Share one of the best gifts you’ve ever received.
I can think of many gifts I have received in my life that stick out as being very special. They all shared one thing in common, the fact that the person buying the gift was thinking of me as a person. I know that sounds obvious, but how often have you received a generic gift from someone who you thought knew you very well? These gifts are bought with affection but without much thought, and we have all been guilty of buying those gifts. It could be that you don’t actually have much contact with the person, that it’s a ‘duty’ gift for someone you don’t particularly like or that things have been so hectic at work or at home that you’ve only had the chance to rush to the shops or buy a next day delivery gift online.
We can still appreciate the fact that the person has made an effort and that they are showing a connection to us, but in the end that gift may end up at the back of the cupboard, in a charity shop or regifted to someone else. I don’t actually dislike the idea of regifting because it shows a level of thought for the other person, as you are sure they would appreciate the gift more than you. In any case, the person who bought it doesn’t need to know what happened to it and honour is satisfied all round. I used to run Secret Santa gift exchanges in many of my jobs, partly due to my often mentioned love of Christmas, and partly because jobs are draining, demanding and often thankless these days and we all need something to look forward to. The Secret Santa worked for two reasons. First, because the forms I sent to people asked them for suggestions as to what the other person could buy them and second because we really liked each other and often went the extra mile. One of the great delights during present opening was seeing the faces of colleagues receiving completely unexpected and absolutely perfect gifts. Actually, there was a third reason. It was restricted to colleagues who weren’t in the upper management positions, because nothing kills the vibe more than your boss sitting in on the present opening!
Some of my favourite gifts have been the unexpected ones and, interestingly, gifts that initially I was not sure about. My wife is particularly adept at finding gifts I don’t know that I want and she is always spot on even if my initial reaction is one of bemusement. She has tried to encourage my creative side with various gifts and, after some initial internal reluctance, I have realised that she knows me better than I know myself! It is always amazing to reflect on gifts that have opened up new areas of interest, such as scrapbooking and organising photos, and how I could have thought for years and not come up with anything nearly as good for myself.
So, when you are buying a present, think of the person, think of their interests, think about an off the cuff comment they have made, replay conversations in your head. If you do all this and you give yourself enough time to get the present, I guarantee that you will make a difference to that person, either short term or long term. Happy present hunting!
Earlier this week, I saw an excellent article in the Guardian about Burnout.
I recognised all of the elements that were mentioned, having experienced all of them for most of my last two years of full time year round teaching. However, I always thought of burnout as a mist obscuring everything around me. I decided it was time to write another poem, so I did and the finished version can be seen below. This time I experimented with making lines 2 & 4 of each verse rhyme. I’m not sure if it makes the poem better or worse, but it’s all part of finding a style I can work with.
The Mist
The mist descended gradually
It came on without warning
A sense of something missing
A perpetual gloomy morning
I told myself 'it's tiredness'
And tried to struggle through
But I lost my way more and more each day
As the mist within me grew
I left the cause of my malaise
But the mist would not depart
It kept me feeling inchoate
And my mind was stop then start
The truth is there's no easy fix
But my better days are more
And when it finally vanishes
It will feel like my encore
Write about your approach to budgeting.
I have always had a difficult relationship with money. With me it’s been a case of spending too much or trying to spend as near to nothing as possible! I move from one extreme to the other and I have never managed to settle on a happy medium. This year, so far, I have spent £10.50 on myself outside of food and other essentials. This was on one night when I went to the National Theatre and bought myself a programme and my daughter and I ice creams. I am quite happy with that spending level and hope I can continue it for the rest of the year! Now, there is a clear reason for me to reduce my spending as much as possible, namely our decision for me to step away from full time year round teaching. I have written about it at length elsewhere so I won’t go into it again but you can imagine that it definitely focuses the mind!
When I was a child I got pocket money and basically as soon as I got it I spent it. Birthday and Christmas money was the same. It never went into savings and I never had a savings account set up. For seven years at Secondary school, I had an extra £5 a week, because we lived one house inside the boundary for free bus travel and the bus fare was 50p each way. I got asked to pay my fare twice in seven years 🎉 🎉 I was literally quids in to the tune of about £200 a year. Did I save any? No way, I just built up a brilliant singles collection and finished the Football 79 sticker album!
By the time I got a job my spending pattern was set in stone. Whatever I was paid was spent and I had no savings whatsoever. In my early 20s I came completely off the rails to the extent that my bank demanded the return of my bank card and allowed me to take out £50 a week in cash until I could prove that I was able to budget properly! Then, salvation arrived in the form of Janet, whose attitude to money was the diametric opposite. She had always been a saver and would not buy anything if it wasn’t budgeted for. By and large I fell into step with her because I gave her control of our finances, which was definitely a great decision and remains so! When our income has been at its lowest, we have always had enough money for rent and food and for what the children needed, and that is very much down to her. However, my financial troubles did leave me with one very important skill, namely that of making 50p do the job of a pound when food shopping. I have always been good at mental arithmetic and if I had £5 I would get the absolute maximum out of it. Back in the early 2000s I was budgeting on about £20 a week for a family of 6 and coming in below budget whilst still ensuring that we had enough food to satisfy growing appetites. I would buy the cheapest ingredients but make really good, filling and healthy meals with my prowess in the kitchen. To this day, I get the absolute maximum for my money even though I don’t necessarily need to budget and I can get much better quality ingredients. It’s a matter of personal pride to reduce our food bill to the minimum but still be able to cook really good quality meals. The waste in our kitchen is absolutely minimal and I am very focused on making sure that remains the case.
