Someone famous said, "I love it when a plan comes together." I don't profess to know who it was, but he (she?) was certainly right. A number of small things have 'come together' this week the way I planned, which gives me that hinted feeling of satisfaction. More importantly, they're things that I can cross off my 'to do' list.
I often make lists these days, to make sure nothing gets missed. In fact someone I was talking to recently claimed to make 'lists of lists' but I'm not sure exactly how that works ... unless, by subdividing a list, when everything on a sub-list is crossed off, that's a whole list finished, and possibly gives a higher sense of satisfaction?
Tuesday evening brought echoes for me of my former working life, as I drove down the A1 past a succession of signs saying alternately, "A14 closed 30-31" (which didn't bother me) and "A1 closed from J14" (which did!). This meant that what had, up to that point, been a smooth and satisfying journey home was about to become a frustrating game of 'find the road that's open' and, although I had left my cousin's in good time, I would now be considerably later getting home than I'd planned.
Since my retirement, now I'm no longer using the road system as frequently as I did, I find I've forgotten some of the routes and numbers that were so familiar as to be 'second nature' and I suffered some moments of panic as I struggled to remember what diversion would get me home soonest in this new circumstance. Eventually I remembered that, long before the A14 would reach the 'fatal' junction 30, it would get me to the A1198, a road formerly known as Ermine Street or 'the Old North Road'. This would take me, without further ado, to Royston and a very familiar final leg home.
Incidentally, the junction of the A14 and the A1198 at Huntingdon, which I then used, has an interesting history. Before the roads in this area were changed and re-numbered about 30 years ago, the Old North Road was known as A14; at that time the main east-west route was A45 and it was this that was modified and improved and eventually became the A14 trunk road that we know today. Thus that junction carries the new east-west road called A14 over what had been a north-south road with the same number (now given the new identity A1198)! I've often wondered - inconclusively - whether there are other similar examples around the country.
As I drove down this ancient highway, I passed a roundabout flanked by a modern filling station and an even more modern McDonald's. It's on the site of an equally ancient crossroads known as Caxton Gibbet; on the verge just south of the roundabout can be seen an old wooden structure believed to be the remains of the gibbet itself. This was a macabre place where the bodies of criminals were displayed (if not actually executed there) as an example to the passing populace. I'm not sure whether the feature presently preserved by the roadside is actually authentic or whether its authenticity is subject to historic maintenance, as in the apocryphal tale of 'great-great-grandfather's shovel', which, apart from two new blades and four new handles down the years, is the very one that he used to bury his grandfather nearly three centuries ago.
So it was, then, that I arrived home at bedtime - too late to do those chores I'd intended to fit in before retiring. I peeled my intentions back to the very essential, and quickly scribbled a LIST of all the little things that I'd postponed. A couple more items came to mind when I got up and were hastily added to the list; it then gave me a great sense of completion to cross off the last of these just after lunch on Wednesday afternoon.
I'm now working my way down a similar list hastily compiled after breakfast this morning before I left for my present voluntary job which on Fridays requires me to be about half a mile from home, ready to leave with two others on a van at 8.30 am.
Friday 26 April 2019
Saturday 20 April 2019
The Back End
Whether you call it Zaterdag, Samedi, Samstag, Saturni or Sadwrn (those who know me well will identify the languages with which I've dabbled over the years), Saturday is for many - and I include myself here - the 'stub-end' of the week. It's the day when 'stuff' that has overflowed from other days is lined up to get knocked off, polished off, cleared out of the way, or whatever other metaphor you choose to use.
I don't know whether this technique is still current in primary schools today, but 60-plus years ago we had diary boards. A broad strip of the wall all the way round the classroom was coated with blackboard material. Each of us was allocated our section of this and on Monday mornings we were provided with chalk and encouraged to write our 'news', the story of what we'd done over the weekend. I suspect there was a fine balance between the educational benefit to the children and the amusement factor for the teachers. Six-year-olds aren't know for diplomatic reticence when it comes to family and domestic affairs!
This week a notice was displayed in as many places as seemed appropriate - including the gents' toilet! - at the warehouse where I presently volunteer twice a week, advertising a vacancy for a part-time van driver. I was told rather pointedly, "You can apply for this if you like." so I read it closely. The position advertised was for the equivalent of two days a week, with hours flexible but based mainly at the weekend.
I fairly swiftly rejected the idea because, as you might expect, I won't work on Sundays apart from for the most exceptional reasons. I can think of only one occasion during my employed career when I did so. It was at the annual stocktaking in a factory where I had been working for two or three years. The senior accountant had estimated that it could all be completed by Saturday lunchtime if normal working stopped at 4.0 on Friday. In point of fact with everyone working Friday evening and all day Saturday it still wasn't done by 6.0 pm, and we had to go in on Sunday as well. I think I was home by mid-afternoon, but the effect on motivation during the following week was quite remarkable. The fact that I'd lost a weekend upset the whole pattern of my life.
