they observed every day in their own or each other's families, quite oblivious of the reality of what it was they were portraying.  It was normal innocent behaviour, and probably the same thing goes on today, as in every age, although possibly fuelled these days by a greater media influence.  In my view, it's only the application of an adult interpretation to certain aspects of those games that makes them in any way sinister.

Like the Indian and daylight 'saving', it all depends on how you look at it, and who it is that's doing the looking.  The same is true of so much in life, from the personal, like the fact that I'm now going to settle down to sorting out my accounts for the last tax year - not something everyone thinks about at the beginning of April - to the global.

I wonder just how many people now preparing to take part in the negotiations between Britain and the EC will really have any idea what motivates those in the opposite camp.  My guess is that most will be thinking almost exclusively along the lines of 'what will my folks back home think of the attitudes I'm taking here?'  Of one thing we can be certain: however the negotiations conclude, there will be many millions who will be disappointed in some measure with the outcome.

Snookered!

Today I want to introduce you to my friend Eric.  He and his wife ran a small shop in what, if it were a larger town, would be described as a suburb of Diss, where I grew up.  A baker, a butcher, a fish-and-chip shop and a little corner newsagent/tobacconist serviced the local residents who lived about a mile away from the town centre and, alongside all these other essentials, was Eric's little grocer's shop.

You will gather that this was all many years ago.  If Eric were still alive, he would be well into his second century.  I believe the chippie is the only one of those shops still remaining.  Some shop fronts have disappeared into private residences, others demolished to make way for new enterprise and the post office is reduced to a plate on the wall and a pillar box on the corner.

I met Eric and some of his friends when, as an apprehensive teenager, I explored the remnants of an air-raid shelter.  This had been built onto the front of what had once been the primary school, set at the corner of the churchyard, although the original structure hadn't served in that capacity for some eighty years.  I had learned that here, two nights a week, men gathered to play snooker. What had sparked my interest in the game I have no idea but, having taught myself the rudiments from library books, I had long practised at home, placing books around the edges of the dining table and using marbles and a garden cane for balls and a cue.  It was these - to me very old - men who showed me what the game was really like.

These days my snooker-playing is done using an app on my tablet (words that would mean nothing to Eric, of course).  Although the principles are the same, the techniques are totally different.  However, the realism is sufficient to persuade me - most of the time - that I'm playing against a real opponent ... until 'he' makes a questionably naive error of judgement, or counter-intuitively allows me to take a shot that leads to a frame-winning break. Many a time I smile to myself and remember wise words told me all those years ago, "It's no good playing for, and achieving, perfect position to take the black next shot ... if you miss potting the red in the first place!"

Have you noticed the way life has of reminding you of wisdom like that completely out of context?  This happened to me the other week, with just those words.  I'd spent an afternoon on line searching website after website to find a place for my summer holidays.  Now I've sold the motor-home, I shall be using bed-and-breakfast facilities and I wanted to find somewhere that would be enjoyable in itself, but also provide a base from which to explore the local area.  Finally, I found an old coaching inn on the North Wales coast.  It was at a price I could afford, and was near to many places I could visit either by train, bus or with the car.  Click!  The booking was made.

Within seconds, I had printed out the details and, very soon afterwards, received an e-mail from the agency confirming that I had booked ... a room! Eric's mischievous laughter rang in my mind down the years.  I'd taken so much trouble to find the right place, with the right transport facilities, at the right price ... I'd missed the all important first meal of the day!  Fortunately the inn does provide breakfast; it just means that my 'bargain price' isn't so much of a bargain as I'd thought.  But it will give me the flexibility for an early start, should I need it, when I get round to planning my week in detail.

Back to today;  I've just returned from what has become an annual church event: the posy party, in which coffee and donuts reward an hour - or less! - devoted by a dozen or so willing men to a little production line, the output from which is sufficient bunches of daffodils so that every woman in church tomorrow (Mothering Sunday) can receive one.  The year marches on ... holidays are just around the corner!

