Sixty the New Forty?

I have come to realise that one of the effects of belonging to a young and lively church is that I have a number of friends who are young mums.  Some I just say 'hello' to, some I'm comfortable to sit and chat with, and there are others whose company I enjoy through the medium of music, as I occasionally join one of the groups to lead the singing at services.

The knock-on effect of being with these people is that it keeps me young. There's more than a grain of truth in the cheeky quote, 'a man is as young as the woman he feels!'  As I said to one of these friends recently, 'I feel as if I'm forty'.

Today has seen a busy day at the church; it was our annual Fun Day, when a variety of activities are staged in church and hall, and outside as well, including a climbing wall, bouncy castle, and a scalextric track, all completely free of charge, as a gesture of welcome to our local community. Many of these are particularly of interest to the children, of course, like the various craft tables, cake decoration, face-painting, and a sandpit, but there was a constant supply of tea, coffee and cakes as well as a barbeque and lots of seating inside and out.

In the past, my response to this event has been to turn up after it's got going, take a quick look around, decide it's not my scene and depart after a token coffee and bun.  Earlier this year, however, I ticked a box to indicate interest in the 'events team'.  I had forgotten all about this until I received an e-mail from one of those 'young mums' mentioned above, asking if I would help setting up tables for a series of corporate meals during Lent, the solemn season leading up to Easter.  Through this, I began new friendships and expanded existing ones.

As a result, when the call went out for help with the Fun Day, I was quite willing to offer my time, though saying from the start that many of the activities were well outside any skills I might possess.  Apart from shifting chairs and setting up tables, the organiser designated me as a sort of general assistant, to be on hand for 'odd jobs'.  I was content with this assignment for (as with my recently-concluded career as a courier) its 'unexpected' element.  It included being asked to collect the gas for the balloons, and despatched at short notice to obtain further supplies of sand ... thankful that, in each case, these would fit into my tiny car.

Reflecting on the day as I relaxed in the bath, I thought of my father at an age perhaps twenty years less than mine today ... when I would have been about three years old.  I thought of my favourite picture of him (reproduced here) and could imagine the man in that picture doing the same as I had been doing this afternoon as I confronted a two-year-old in the ball-pit.  I had decided it would be of practical help (and prevent accidents) if I were to clear up some of the balls that had found their way under chairs and into other areas where they could have been stepped on.  As fast a I put them back in the pit, little Ryan was pushing them out again through one of the holes in the side.  It became quite a battle - one I seemed to be losing - until the cavalry came over the hill in the shape of his parents!  As I gradually, and with some relief, handed control over to them, I realised both my age and how much I had enjoyed myself.

So, perhaps sixty is the new forty ... more tales from this youngster next week!

Life's Subtleties

The other day I completed one of those online surveys all about sport, health, diet and so on.  One of my responses claimed that I go for a walk ('dog walking, with or without a dog') about once a week, and I realised that I haven't done so lately.  So, to restore some truth to my claim, I walked yesterday morning ... early, so as to avoid the forecast rain, which never came, but that's another blog altogether!

Walking is always a good time for thinking and, as I recalled what had prompted me to walk, I realised the skill of the survey's compiler.  A lot of the questions were in two parts, "how often in the past year ...?" and "how often in the last four weeks ...?"  Comparing my answers: the one an estimate based on my perceived lifestyle, but the other a fairly-recalled accurate count-up, I realised that this revealed, in a number of cases, how life is changing.  Habits formed with good intention are interrupted for genuine reasons but, before they can be restored, other 'stuff' begins to make regular demands on one's time.

I find my thoughts, especially when walking, drift to childhood memories, and I realised this week that I've reached - nay, well passed! - the age that my father would have been when he complained that he could recall clearly things from his childhood but couldn't remember what happened last week! I may not recall, as he did, seeing German prisoners-of-war working on the farm during WW1, but I do find that I can remember the names of many class-mates from fifty or sixty years ago!