While working as a courier, the only work I would do on Sunday was the occasional pick-up ready for an early start on Monday morning, and I believe on one occasion I left home on Sunday evening to make an 8.0 am delivery in Scotland the next day. Saturdays are a different thing; for many years, I used to work regularly on Saturday mornings, sometimes until 1.0 or 2.0 in the afternoon, occasionally all day. For part of those years I was getting paid overtime for it, but always there was the question, how much can be squashed into a weekend?
In these days of retirement it might seem that there is all week to fit 'stuff' into, but lots of interests are at regular times, and some things are always on Saturdays because they involve others who are still of working age. As I considered this particular job, I quickly counted up nineteen Saturdays in the year when I wouldn't be able to commit to working all day without sacrificing something or other that has become part of my life. And that's without my increasing attendance at football matches! It seems that I've been to 21 matches already this season, with at least one more planned, a local cup final next week, compared to 15 in the whole of last season.
I'm wondering how long those notices will remain on display, and how long before an anonymous graffito appears on one or other of them! I suspect that there are many like me who value their weekends over and above what money can be made out of them.
I don't know whether this technique is still current in primary schools today, but 60-plus years ago we had diary boards. A broad strip of the wall all the way round the classroom was coated with blackboard material. Each of us was allocated our section of this and on Monday mornings we were provided with chalk and encouraged to write our 'news', the story of what we'd done over the weekend. I suspect there was a fine balance between the educational benefit to the children and the amusement factor for the teachers. Six-year-olds aren't know for diplomatic reticence when it comes to family and domestic affairs!
This week a notice was displayed in as many places as seemed appropriate - including the gents' toilet! - at the warehouse where I presently volunteer twice a week, advertising a vacancy for a part-time van driver. I was told rather pointedly, "You can apply for this if you like." so I read it closely. The position advertised was for the equivalent of two days a week, with hours flexible but based mainly at the weekend.
I fairly swiftly rejected the idea because, as you might expect, I won't work on Sundays apart from for the most exceptional reasons. I can think of only one occasion during my employed career when I did so. It was at the annual stocktaking in a factory where I had been working for two or three years. The senior accountant had estimated that it could all be completed by Saturday lunchtime if normal working stopped at 4.0 on Friday. In point of fact with everyone working Friday evening and all day Saturday it still wasn't done by 6.0 pm, and we had to go in on Sunday as well. I think I was home by mid-afternoon, but the effect on motivation during the following week was quite remarkable. The fact that I'd lost a weekend upset the whole pattern of my life.
While working as a courier, the only work I would do on Sunday was the occasional pick-up ready for an early start on Monday morning, and I believe on one occasion I left home on Sunday evening to make an 8.0 am delivery in Scotland the next day. Saturdays are a different thing; for many years, I used to work regularly on Saturday mornings, sometimes until 1.0 or 2.0 in the afternoon, occasionally all day. For part of those years I was getting paid overtime for it, but always there was the question, how much can be squashed into a weekend?
In these days of retirement it might seem that there is all week to fit 'stuff' into, but lots of interests are at regular times, and some things are always on Saturdays because they involve others who are still of working age. As I considered this particular job, I quickly counted up nineteen Saturdays in the year when I wouldn't be able to commit to working all day without sacrificing something or other that has become part of my life. And that's without my increasing attendance at football matches! It seems that I've been to 21 matches already this season, with at least one more planned, a local cup final next week, compared to 15 in the whole of last season.
I'm wondering how long those notices will remain on display, and how long before an anonymous graffito appears on one or other of them! I suspect that there are many like me who value their weekends over and above what money can be made out of them.
Saturday 13 April 2019
A Long and Meandering Stream
Looking through what passes for a diary these days, I see that this has been a week with lots of routine but nothing that really says 'Write about me today!' It's all a bit boring, like the title of today's Bible notes, 'Are we nearly there yet?' These began with the innocent question, 'Can you recall the longest journey you've ever made?'
My thoughts floated back down the years (the older I get, the more that exercise seems to become a cruise along a slow-flowing river rather than guiding a canoe down a swiftly-running stream, with more and more places to stop and explore along the way) and didn't stop when I realised that this was probably a flight to San Francisco in 2000. Instead, recollection followed recollection until memory eventually came to rest in the early 'seventies, when I was living with my young family in the middle of a country town, almost opposite the pub and just around the corner from the church.
That was the time when I was studying economics as part of my accountancy training, and struggling to make sense of the written course material as it described the way that one government and then another had tried to control the British economy. It was then, too, that my thoughts first turned to politics as I realised that each government in turn had first undid what had gone before, in order then to implement its own ideas of what needed to be done now. Obviously the purpose of an Opposition is to oppose, but it seemed to me that too much of its energy was devoted to tearing the government apart, and not enough to explaining what ought to have been done instead.
