Black belt achieved

Here's what my son gave me for my birthday - a black training dobok, because I'd got through my tae kwon do black belt grading the week before, after nine years.

Black belt & dobok, with training book

I might have done it sooner if I hadn't devoted so much time to my doctorate, and then had the breast cancer. But, I never planned to get a black belt in anything.  I just took my daughter along and found I could train with her.  Most times when a parent takes a child out - to ballet, karate, swimming or piano lessons, - they have to sit there and wait patiently.  I'm not so patient.  Sooner or later my child was going to have to get herself there, or not go.  But once I realised I could join in, I also found that playing tag for the first time in decades made me laugh - another first in a while when you're a woman in your early fifties.  Then I tried to catch up with my rapidly improving daughter, so I went to more classes, got to an intermediate grade and got fitter.

One tag at a time, one new colour at a time, I went up.

As I got higher, I realised more and more people were helping me, not only the subum (teacher) but also lots of black belts, particularly the junior black belts, who courteously showed me how to do something better, and despite my poor and slow technique were willing to partner with me, thus demonstrating that getting to black belt isn't a solo achievement.  Then I realised that middle-aged, middle-grade women were seeing me a a role model, and that spurred me on too. And Christie Bytom was there in the background cheering for me.

The BBC Radio 4 programme iPM: Share What You Know asks for one sentence items of listeners' news, which they then select and read out over the air. I wrote:

"After nine years of training, including a year when I had breast cancer, I've been awarded my tae kwon do black belt" 

On 16 November, they got Dame Jenni Murray to read them and she read my sentence too - she who herself had breast cancer. The podcasts are at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ipm and the listeners' news is towards the last couple of minutes of the programme.

Birthday frog!

Dear Step Daughters - two of them left me presents for my birthday last week, then #3 turned up with a slightly bigger parcel, requiring that I opened it there and then.  Look at this cross-stitch!

It's so fine; she must have worked for hours.  And she chose the frog because she knows I like frogs.

Today I'm in Luxembourg presenting our company's   (Catcher Media)  work package as part of the EU JuxtaLearn project. so she brought it round at the weekend.

Dublin visit

We visited daughter in Dublin, youngest of our combined children, and took the eldest of the grandchildren.

Daughter did us proud in hosting us, escorting us, showing us interesting places:

• Kilmainham gaol, 
• Dublin castle, 
• museum - there was ever so much gold jewellery in Ireland thousands of years ago
• Trinity College Library where we saw the book of Kells
• Guinness Storehouse mmm - I don't normally drink Guinness, but there it tastes different, creamy and less bitter
• St Stephen's Green - a relaxing park of beauty

and eateries: Queen of Tarts, Joy of Chai.

We met up with an old friend, saw the marathon, and went to the theatre (Brecht's 'The Threepenny Opera'). All in three days.

Of great interest to daughter and me was the house in Grafton Street where my grandfather and his six siblings grew up.  It's a shop, as it was in 1900 and something, but no one lives above it any more

Scent from Rhodes

Pine, bay, sage and thyme... The air is full of herbal scents. Sun,sea and sand, architecture and archaeology we're rambling through Rhodes sampling them all.

Aylesbury mosque

"Oh Prophet, truly we have sent thee as a witness, a bearer of glad tidings, and a warner."

Thus read one of the admonitions (or is it a prayer?) on a wall at our local mosque, the Aylesbury Ghausia Mosque.
This view of the lovely carpet (a good reason for removing your shoes) is from one side of the room and that was the side where the women sat, slightly behind a rather wobbly screen.
The president of the masjid ('mosque') welcomed us, and a school student recited some of the Qur'an in that odd singing tonal chant you hear from minarets.  Perhaps that's just the way that Arabic sounds.  The boy stood at the centre of the room so both men and women could hear and see.   I guess they were pleased with and proud of the young man, but the Arabic language passed most of us by, even though someone then translated it.
An imam gave a key note speech about peace, which was short and to the point, then there was a lo-oong speech about the relationship between Islam and Christianity and the law.  I should like the speaker to join our local Toastmasters, come along one Monday evening to the meetings at Stoke Mandeville Stadium.  Finally our local MP gave a short message.
Then we were free to tour the majid, examine the exhibition, watch a hajj film and take refreshments, but we had stayed too long and had to forgo the food.   I'd like my own church to be as inviting (though it probably doesn't have the curiosity value).  Thank you to those who invited us, showed us what is important to them and how we share important values.

