What are three objects you couldn’t live without?
When I was at St Andrew’s school I regularly came home to an empty house with one parent working 9 to 5 and the other doing shifts. I was what was called a ‘latch key kid’. My biggest problem was that I often forgot the key to go into the latch! Often, my Mum would come home to find me in the garden or sheltering from the rain at the back. You would have thought that I would have learnt after a couple of times, but no. I was still occasionally forgetting my key into my teens. A lack of organisation was the root cause, exacerbated at Secondary school by very high levels of dread and fear at the prospect of going to school. Nowadays I still need to let myself in on a regular basis and I have a place for my key so I don’t forget it.
That key is next to my wallet so I don’t forget that either. I now have a card wallet that seldom contains actual money, and I miss that. When you spent over 40 years of your life using notes and coins, that still seems like the default setting for daily life. When I was younger I had notes and coins and always kept them in the pockets of my trousers and my coat. That would often cause me to get to a shop, decide to buy something and then search through 6 or more pockets to see where I had left my money the night before! Sometimes I didn’t have the money, as it was in the pockets of the previous day’s trousers. As with keys, it took me an inordinate amount of time to settle on a particular pocket for my money, and even now, I can still be caught out when I leave my wallet in a coat, a pair of trousers or in the wrong place in the house.
These days my third and final item is my phone to contact people and count my steps in the main. I wondered what the equivalent was in my childhood and I decided that there simply wasn’t one. Perhaps I would have change for the telephone box or I might have a calculator if I was off to school. A notebook and pen were a must if I thought I might need to take notes about something. A torch would be in my pocket on scout camp. A phone has replaced all of them.
As I was never a smoker I never had the concealed packets of cigarettes and box of matches some of my friends had. During the Autumn and Spring terms I would have gloves because I have always run on a different thermostat setting to everyone else! Finally, I would put all the rubbish from sweets, sticker packets and crisp packets etc in my pockets to dispose of when I got home. The problem was that I often forgot to do that and ended up with coat pockets bulging with rubbish until I remembered. Actually, some things never change!!
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Every time I went abroad to work I learnt more about myself than I would have done in an entire lifetime of staying in the UK. If you are living and working in your own country, people will have expectations of you and they will place limitations on you. This is because they ‘know’ you and what you are capable of. When you go abroad to live and work you will stand or fall on your own abilities and achievements. Fewer excuses and allowances will be made for you but fewer constraints will be placed upon you.
I first went abroad to work in 1986 as an International Scout on a summer camp in Florida. My age and my lack of experience were incredibly telling. I was awful for the bulk of my time there as I couldn’t really do anything particularly useful. As an immature and sheltered 21 year old I had very few skills, either personal or practical, but through the patience of those around me I gradually improved as a member of staff and as a person. It was from a very low base, but I came back with a new idea of myself.
Next I went to Japan for three years and I veered from triumph to disaster and visited all points in between! Along with the teaching, I had a family to try to support emotionally as well as financially. It was an even steeper learning curve than the summer in the US. My other two overseas jobs were disastrous for a number of reasons but those times in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia were pivotal in helping me to continue finding myself as a person.
If you can’t go abroad, join a club that is doing something you have never tried before or go to a new area with a job. I promise that any opportunity you take to take yourself out of your comfort zone will pay dividends.
Progress Report
Let’s start with fitness. Having finally shaken off the worst of the cold, I started using my 1kg Dumbbells on February 1. To be honest I felt a bit silly using such light weights, but I thought I’d see if they made any measurable difference. After the first couple of sessions I realised that my balance was awful when I tried one exercise that required standing on one leg! To try to combat this, I introduced yoga sessions with just seven exercises to try to reset a body that had stiffened up and lost its flexibility as well as its balance over seven or eight years of relative neglect. I have ended up doing 14 sessions of dumbbells, 12 sessions of yoga and taking two rest days in the 28 days of February.
The results have been quite amazing. The tone of my arms and the strengthening of my neck muscles have shown that even 1kg of resistance can work wonders. At 60 I expected it to take ages to show any results, but it’s a month and I can actually see the effect in all areas. For me, the most pleasing of all is the improvement of my stomach muscles which have started to tone up very nicely. I do not have a six pack yet (!) but I do have a 90s rapper!! I have only recently realised that the exercise instructions were to do two reps of the 9 exercises and I have been doing ten! Perhaps that is why the improvement has been so rapid, but as I have got used to it I have just continued with my 9 exercises & 10 reps.
The yoga has also passed expectations in terms of its effects on my body. I have increased my balance to the extent that I can now balance easily on one leg for a count of 5. Over the last couple of mornings I have been very pleased to see that I can once again touch my toes whilst keeping my legs straight and I can now move towards being able to put my hands and wrists flat on the floor in front of me. I have incorporated good breathing practices into both yoga and weights as well. In all areas my February fitness regime has been a resounding success. The walking still needs to be more regular, but I have a plan for that. More details in my March progress report.
My discretionary spending on myself hit the heights of £13.50 this month as I went to the theatre and bought a programme and an ice cream and then went to Arsenal Women v Man City Women and also bought a programme! I know, profligate in the extreme, but they were my first trips out of Medway this year so I allowed it to go to my head 🤣 In all seriousness, I think it’s still pretty good.