I will never feel totally comfortable with money and I have come to realise that I have to really watch myself like a hawk. Yes, it’s led me to denying myself treats that I probably could buy, but I always think that any money spent on myself is money I can’t spend on my loved ones. It’s definitely at the other extreme now, but I have a feeling of guilt when I spend on myself when it is unnecessary so I accept that as the price for my previous profligacy.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
When I was a child I was brought up in a house and an area that took patriotism as read. The prevailing idea was that there was no country as good as England and that you must support it come what may. It was something I was happy to go along with in everything I did. Note that I said England not the UK. My Dad and his friends made no secret of the fact that they disliked the Celtic nations and saw the Irish as terrorists to the person, either active or supportive. Our Scout Troop was a very patriotic organisation and I was never really put in contact with anyone who felt differently apart from at school.
It was with this patriotic feeling that I made the decision to join the RAF. It is ironic, then, that it was there that I found the first indication that there was a very different side. So many of my fellow recruits came from areas where manufacturing industries and mines had been closed down by Margaret Thatcher’s government and these teenagers had nothing for them at home so they were looking towards the armed forces as a job not a virtue. I realised then that I had been misled by the people and culture around me.
The real break from patriotism came in the mid 1990s when I took a job in Japan. I realised that they did so many things differently, but that, despite what I had been told, a good proportion of them were much better than the UK. It was a bit of a eureka moment I suppose, and the more I looked into it the more ridiculous I realised that patriotism was. By the way, I don’t just mean British patriotism, I mean any country’s patriotism. Japanese patriotism was just as ridiculous and as based on unrealistic ideas as any other form of patriotism. When I returned from Japan, the majority of my friends didn’t want to hear that Japan was better than England in any way, anymore than the Japanese wanted to entertain the idea of England or Britain being better than they were.
Why should we accept that we are somehow better than anyone else based on accident of birth? What is a country anyway, apart from a random border made up by human beings that really bears no resemblance to the land around it? Why do Scotland and Wales have the borders that they do? Actually, those borders have changed throughout the centuries. Looking further afield, the British left their Empire and created countries that bore no resemblance to the people living within them, creating the setting for decades of conflict.
I have lived in four other countries in my adult life, Japan, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Australia. The latter contains the cricket team I support in all versions of the game, something that started in 1989. That was the year that an incredible Australian team came over and played cricket that was absolutely brilliant to watch. I instantly swapped to supporting Australia against England and that has never changed since then. When I was living there I got the chance to watch my cricketing heroes and to this day, those heroes come from a land down under, not from England.
Do I feel pride when I see English or British sports people doing well? Yes, to some extent, but nowhere near as much as I did in my younger days. The only English team that stirs my patriotism are the Lionesses, but that is because of how much they have overcome as a result of their own country ironically! Women’s Football was banned by the FA for 50 years for no reason other than it looked likely to overtake men’s football. Everything that the Lionesses have achieved is despite their country not because of it.
Patriotism is quite often negative, poisonous and disruptive and now that this is the current form of patriotism in every country I can think of, I want nothing more to do with it.
Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
Yesterday I was writing about my career maze and I mentioned my casual work. This was back in the mid 1980s and at that time, you were entitled to sign on for unemployment benefit if you had previously worked. I was 21 at the time and I had been employed by Lloyds Insurance and the RAF. So, I went to the Unemployment Benefit Office and signed on to get, from memory, about £35 a week. Even in those days, this would not get you very far at all with my rent for one room in a house being £25 and a diet based on cereal and Savoury Rice accounting for another £5,leaving me with £5 a week together with whatever money I could win from the pub quiz machine! Fortunately I was pretty good at it and waited until there was a reasonable prize, a skill that usually netted me another £10 a week on average.
Even then, the middle and upper classes were joining the government in demonising anyone on benefits as lazy and living well off of the back of ‘hard working people’. As my experience indicates, this was rubbish then and it’s rubbish now. As for the argument that, as fraud, it is a massive amount of money taken out of taxes, well it’s barely a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money taken out of the country by high earning people who avoid and evade taxes to a massive extent and then spout rubbish about colonisation from their tax havens surrounded by huge luxury.
So, when I was offered £150 for a month’s work, cash in hand, I negotiated with the person who was offering the work and asked that I could take a day off on each of the two days when I was due to sign on that month. This was agreed and I kept the £150 plus the £70 for signing on and was able to buy some small presents for friends and family that Christmas which would have been impossible otherwise. I feel no guilt for doing what I did because the benefit law was one designed to make things as difficult as possible for the poorest in society while allowing the richest to ignore the tax laws that applied to them.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 