Happy Campers?

An incident occurred while we were away on the Isle of  Wight recently that brought home to me the British stoicism in the face of adversity.

One night at the weekend we had the mother of all storms raging for a good few hours. The rain was torrential, and the wind screamed and whistled and brought down a blanket of leaves and twigs onto the decking.  We heard on the news the following morning that there had been over 500 flashes of lightning during the night.  Our holiday home was thankfully spared though, as it seems quite sturdily built with an added bonus of double glazing and central heating.

A little way away down towards the beach was a field of colourful tents containing perhaps about 200 campers.  The field had been full when we had walked through it the previous day, and Sam and I both wondered how they had all fared during the storm.  The next day when we took our usual morning walk down to the beach, the field was a tad waterlogged, but children were running about, barbeques were smoking, and families were sitting under blankets chatting and laughing, no doubt sharing events of the previous night.  There did not appear to be any spaces where a family had perhaps given up and gone back home.

I must admit that if I had been in a tent I would have sought out a hotel room.  Sam and I have camped with our boys at the Download music festival in similar bad weather, and remember the mud with its consistency of gravy, the bone-aching cold, and the inability to find any dry clothing.  Plus a nasty effect from the lack of a memory foam mattress on ageing hips, and the noise of other people shouting “Oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi!”  well into the small hours. Never again!

Perhaps it’s because we’re older now and the families were all younger than us.  I think nearly 60 year olds perhaps need a little bit of comfort!  Would you have gone home or braved the weather and stayed in your tent?  I know what I would have done…

Tasty?

The new Stevie seems to be nearly a stone lighter.  I’m feeling a lot better since my radiotherapy treatment finished 2 weeks ago, but the weight is still staying off.  Anything sweet tastes like radiation (yes, you can taste it, believe me) and I find I’m repulsed by the sight of cakes, biscuits, or anything full of sugar.  Even fruit I haven’t been able to eat, as it also tastes strange, and burns my mouth and the inside of my throat.

I suppose it’s not a bad thing, but I did enjoy a nice piece of fruit cake before the treatment began.  I still buy it, but Sam ends up eating it.  He’s putting on weight, and has had to start visiting the gym again.  All my trousers are a little too baggy now, and I’ve had to invest in a belt.  I’m wolfing down snacks of hummus and crackers, sausage rolls or toast in-between meals, as my appetite has returned with a vengeance.  However, my taste buds have not.

I can’t get used to my flat stomach!  I’ve lost 3 inches off my waist and keep waiting for the old Stevie shape to re-appear, but the scales stay fixed at 9 stones.  My knees have never felt better though, and are thanking me for losing ten pounds of flab.  What a way to lose it though.

I’m a bit sad to have lost my taste for fruit cake and the lovely summer fruits that are in the supermarkets now.  I only hope that with time my taste buds come alive again and allow me to partake of just a little bit of lemon drizzle cake or sultana loaf.  Is life worth living without a slice of genoa cake?  I suppose it is, but I’ll just have to get used to ‘The new normal’ (usually abbreviated to ‘The new norm’), a favourite phrase of the clinical nurse specialists in the department where I used to work.  Now I understand what they were going on about.

Due to a sinus problem my late aunt had not been able to taste a thing for years.  She would always cook a roast dinner on Sundays, eat every scrap, and exclaim – ‘That was a lovely dinner!’.  Poor old June.  At least I’ve got some sort of sense of taste, albeit a severely mutilated one.

The Crozier Estate

My teenage years were spent living miserably in an 8th floor flat on an infamous London council estate, which many years later I found out was at one point home to the ‘Shoe Bomber’ too.  I’ve changed the name of it (just in case!) in the poem below.  It’s all true by the way, but the photo underneath is just one I saw on the Free Photos site showing a similar block of flats:

 

In nineteen hundred and seventy one
The Crozier Estate had just begun.
Four thousand souls in the September heat
Made themselves at home amongst the London concrete.

Flats, maisonettes, and houses galore,
Had risen up from an airfield's floor.
Grey breeze blocks had been cobbled together
To give the people a happy ever after.

For eight long years I stayed there with my dad and mum
Until my day of freedom could come.
When I could leave the place where few trees grew,
And where the council had slowly let
All the eggs sink in one rotten basket.