Garden room

Isn't this room gorgeous?  Look at the door that allows you out onto the patio, the light reflecting off the tiled floor, the hops shading the room.  We've just had the decorators in, taken out the green fitted carpet and one of the nine huge windows.  We've turned that window into doors, and replaced the carpet with these parquet tiles under which there's wired heating, so the room is now warmer in winter, but cooler in summer.  I use it as a study - you can see my desks - but it now feels like a garden room - a transition between house and garden.  It's lovely.

Sedentary sixties

This photo shows I've stepped over 11,000 steps today, the first time I've managed that many this week.  But then, today, we rehearsed and performed the Red Kite women's dance in the Vale Park, and then I did tae kwon do too.

I got the counting device a week ago after watching the BBC Horizon programme, Monitor Me.  Apparently you should aim at 10,000 steps a day, but in my sedentary work I'm lucky if I do 3000 and on one day this week did only 2000 because I was writing, at home, and didn't go out even for a stroll.

I made up for a lot of steps today.

Bureaucracy Tuesday

Not a punday Monday, but bureaucratic Tuesday!

I did a little work today between 7.30 and 10 o'clock, before the bureaucrats reared their ugly 9-5 heads.

1. Then my boss rang.  He's okay this boss - get that clear - but he has to explain to the EU bureaucrats what hours we've been doing in order to get the EU bureaucrats to pay the company.  The discussion on the implications and ramifications of the forms he needs to fill with what hours and what information on who, how long, for how much, took about an hour.  It's not democracy to have so much bureaucracy that the work doesn't get done.
2. Then I had to ring the company that delivers ready made meals to aged aunty because her bit of plastic won't go through.  I agreed to send them a cheque then rang the bank.  Turns out that EU regulations say the bank can't stay like it is but must split into two banks and that means they have to issue a new card, which they've sent out and they've stopped the old one.  Those phone calls took an hour.  I don't feel in charge; they changed the bank without me asking; it's bureaucracy not democracy
3. Then I trotted down to the charity shop to deliver some specialist books for recycling.  "Thank you.  Are you a tax-payer?"   Oh, no!  I'm not filling out one of their forms today, and I've probably filled it out before, so now I feel guilty for not helping them get their extra tax free amount.  But it's more form filling and bureaucracy. Charity depends on bureaucracy now.

Gus O'Donnell argued on Radio 4 that "an efficient bureaucracy isn't only a symptom of a mature democracy - it's a fundamental prerequisite."  Can we note the word 'efficient' please, and let me get back to doing productive work?

Never ever give up

Remember.

The end of another gliding day.

Caring for ageing aunty

Dear aged Aunty even forgets to eat.  She sits and stares out of the window at the windows and walls of rooms of other sheltered residents.  Even when food is next to her, she doesn't eat it unless reminded.
A month ago she fell, breaking her hip.  Or maybe she fell because her hip spontaneously broke. Whatever.  She stayed in hospital a remarkably short time and last week came home - minus her zimmer frame because the hospital forgot, or may she left it in the ambulance ... whatever.  She can't walk without it - what care is that?

So the really caring people, the volunteers from the local St Vincent de Paul Society ran around, one getting her a zimmer frame in the next few hours, which meant that volunteer didn't get to eat supper with her husband.  That's wrong.  You have to get your priorities sorted and that means voluntary work comes after family, but that caring volunteer said quite reasonably that you couldn't leave an old lady alone with no means of moving.  When she came back with the frame, Aunty was in bed, with the door unlocked. We have to get a key safe, so that we can lock the door safely, yet get in to help her.