The project work took a back seat to my volunteering preparation. I am nearly through the initial process of becoming a volunteer for Coram Beanstalk, a UK based charity who send volunteers into schools to help children with their reading. It’s in the form of regular one to one sessions and I hope to get started either late March or, perhaps more likely, at the start of the Summer Term. I have also got to the same stage for Write the World, a US based website that helps teenagers to enter competitions, receive feedback and continually improve their writing. I will be initially working with them as a shortlister, reading up to 75 entries and sending maybe half a dozen through to the next stage. When I have been there a few months I am looking to branch out into giving writers feedback on what they are doing well and what they can improve. It is going to be interesting to see how all my teaching experience transfers across to these tasks. In terms of paid work, it looks like RCA will be summer only, as I expected, and fingers crossed I will get one of the 10 week classes to maximise my earning.
Social media use is definitely dipping and I really feel that, at the moment, I have it well under control. I am aware how easy it is for that to change, so I have tightened up my Screen Zen app, asking it to stop me from accessing all websites between 10.30 pm and 7.30 am and blocking social media and browsers completely between 12 and 6 every afternoon/evening. My most time consuming phone apps are Jetpack for blogging and Happy Color for relaxation. Alongside these I also use Duolingo to study German and Calm every evening. It’s made me far less reliant on the phone overall, and long may that continue.
By taking away my opportunity to scroll rather than read I have continued my daily habit of reading in the morning after I get up. So, this month I have read the following books
Listening to the Music the Machines Make
Cassandra in Reverse
All Wrapped Up
The Doll Factory
Ring the Hill
Help the Witch
The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan
Think Like a Monk
I will be reviewing some of my books each month and, in a new blogging category, I will be introducing you to some of my favourite authors and explaining why I like them so much. My blogging continues to be daily and occasionally twice a day.
Finally, my creativity. I wrote two poems this month, both reflecting the situation I am facing. Are they any good? Well, that’s up to you to decide I suppose. Even if they aren’t, my creative muscles, along with my physical muscles will only get stronger through regular use, so I aim to write at least another two poems in March.
So, I am fitter, more relaxed and I have more patience. I am still a work in progress but that progress is definitely in the right direction. Have a great March!
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
I used to believe in destiny, but then life happened and I realised that it was all random. As human beings we are desperate to find patterns and reasons for what happens to us. Fate and destiny is an easy way to try to pretend that we are on a path. The fact is that the sheer amount of evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, and people who believe in fate or its more self important version, destiny, focus in on one situation where it ‘worked’ and ignore the 99 situations where it didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to believe in destiny but I have had to accept that there is no plan, divine or otherwise. We are cosmic accidents and so are our lives. If it brings you comfort to believe the opposite I am genuinely glad for you, but I can’t ignore the overwhelming evidence against that proposition.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
In March 2005 I left Australia with my family after 15 life changing months. After escaping Hong Kong we decided to visit my cousin and intended to stay there for a couple of months to see in Christmas and the New year of 2004. Things started to snowball when Janet decided that she wanted to see her cousin in New Zealand. We went over there for a couple of weeks and travelled around the country, visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. When we got back I decided to look for a job, because I had seen that English was a shortage subject and one that attracted the easiest route into permanent residence. I was shortlisted, interviewed and offered an EAP job in a school in the Sydney area. I went excitedly to the Immigration Department and showed them the job offer and inquired as to the next step. An extremely officious and rude woman behind the counter looked at my job offer and said that teaching English to foreigners didn’t count! It was a very interesting insight into the incredibly narrow view of what was acceptable to them and what wasn’t. Mind you, I have dealt with immigration all over the world and pretty much the only personal quality needed is to hate anyone trying to enter the country! After making sure that she didn’t have it wrong I had to ring up the school to turn down the job. That wasn’t the end of it though. I found out that the University of Wollongong had an MEd TESOL course starting in March, which I knew would secure my long term future in the sector, because I still had nothing other than experience. Even that was tricky because I had a family. We had to get our three school age children admitted to the local school and we had to follow strict rules on working hours. Then I had to go over to New Zealand again to get our tourist visa changed to a student visa. I won’t recount the story this time but suffice to say that it was stressful and very poorly organised from a Department of Immigration standpoint.
Once that was done I settled down to getting my Masters which I did with an overall distinction. Once that had finished the university sent the Department of Immigration a notification that I was no longer a student and the countdown to leaving began. When the day finally arrived I knew that I was saying goodbye to my dreams of settling down in Australia as a family. It was one of the worst experiences I have had outside of the obvious stress points of loss because I knew we could have made an amazing life there. We came back to the UK and two weeks later I turned 40. There was no celebration that year. Janet intended to mark it with a trip on the London Eye but it was foggy that day and it was a non starter, so I sat in St James’s Park freezing cold and feeling like things wouldn’t get better! Obviously they did, but the knowledge that a multiverse version of myself was allowed to stay in Australia made me very unhappy for a long time!
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 