Comparing some of the houses and the lifestyle of their occupants to what we knew in those days reveals countless changes of course, but most of those haven't happened overnight.  They've come about gradually, almost imperceptibly, just as my habit of walking has been overtaken by the need to spend the time on other things.  I wouldn't say my own experience is universally representative - far from it - but it's the only experience that I know in sufficient detail to comment about.  As well as differences in and around the home: the use of my time and relationships with the neighbours (virtually non-existent among flat-dwellers), there are noticeable changes in church and community life, too.

Twenty-five years ago - well into the computer age - I was editor of a church magazine.  I had a fairly up-to-date desktop publishing program on my computer at home, and prepared each month a four-A4-page original that would be sent to a nearby printer to be reproduced in the required quantities for distribution throughout four villages.  I have no idea what that parish is doing these days, but in the ten years or so that I've been at my present church, I've only seen a handful of magazine editions ... which I now believe to have been no more than the fruits of an exercise for a former curate.  It could be argued that such a publication is no longer necessary.  Apart from a church website, there is a facebook page, and essential information is disseminated by e-mail directly to the individuals concerned.  The cleaning and flower-arranging rotas no longer rely on half a page in a printed booklet!

And, of course, change isn't confined to local things.  We have only to look at our TV screens to see the evidence of that.  While the twenty-four-hour newsreels bring us the shape of today, endless documentaries provide a detailed analysis of how things used to be.  In many cases, the change from then to now didn't happen overnight in, say, 1979; it's been a gradual, almost insidious, transition as one development after another has made something else redundant.  The present verbal - and, sadly, sometimes not so verbal! - campaigns over the upcoming referendum on EU membership remind us that in international relations, too, changes have occured.  The present 28-country Union is a very distant cry from the Coal and Steel Community of 1952.

Who would have thought that such a far-reaching meditation could have resulted from a simple stroll around the block?

Was it All Worth it?

I suppose it’s an inevitable question after more than a week away.  Even more so now, two days after my return, when there still seem to be lots of ‘extra-ordinary’ tasks to be done, homes to be found for guide books, souvenirs and so on.  What have I enjoyed?  What could have been better, in planning or in execution?  What have I to show for it? are the key questions that come to mind.

To answer the big one first ... I have to say yes, it was worth it.  Otherwise there would be no point in having the motor-home in the first place.  At its very basic level, I enjoy driving it.  The healthy throb of the engine every time I start it, the thought of negotiating over 2.5 tonnes of moving vehicle in traffic or between obstacles, is empowering, satisfying and, as I said to someone the other day, calming.

What could have been done better?  In April I wrote about using a parking scheme this year that, at its very basic level, relates the cost of an evening meal in a pub to an otherwise free park for the night.  I had planned one such on the way to Scotland and one on the way back.  It would have helped if I had read all the details about the Windmill PH at Linton, where I stayed last Monday, my first night out.  The warmth of the welcome couldn’t be faulted; the car park was fine and virtually level (although the van next to mine had been parked on ramps at one end) and the food was perfectly acceptable.  The problem came when I judged the following morning that my motor-home would get through the archway that was marked ‘Exit’.  

Windmill PH car park, with the
miscreant arch to the left.

Width-wise, it probably would have, but at the spring of the arch, almost at roof-height, are projecting capitals to the uprights.  There was a rubbing sound, as if I’d caught a tarpaulin with my back wheel.  It was actually the sound of stone against the window of the over-cab bedroom!  When I consulted the guide ready to warn others of my misfortune, I discovered that this had already been done; the warning was there, in three languages, at the foot of the page: “leave by the entrance; the exit is too narrow”.  If only the sighted could see!