Back to Normal ... Almost

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a fair while - well done! - will be aware of the way my mind works and be asking, 'who and where is Normal ... Almost?'  Others might simply realise that, while true normality is rarely achievable, an acceptable approximation is a regularly possibility.

Last weekend, I won a prize in a raffle.  It was the sort of raffle where a table of prizes stands behind the compere and, after drawing the next ticket, the winner then proceeds to the table to select his or her own prize.  On this occasion, by the time my ticket was drawn, few choices remained and the least unsuitable was (as I saw it) a string puppet, for whom I thought it would be easy to find an ultimate recipient.  Closer examination, however, revealed that it was only a doll seated on a plank, suspended to be hung in a window or alcove - a 'puppet on a swing' <groan>.  After brief enquiries, it found another temporary lodging in a charity shop, awaiting the advent of a keen collector.

Following the completion of what I came to know as the 'Golden Trees Project' (see last week's post), I've been filling in a few more of the blank areas left behind it in my tight network of family history records.  If this network were a fishing net, it wouldn't get near the dock, let alone taken to sea!  Severe mending is the nature of its needs, and at one point I told myself that 'it might be done by Christmas!'  At least it's something that can now be attended to with a degree of leisure and in small chunks that will allow concentration to remain focused.

Alongside this, I did my first Welsh lesson of the new year last week, and this week saw a renewed assault on my reading book, 'Bugail Olaf y Cwm' (Last Shepherd of the Valley).  I'm pleased to report that this dimension of my self-imposed retirement study challenge is becoming easier; I've now almost finished the first page!

Buttress through the arch

The week's great excitement has been the annual Ringers' Weekend Away, from which I've just returned and which has delayed writing this blog-post. This year, we went once more to the Suffolk seaside resort of Felixstowe, which we used as a base from which to visit six more village churches in the area, before rounding the weekend off by ringing for this morning's service at the beautiful Victorian church of St John Baptist in the town.

During the course of the weekend, we visited Orford,
where we observed the product of that traditional architectural amusement of 'putting the buttress through the arch', and we also managed to find a few unusual places from which bells are rung.

Ringers hidden behind the organ

One of the favourite places to hide bell-ringers, if they can't be stowed halfway up the tower, is behind the organ, as we found on two occasions yesterday.  The pictured example is from Hollesley.  We also enjoyed some fine food, thanks to Premier Inns and a lovely seaside pub called the Sailor's Rest.


Now all I need to do is find the hedge over which I tossed my diet and get it back!

When History Meets the Present

Last weekend I was rejoicing because I'd managed to complete a 'major project' ... which I can now reveal was a twin family-tree presentation as a gift on my cousin's golden wedding.  In order to get it finished on time, as I said last week, I had revised my procedures.  That wonderfully professional expression really means that I had cut corners.  In many areas, I had made notes instead of proper records and now, in the leisurely aftermath of the project's completion, I'm spending some time 'doing the job properly'.

My mind goes back to my professional career when, in order to get a budget completed on time, some degree of estimation was necessitated, and round figures were included for some aspects which would certainly be acceptable at board level.  Then came the task - delegated to more junior staff like me - to prepare detailed schedules that could be used to measure actual performance in the coming year.  Inevitably, figures wouldn't add up, or wouldn't divide equitably into the many components that, in practice, comprised those elements of the operation for which single amounts had been estimated.

Far more time was required for that stage of the exercise than had been taken for the preparation of the original budget; the same is my experience now.  I'm finding it difficult to determine just where I got some dates from and, in some instances, I'm having to repeat the whole bit of research to identify and document the sources.

Another phrase has been thrown up from my past: "Nearest the church, farthest from God!"  The grocer's shop where I spent many Saturdays and holidays before leaving school was right next door to the church ... in fact, its rear entrance was from the churchyard.  While I couldn't explain its theology, I remember that this saying was coined by one of the managers in reference to a particular customer whose habit was to enter the shop with a large list at five to six on a Saturday evening ... just as the doors were about to be closed for the weekend.