The fact that the half-dozen Liberal MPs seemed willing to agree with one 'side' on one point, and then with the other on another point was what first persuaded me to join the Liberal Party and, although that enthusiasm proved only to be a 'flash in the pan', I've been a supporter of the politics of compromise and accord ever since. In the 'noughties', when I listened to RTE on long wave as I drove around the country, I became aware of multi-member constituencies and started to think about proportional representation as a real possibility.
To bring this truly up to date, I'll share a comment I read this week about the speed with which 27 European leaders could reach a compromise agreement about the extension of Article 50, compared to the length of time our Parliament has taken - and has still not been able to come to agreement - over the approval of the Brexit legislation. It was described as the grey productivity of European thinking versus the black-and-white failure of our own. People on all sides of the political spectrum are now voicing what I was beginning to see forty-odd years ago, that the days of a confrontational parliament based on a winner-takes-all mentality are numbered.
It is indeed a long journey, along a very long road. But I believe we will eventually learn nationally what children learn very quickly in the school playground: it's more satisfying to agree that one can play with the toy for a while and then for the other to do so, than for either to break it, or throw it over the hedge, so neither can play with it at all!
My thoughts floated back down the years (the older I get, the more that exercise seems to become a cruise along a slow-flowing river rather than guiding a canoe down a swiftly-running stream, with more and more places to stop and explore along the way) and didn't stop when I realised that this was probably a flight to San Francisco in 2000. Instead, recollection followed recollection until memory eventually came to rest in the early 'seventies, when I was living with my young family in the middle of a country town, almost opposite the pub and just around the corner from the church.
That was the time when I was studying economics as part of my accountancy training, and struggling to make sense of the written course material as it described the way that one government and then another had tried to control the British economy. It was then, too, that my thoughts first turned to politics as I realised that each government in turn had first undid what had gone before, in order then to implement its own ideas of what needed to be done now. Obviously the purpose of an Opposition is to oppose, but it seemed to me that too much of its energy was devoted to tearing the government apart, and not enough to explaining what ought to have been done instead.
The fact that the half-dozen Liberal MPs seemed willing to agree with one 'side' on one point, and then with the other on another point was what first persuaded me to join the Liberal Party and, although that enthusiasm proved only to be a 'flash in the pan', I've been a supporter of the politics of compromise and accord ever since. In the 'noughties', when I listened to RTE on long wave as I drove around the country, I became aware of multi-member constituencies and started to think about proportional representation as a real possibility.
To bring this truly up to date, I'll share a comment I read this week about the speed with which 27 European leaders could reach a compromise agreement about the extension of Article 50, compared to the length of time our Parliament has taken - and has still not been able to come to agreement - over the approval of the Brexit legislation. It was described as the grey productivity of European thinking versus the black-and-white failure of our own. People on all sides of the political spectrum are now voicing what I was beginning to see forty-odd years ago, that the days of a confrontational parliament based on a winner-takes-all mentality are numbered.
It is indeed a long journey, along a very long road. But I believe we will eventually learn nationally what children learn very quickly in the school playground: it's more satisfying to agree that one can play with the toy for a while and then for the other to do so, than for either to break it, or throw it over the hedge, so neither can play with it at all!
Friday 5 April 2019
Regaining Sovereignty
It's a phrase that has been accorded a heightened currency in recent months that some would say is unjustified. I don't wish to comment on that here, but it is one that summarises the positive nature of my personal feelings just at this moment.
Two weekends ago I sat in A&E on Sunday evening looking at an X-ray picture and was told that recovery would probably be 'two to three weeks'. I had just learned that I didn't have broken ribs - not even cracked ribs - and no dark glamour could now be claimed by revealing that I had simply bruised my chest: after all, the only bruise that could be seen was the size of a postage stamp! All I could offer to explain my reluctance to do things was 'I had a fall'.
What I did know was that a wide variety of small movements that are part of normal life were suddenly painful and to be avoided if at all possible. In the last week many of these have no longer caused trouble, and I'm left with difficulty in only one or two things like getting out of bed; even breathing deeply is virtually pain-free.
As I mentioned last week, I attended a talk on the Burston School Strike and, quite apart from that expedition, this event has suddenly taken on a higher profile for me. One of my online friends was looking for something in her home and - on the 105th anniversary of the start of the Strike - discovered a map of the walk of protest the children had taken that sunny April day. She announced this fact on Facebook, accompanied by an album of present-day photographs of some of the places mentioned on the map.