Then, on Monday, the new carers who deliver food, forgot lunch, and Aunty sat there staring out of the window at the walls and windows with no food until, again, the same SVdP caring person arrived and realised what had happened and whipped her up an omelette in the microwave.

Aunty can't do the shopping herself, or ring the news agent to deliver her papers, or organise the delivery of the drugs she must take every day, or feed herself, let alone cook.  She hasn't unpacked her boxes from when she moved in there in 2009, and doesn't know where her clothes are.  She doesn't do her own laundry but someone else must come and fetch it and take it away and do it for her, and then put it back in her drawers.

Her drawers are mixed and muddled.  When she went into hospital, one of the SVdP people couldn't find her nighties.  I found them when I visited last weekend; they were in the wardrobe under her outdoor hats and gloves, with some cassette tapes.  I've put them in the drawers next to her bed.

If you have a child, a toddler, you know you have to mind them.  You give them food, wash their clothes, wash them, and put them to bed.  Aunty now needs minding like that.  She even asked me to cut her nails.  And volunteers can't be doing all that for a non-family member.  Soon Aunty will have to move from her sheltered flat to a room in a care home.

Visual memories

We spent a few days last week with three grandchildren at the Cheddar Youth Hostel here.   Previous years we've stayed at Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight, Wilderthorpe Manor and Pembrokeshire, Wales.

I checked back in this blog to find at the Isle of Wight http://ejh2.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/isle-of-wight-youth-hostel.html youth hostel grand daughter #1 lost her tooth and we needed to call the tooth fairy.  This time her little sister, only five, had a wobbly tooth, but nothing was lost.

The blog reminds that husband had planned the trip telling me we were going but omitting to mention that we were staying in a youth hostel with grandchildren.  Now I might know better and be less surprised.

In August 2009 we went to Shropshire here and I took photos, photos of the birds nesting in the youth hostel, and photos of the gliding site we visited.  Last year at Pembrokeshire, when I had a great time surfing I didn't blog, and husband didn't get much in the way of photos of the surfing.  I had an unforgettable time surfing, yet I remember little of the hostel.  I remember going round a castle and someone falling and not being able to get down a narrow staircase so a helicopter came to rescue her.  I took photos but didn't blog the holiday.  A blog helps me retrieve these memories.  This trip I would have taken my camera but it is being mended.  The visual memories are

• walking over the hill top the first morning, and sheltering under trees with another family under the next trees waiting for the rain to stop;
• watching rain coming in over Cheddar reservoir and we are already pretty wet, and hoping the others will hurry up but we're about to become thoroughly drenched. 
• the high roof of the Cheddar cave
• the huge cliffs of the gorge
• the soft sleeping face of granddaughter #4 on her bunk in the morning

Gliding weekends (sunny Sunday with friends)

Gliding incidents used to be the staple of my social conversation.  Sunday evenings would be spent in the pub reviewing the weekend's gliding activities: who'd gone solo, who'd earned a medal, who'd landed out.

My gliding club friend, having finished her Open University studies, is returning to normal sociability.  She invited husband and me, along with several others from gliding days for lunch on what must have been the first warm Sunday of the year.

Her dog, Hendrix, hid in the shade beneath our table, while we compared notes on our now grown children, our waning careers, and pension prospects. the mortgages we've paid off, and the 16% interest rates we started with.  Gliding we hardly mentioned, apart from remembering the scandal when an early solo pilot misjudged his height so badly that he failed to return to the air-field, attempted to land on a local parade ground, yet was so low he missed that too, and as he glided into a street, wrapped the K7 glider round a lamp post so that his cockpit nose ended up in the first floor  bathroom of a local house, whence the owner dragged him to safety.

It was a memorably embarrassing incident at a politically difficult time because the MOD was trying to sell the airfield, and despite a question about our airfield's safety consequently being asked in Parliament, the incident was effectively hushed up, forgotten and the airfield sold.  But, though we didn't know the culprit, we were all ab-initios or early solo pilots too at the time, and we remember it.  I expect culprit and house-owner remember it too - a talking point for their Sunday reminiscences.