When the original tenants did move or die,
With relish arrived the work-shy.
Over the sound of the TV at night,
Police outside would break up yet another fight.

Ambulances were two a penny
In the days when there were many.
A&E doctors came to dread the state
Of the inhabitants of the Crozier Estate.

In nineteen hundred and ninety four,
My mum, now a widow, heard a kick at her door.
It wasn't the first time, and she knew for sure
That she must move to where we were.

The estate had sunk to a new level of low,
Mildewed, decaying, unloved, and so...
We took my mum on a little ride
And moved her out to the countryside.
She hated it, this new place of hers,
And took the piss out of the villagers.

In two thousand and ten the bulldozers came round
And razed the estate down to the ground.
But like a phoenix it rose again without a hitch,
And is now a billion pound 'des res' for the rich!

Doing a Car Boot

Tags

car boot, humour

My US friends might ask “What’s doing a car boot?”

Well, it’s where you pack the boot of your car on a Saturday night with as much tat as you can find, and then set your alarm to go off at 05:10 hrs on the following Sunday morning in order to stand in a cold, muddy field from 07:30 hrs with about fifty other like minded souls in order to sell said tat.   The bit about setting your alarm for 05:10 hrs isn’t funny, as I came to realise last Sunday.

My daughters-in-law are prolific car booters.  I’ve never discovered just why my eldest daughter-in-law always has so much tat to sell.  Where is it all coming from?  She usually makes quite a bit of money every time too.  After finally clearing out my mother’s flat and being left with a mountain of tat, she suggested adding Dot’s tat to my own tat and joining her for a car booting session, and she knew just the one to go to – the Sunday market at Woolpit.

Woolpit Sunday market has been going for years, certainly for as long as we’ve lived in Suffolk.  The tat stretches far and wide across the aforesaid muddy field every Sunday morning, and if it’s a nice day then vultures start arriving from 07:00 hrs in order to buy up the best tat before somebody else takes it.  Sam and I had so much tat that we had to pay £14 for two cars to enter the field.  I fervently hoped that we’d soon sell all of it and make a grand profit.

The weather was a bit cold and overcast, but otherwise dry.  I trundled my car across the field and parked next to Sam and Kelly’s cars.  Before we had turned off our engines the vultures were flapping around all three of our cars, shouting through the windows and asking what we’d got.  I had some of the grandchildren’s outgrown toys in a Fortnum and Mason’s wicker basket that we’d been given several years back.  One chap asked how much for the basket.  I shouted back that it wasn’t for sale, just the toys inside.

We set up tables with our tat, and the vultures starting picking it over.  Quite a few of them wanted our Fortnum and Mason wicker basket, and Sam suggested selling it for £100. The sight of a group of vultures around our tables sent other vultures racing over to see what they were missing.  We were surrounded; this was a good start!

The morning ticked by. I felt as though I’d been up for hours, and it was only 08:15.  Kelly as usual was raking it in with her kids’ toys, books and games, but our tat wasn’t being shifted as fast.  Sam wandered off to buy a bacon roll and to look at other people’s tat, with strict instructions not to bring any of it back as we had enough of our own.  I yawned, sat in my beach chair still covered in Isle of Wight sand, and looked ever hopeful whenever a potential customer mooched along.

By 11:00 hrs everybody was packing up and I was windswept and starving hungry, as I’d eaten my breakfast at 05:45.  Kelly had made nearly £90, but Stevie with twice the amount of tat had only made £22.50 and had to bring the majority of it back home again.  Hey ho, such is life.  I worked on the assumption that it was a cold day and not many people had ventured out.  Kelly said to try again, but I think I’ll leave it until the summer!

Have you ever ‘done a car boot’? Would you do another one?  What’s a car boot sale called in the US?

An Exercise for the Mind

Tags

cancer, radiotherapy

Yesterday I went to Addenbrooke’s hospital for the first of eventually 47 radiotherapy and consultant review appointments, which will thankfully end on 25th May.  I had no idea of what was coming, and looking back, I think ignorance was probably a good thing.