Comments have been posted this week in reaction to the map and/or the photos. One person reported that a BBC documentary about the Strike is available on YouTube (just search for 'Burston School Strike' and you'll find all three 15-minute parts) and then - to my amazement - one of my many first-cousins-once-removed said she'd watched this and that it was 'lovely to see my nanny Violet there'. Violet Potter was the 13-year-old girl who had led the Strike in that last spring before the First World War.
I can remember as a teenager in the early '60s delivering groceries to her younger brother. At that time, and in the documentary made ten years or so later, he was running the village post office, but I had no idea that, about 11 months before I was born, his niece had married one of my cousins! Such are the inevitable consequences of a large family who were too busy with their own lives to socialise very much beyond the occasional funeral!
This afternoon I lost all track of time as I rekindled my latent family history enthusiasm and traced the Potter family back to the late 19th century, discovering and documenting those links of which I was hitherto unaware.
My other activity this afternoon provides a third strand to my positive reflections this evening. Last spring and summer I seemed to be fighting a prolonged battle with certain unidentified neighbours and the local council over the non-collection of recycling waste from my home community. To cut a very long story short, the council had - quite rightly - been refusing to empty recycling bins that were 'contaminated' either by materials put into the wrong bins, or plastic bags in which the right items had been deposited. Since we all use a small number of communal bins, this action deprived me of facilities to dispose of my own recyclable waste.
The situation has now greatly improved, but one lingering aspect of the problem concerned the bin for paper and magazine recycling which had never been emptied. I had been by-passing this difficulty by making use of another bin further along the road but, when I found last weekend that this alternative was now full so I couldn't use it, I decided to take matters into my own hands. This afternoon I had the time and opportunity to empty the stinking bin and transfer the contents into a recently emptied general waste bin, thereby giving me the chance to empty my domestic waste-paper container into the right bin for the first time in over a year! How long this pleasant state of affairs will continue is as yet unknown, of course. Watch this space for news of further developments!
Two weekends ago I sat in A&E on Sunday evening looking at an X-ray picture and was told that recovery would probably be 'two to three weeks'. I had just learned that I didn't have broken ribs - not even cracked ribs - and no dark glamour could now be claimed by revealing that I had simply bruised my chest: after all, the only bruise that could be seen was the size of a postage stamp! All I could offer to explain my reluctance to do things was 'I had a fall'.
What I did know was that a wide variety of small movements that are part of normal life were suddenly painful and to be avoided if at all possible. In the last week many of these have no longer caused trouble, and I'm left with difficulty in only one or two things like getting out of bed; even breathing deeply is virtually pain-free.
As I mentioned last week, I attended a talk on the Burston School Strike and, quite apart from that expedition, this event has suddenly taken on a higher profile for me. One of my online friends was looking for something in her home and - on the 105th anniversary of the start of the Strike - discovered a map of the walk of protest the children had taken that sunny April day. She announced this fact on Facebook, accompanied by an album of present-day photographs of some of the places mentioned on the map.
Comments have been posted this week in reaction to the map and/or the photos. One person reported that a BBC documentary about the Strike is available on YouTube (just search for 'Burston School Strike' and you'll find all three 15-minute parts) and then - to my amazement - one of my many first-cousins-once-removed said she'd watched this and that it was 'lovely to see my nanny Violet there'. Violet Potter was the 13-year-old girl who had led the Strike in that last spring before the First World War.
I can remember as a teenager in the early '60s delivering groceries to her younger brother. At that time, and in the documentary made ten years or so later, he was running the village post office, but I had no idea that, about 11 months before I was born, his niece had married one of my cousins! Such are the inevitable consequences of a large family who were too busy with their own lives to socialise very much beyond the occasional funeral!
This afternoon I lost all track of time as I rekindled my latent family history enthusiasm and traced the Potter family back to the late 19th century, discovering and documenting those links of which I was hitherto unaware.
My other activity this afternoon provides a third strand to my positive reflections this evening. Last spring and summer I seemed to be fighting a prolonged battle with certain unidentified neighbours and the local council over the non-collection of recycling waste from my home community. To cut a very long story short, the council had - quite rightly - been refusing to empty recycling bins that were 'contaminated' either by materials put into the wrong bins, or plastic bags in which the right items had been deposited. Since we all use a small number of communal bins, this action deprived me of facilities to dispose of my own recyclable waste.
The situation has now greatly improved, but one lingering aspect of the problem concerned the bin for paper and magazine recycling which had never been emptied. I had been by-passing this difficulty by making use of another bin further along the road but, when I found last weekend that this alternative was now full so I couldn't use it, I decided to take matters into my own hands. This afternoon I had the time and opportunity to empty the stinking bin and transfer the contents into a recently emptied general waste bin, thereby giving me the chance to empty my domestic waste-paper container into the right bin for the first time in over a year! How long this pleasant state of affairs will continue is as yet unknown, of course. Watch this space for news of further developments!
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