The visits I made on Monday, Friday and Saturday all went according to plan, and enabled me to spend time with people I don’t see very often ... in one case for about forty years!  What could have been better planned was the homeward journey.  The selected pub stopover on Sunday seemed not to be very far from the campsite where I’d spent the last two nights (hampered by non-stop rain, exacerbated by the tree under which I’d parked).  I decided at the last minute to change this to one much nearer home but, given the short journey then left before arriving at my last campsite (booked and paid for in advance) I now see it would have been better to have broken the return journey somewhere else, and made it in two days instead of three.

I certainly enjoyed the site I stayed at near Stirling.  The weather was perfect, warm and dry, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable.  There was a bus stop not far from the entrance, and upon my return from a day out the driver dropped me at the gate!  And for a backdrop, the Ochil Hills!  As one not accustomed to mountain scenery, I was - in the modern idiom - ‘blown away'!

And what will I take from it? Apart from the photos, and the lessons learned, and a few small souvenirs there are unwritten memories of people visited, people watched, people spoken to, and places seen, signs to interesting possibilities for another time and above all, the excitement of finding out what’s over that hill, round the next corner, and where I get to if I leave the trusted roads I’ve come to know only too well in the past few years!

The Ochil Hills, and Witches Craig
campsite, Blairlogie, Stirling

When Cyril met Geoffrey

I hope you will forgive me, dear reader, for the fact that this week's blog may tax your mind.  You might care to find pencil and paper now, in order to follow its intricacies.

I've been telling friends this week about my upcoming trip in the motorhome, and the plans I have to visit in the course of my travels, two brothers whom I think of as my cousins, but in fact are no blood relation at all.  Their link to me is that their father's brother married my mother's sister, so we have a common cousin, but are not cousins to each other.  If you think that's complicated, read on ...

During the course of trawling through some papers this week, I came across a note that brought to mind the two title characters in this piece.  They have been (I suppose I should say 'were', since by now they have both passed on to a better place) part of my life since I can remember.  They were my mother's work colleagues before I was born.  In one of my earliest blogs, I wrote at some length about the shop where they all spent their working lives.

I'm not sure when they started working there, nor which one arrived first. Each was a few years younger than my mother, and Geoffrey was by two years the elder of them.  I presume they had both seen military service during World War II, but I have no evidence one way or the other.  They were still there long after I worked alongside them during school holidays in my teens.  They also shared a common interest in cage birds, but I now find myself wondering if they ever discovered in their long association the family chains that linked them to one another ... as well as to me.

Cyril's link to me was obvious.  His wife was my first cousin, since her mother and my father were siblings.  Their father's youngest sister Betsy married one Nathan Bridges, whose eldest brother Eli (or Elijah) was the grandfather of Edgar W. Bridges, who was born in 1911 and married a lady called Violet in 1946.

This lady, the vital link in the chain connecting these two men, was born Violet Madge Cooke in 1914. She had previously been married to Geoffrey's uncle.  Like my father (one of twelve), Geoffrey's father, too, came from a large family, being the eldest of ten.  Violet's husband Freddie, born 1909, was his youngest brother.

As I know from personal experience, divorce happens for a variety of reasons, usually a combination of them rather than a single cause.  A common reason for divorce after the war was incompatibility with a returning serviceman husband.  I have no idea whether this was the case for Violet and Freddie.  They had a daughter, born in 1936, who - whatever the causes involved - would have been aware of this tragedy happening around her.

So ... the summary statement, wait for it ... Cyril's wife's grandfather's brother-in-law was the grandfather of Geoffrey's aunt's second husband.  No, I shouldn't think either of them knew their families that well.

How did I get to know all these details? you will surely be wondering.  It all started through a fascination with the Bridges family.  Not only were they linked to my own in the way I've already mentioned; Nathan's youngest brother Sydney (another big family: Nathan was the sixth of nine children) married the illegitimate daughter of another of my grandfather's sisters.  In the course of following up this curiosity, I made contact with a granddaughter of Violet and her second husband Edgar Bridges.

And just to complete the complexities, I remember meeting Violet's and Edgar's daughter Louise when at the local swimming pool in the sixties!

Now, how full is your piece of paper?