I was aware that ‘at some point’ in the near future, my protective mask was going to be made.  This turned out to be yesterday.  I was shown a flat outline of a head and shoulders in some unknown breathable material which was attached to a frame, and told that it was to be heated up in a container of hot water and then placed on my face.  This would cause the material to mould itself to my facial contours, but apparently I would still be able to breathe (how reassuring).

This is where the exercise for the mind comes into play.  I am slightly claustrophobic, and as I lay flat on the CT scanner, I was told to close my eyes.  I dutifully complied with a racing heart, and then what can only be described as a thick hot blanket came down on my face.  As the heat left the blanket and it started to harden, the doctor and nurse clamped the frame to the CT scanner, rendering my head and shoulders totally immobile.  I then laid like this for at least 15 minutes while they scanned my neck and made marks on the mask regarding the area they wanted to treat.

I started to try and take myself away from my plight.  I imagined my newly-purchased holiday home, and the journey along the M11, M25 and A3 that I would need to make to get there.  Then I imagined myself and Sam sitting on the decking with a drink to watch the sun set.  Then I tried to work out how much 47 years of site fees would cost, but failed miserably as I am number illiterate. The time dragged endlessly by, and I realised that every time I presented for treatment, I would have to go through exactly the same thing, except that for future appointments the mask would have already been made.

Apparently I can take some CD’s with me for next time and concentrate on the music, which I might have done yesterday had they warned me what was going to happen.  Ugh, the whole process is horrific.  The only good thing about thyroid cancer treatment (or any other cancer treatment for that matter) is that you learn how to endure.

If you were in my position laid flat on a CT scanner with the hated mask over your face, what would you do?  I’d love to know!

 

Cruise Memories

On a lighter note today, I thought I’d show you a little bit of our holiday.  Not too much, just in case you get bored!  It was lovely to get away from the British winter for a while.

Our home for a fortnight – the Celebrity Equinox

This multi-million dollar house in the Cayman Islands only has 2 bedrooms!

Ride of death back to the ship in the tender, just before it got nasty!

Swimming with the dolphins in Costa Maya

At a Mayan village. Yes, he’s putting his bare foot in the fire!

 

Stevie with Captain Costas

 

On a New Orleans streetcar

 

Mardi Gras!

 

The iconic Lafayette cemetery No. 1

 

On the beach at Cozumel, complete with Mayan warpaint

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pushing the Boat Out

On a somewhat lighter note than yesterday, this will be my last post for a while on Haddon Musings’ Senior Salon.  The main reason is because Sam and I will be flying out to Miami early on  Saturday and boarding one of the Celebrity X cruise ships on Sunday morning:

Then visiting Georgetown, Cayman Islands…

Followed by swimming with the dolphins in …

Then visiting Cozumel…

And finally there will be three days in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras!

It’s our way of celebrating our upcoming 60th birthdays later this year.  When we were 50 we hired our village hall for a disco and buffet party with family and friends, but ten years on with no monthly mortgage payments, we decided to save up for the chance to sample New Orleans in all its glory instead.  I must say I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Has anyone ever been to the Mardi Gras?  If so, do you have any tips or advice for me?  Any comments gratefully received!

 

 

Another Kind of Addiction

Tags

addiction, Mobile phones

My landline rang, and my son’s tone of voice hinted at more than a touch of annoyance.

“Where have you been?  I’ve been ringing your mobile for ages!”

I informed him that I’d just been out for a long walk, and that I never take my mobile phone out with me on these occasions.  I also went on to explain that sometimes it’s nice just to feel the sun on your face and not to worry about who is trying to get in touch.  It’s quite often absolutely wonderful NOT TO BE CONNECTED!  My son seemed somewhat stupefied by my answer, as of course possibly every person of his generation may need to be surgically removed from their mobile phones before they can undertake even the simplest of discussions.

The theory I work on is that if somebody calls and they get no reply, then they will phone back later.  Doesn’t it always work like that?

On my walk today I saw people ambling along absolutely glued to their phones, and totally oblivious to their surroundings.  Is the whole world in the throes of a mobile phone addiction?  Is it really necessary to be connected 100% of the time?  When my sons and their wives visit us, they all sit on the settee in a trance, each one staring at their phones.  My granddaughters have the addiction as well now, it makes me want to scream!