In this 'sweeping up exercise', I've discovered about some of my closest relatives a number of pre-existing details for which no source has been recorded.  Because they were 'known facts' - things that I'd grown up with - I suppose it was excusable, although not justified, to ignore the uniform requirements of disciplined research.  An example this morning concerned a death in 1969, for which I had recorded the precise date although I have never obtained a death certificate for this particular great-uncle.  Where had that date come from?  The source related to it was a birth registration, with the annotation, 'date from mum's birthday book': a need for further investigation if ever there was one!

I discovered that the birth registration was correct, but recorded in the wrong place; that I'd never recorded the actual death registration at all; and that there was no mention of this date in the computer transcript that I'd made of the birthday book soon after my mother's death.  My only recourse was to look at the original.

First I struggled to find the book amongst other amassed and carefully preserved family impedimenta, and then an emotional hour - or more - ensued as examined it in detail.  It had been presented to my mother on her fourteenth birthday by her aunt and, as I slowly turned the pages, I marvelled at the difference in the entries.  There was the juvenile hand in which had been quickly recorded the names of her - now former - school friends; there were more mature entries of the rites of passage of family members: their marriages, the births of their children, or their deaths one by one; and then the observations of older age, as she had noted the marriages of neighbours up and down the street.

An interesting paleographic feature was the incidence of the two ways of writing an 'r', sometimes both within the same entry, seemingly dependent on the combination of adjacent letters.  But nowhere was there a record of the death of her uncle Tom, which had started the adventure.  I had no alternative but to remove a detail that I am unable to verify.

Swans and Icebergs?

I don't suppose you see many swans swimming around icebergs.  To be honest, I've never been near an iceberg ... and I haven't been up close and personal with many swans either, come to that!  But there are connections, in that they are both used to illustrate broadly similar situations.

One of my friends was asked last week how she was coping - she was looking after the responsibility of three colleagues as well as doing her own job - and her reply began, "You mean, am I swimming along serenely like a swan, but paddling furiously" - she gestured - "to keep afloat?"  She was actually doing OK, but the comparison reminded me of the iceberg: what we see is only about one tenth of the whole, the remainder being hidden beneath the waves.

For the last few weeks, my life  has been a bit like that swan.  I've been working on a major project which had a deadline to meet.  Because I didn't start soon enough to complete it at a leisurely pace, I realised a few weeks ago that my meeting the ultimate target was in doubt, so I revised my procedures a little, alongside of abstaining from many other things that have been part of my normal life for the last year.

This week has seen the completion of the project a few days ahead of schedule, and the last couple of days I've been in 'switched-off mode', not exactly looking around for something to do, but turning my attention to a few things that had been postponed - like booking a summer holiday - before I get down to the business of going over those aspects of the project that were 'by-passed' in order to ensure its timely completion.

Another 'project' (if indeed it's worthy of such a grand title) has come to fruition this week: the sale of my motor-caravan.  I was happy to delegate this to a broker when his wife responded on his behalf to my original advert before Christmas.  In all my vehicular dealings down the years, I've tended to go for part-exchange deals.  On the one hand, you usually have the benefit of a reliable purchase, probably with some warranty and, on the other, you're spared the bother of dealing with enquirers, the trauma of showing the old vehicle with its inevitable faults and shortcomings (why else are you selling it?) to prospective customers, and the general hassle of managing the sale.

The same considerations apply to selling through a broker but, inevitably, for this relief there is a price to pay and I was a little dissatisfied with the amount I got for the motor-caravan.  However, looking back at what I have achieved instead of fretting about that, I think it was worth it.  To use a metaphor, the ship sailed into the dock almost unnoticed.

The same can be said of another matter this week, this one on the financial front.  Although I'm not yet in the position of needing to draw upon my pension - and with the sale of the motor-caravan, even less so - I realised a few weeks ago that I would have unused tax allowances by the end of the tax year, so I set matters in motion to draw down sufficient from the pension fund to soak up these allowances, planning to invest this money in the next tax year into my ISA until it's required.  When I looked at my finances at the end of February - as any retired accountant probably does - I found myself asking, "where has all that money come from?"

Gift horses were not, however, queuing up for dental examination!