When I was growing up there were no mobile phones at all, but we survived.  Friends rang my parents’ landline, and if I wasn’t in then they’d phone back.  I grew up not needing to tell the world that I was in the supermarket, waiting for a train, or cooking the dinner.  I feel no need to publicise my location via the Facebook app, and wonder how on earth teachers instill any knowledge into young heads, if children are constantly checking messages on their mobile phones underneath the desk.  For years my mobile phone stayed in my car just for emergencies, until the exasperation of my family forced me to bring the bloody thing inside the house.

I suppose it’s another example of the generation gap, but in my case, thank goodness I was young in a time when mobile phones did not exist.  Nowadays my phone stays in my rucksack (yes, I’m one of those bohemians who never carry a handbag if I can help it).  It’s more often than not on silent because the pinging noises annoy me, and yes, I will answer your message at some point when I take it out of my rucksack in order to charge it up!

 

 

Ageism in the Workplace

Tags

#postaday, Ageism, older workers, working mothers

I read an article on LinkedIn by Lesley Jane Seymour about ageism in the workplace that made me want to expand a little bit on this:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-age-still-last-taboo-workplace-lesley-jane-seymour

I am almost sixty too, just like Ms Seymour.  I returned to work in 1994 at the age of nearly 37 after staying at home to look after my boys.  I chopped and changed jobs in the next few years without any problems, until I found the one that suited me the most – a medical secretary in my local NHS hospital.

The NHS took me on at the age of 44, after I voluntarily left my previous job.  I was promoted over the years and gained experience in several departments until I took early retirement in 2014 due to side-effects of treatment for thyroid cancer.  I eventually ended up 2 grades higher than when I started.  Probably about 90% of the secretaries there were ladies in their fifties – free of childminding duties and willing and able to start at 8am and work past 3pm.  I can actually say that I never came across ageism when I was a medical secretary at all.  Even now my ex-manager often sends me emails and asks if I would like to return to work as a bank secretary to cover for holidays and sickness.

The NHS put up with my frequent hospital appointments when I was initially diagnosed with cancer in 2005, and my colleagues always welcomed me back after time off due to major surgery.  I cannot fault the NHS at all as an employer.  I now receive a pension.  I know that some people in their fifties do experience ageism in the workplace, but I just wanted to write about the other side of it.

When I went for one particular interview just before I returned to work in 1994, I was told that the company never takes on women of childbearing age.  It did cross my mind to wonder why they had invited me for an interview in the first place, but I’ve since learned that companies do have to interview a range of prospective employees to make their documentation look good.  I actually found it more difficult to get that first job when I was of childbearing age and after 12 years at home.  The older I became, the more easily I was able to find employment.

I can actually say that I’ve never experienced ageism at work, but was definitely  discriminated against in my childbearing years a few times in the 3 years it took me to find a job and return to the workplace.

Have you experienced ageism in the workplace?  I’d love to read your comments!

 

 

The Joy of Reading

Tags

books, reading

On the BBC News app recently was an article about an 86 year old lady Ursula Shepherd, who lives in Devon and is learning to read with tutors from LearnDevon, which encompasses adult and community learning courses run by Devon County Council.   She is coming along in leaps and bounds, and her goal is to be able to go to the library and pick out a book to read.  Ursula says that as a schoolgirl in the 1930’s, her teachers did not really care if she was educated or not.

I am so pleased that Ursula is finally discovering the joy of reading.  I taught both my sons to read before they went to school, as my mother did for me.  As a child I would walk with my father to our local library once a week, where I would search for the latest Enid Blyton book or one of the Nancy Drew mysteries that I hadn’t yet read.  A good part of my childhood was spent with my nose in a book, and I could lose myself totally in the story. It got me out of having babysitters by the age of 8, as Mum trusted me and knew that I’d still be sitting reading when she came home from work.  As soon as she returned from her job at 2.30pm I’d run out to knock for friends, safe in the knowledge that she was home and available if I got into any trouble.

How difficult it must have been for Ursula all her life being unable to read.  How could she understand food labels in supermarkets, instructions, or even fill out a simple form?  She would have always needed to ask somebody to do these things for her, now hopefully she will soon be able to do these things for herself.

Yes, Ursula has missed out on a lot, but it just proves that you are never too old to learn to read and enjoy a good book.