Photo (by Terry Morgan) from the local paper 1982.

Friends

My son asked if I had any friends because he didn't know them.  Children don't always know their parents' friends, and I have sometimes wondered who were my grandparents' friends.  But children don't  know them, not only because they are absorbed in their own lives but also because they are physically in different places.  My friends were in the places where I grew up, where I went to school, college and worked, and I'm not in those places any more, and neither are they.  You lose touch.

Best friends, 1966 including Sheila, her sister, Cathy, and Anne.

Thank goodness for FriendsReunited some years ago.  Through that I found one of my very earliest friends (VEF), someone I knew when I was nine, and she now lives not far from me, a lovely intelligent woman, shy - the nuns battered any confidence out of her.  I made some good friends at that school, but not at my second secondary school because our family moved when I was around 14 and all the girls in the new school seemed to have paired up into best-friend relationships and there was nothing spare for me.

My best friend from my first secondary school came to live not far from me when our children were born.  We've kept in touch, but our sons don't remember playing together.  It didn't help that when I remarried I moved away so it was more difficult to keep in touch.  I made friends with other women through our children, playgroup and nursery school more than through primary school, and I missed them when I left.  When we meet, I know why they're friends because we talk for ages about things that are important to us.

Third year, 1966, including Madeleine, two Annes, Penny C and me.

A few weeks ago, a gliding-club friend contacted me to say that she'd finished her Open University degree and at last had time to spare, so we spent a day together catching up, comparing notes on work and life.  Her son went to the same university as my son, but they don't remembering playing together when they were little, and never had cause to meet again at uni.

Then there are the girl friends or play or have played tae kwon do.  I meet one who doesn't play any more for coffee occasionally.  Our latest point for comparison has been cancer treatment because she had breast cancer diagnosed a year after I did.  Another tae kwon do friend, who invited husband and I to her fiftieth birthday party, is a garden designer, and at the moment I have 40 of her plants nestling warmly in my greenhouse, ready to bloom we hope in time for her design display at Chelsea.

Recently, researching away from home for a couple of days, I stayed with an old college friend who lives in Worcestershire.  We had a wonderful time talking about, for example, books we've both read - Dervla Murphy's "To India on a Bicycle".   We don't see each other for decades and then meet twice in a year  - we met in summer last year for a mutual friend's sixtieth, when we sang and laughed as if we were still in college.

For my sixtieth birthday, I wanted to invite sixty girl friends but I ended up inviting men too.  I have a few men friends, not just husbands of girlfriends.  I have an old work friend who lives in America.  We'd lost touch but he's got such an unusual name that when I googled him (and his wife who has a different name) it was possible to get back in touch.  And he came and stayed with us for a night last year.  Many of the friends I've made in the last few years through my PhD are men, and several are from other countries: Canada, Ireland, Germany, China, India.  One PhD colleague who comes from Syria was very supportive and caring when I was diagnosed with cancer - his father had recently died of cancer.

And my best friend?  I asked my mother when I was around 14, so sad that I couldn't make friends in my new school, "Who's your best friend, Mum?"  She looked surprised that I didn't know.  "Why, your father of course!"  There you are - your best friend must be your spouse.

Icy spawn

So cold, went in garden, saw ice in pond, thought to photo it to compare with previous years, years when I could find frog spawn in ponds, would collect it and hope I'd get tadpoles.   Not this year.  Too cold to spawn.  I thought.

But my tadpoles last year must have grown into frogs when I wasn't looking, because amongst the ice I saw spawn in the pond, my pond!  Hope springs.

Judo champ trains tae kwon do shorties

Do I look short?  Have I shrunk?  No - I have osteoporosis thanks to the aromatase inhibitor drugs I'm on, but I'm not shrinking yet. I'm standing between a couple of judo champions: Karina Bryant, whose Olympic bronze medal I'm holding, and a potential Olympic champion whom she's training up, Frazer Chamberlain.  Our tae kwon do instructors arranged a two-hour session with her in which we practised rolls, side falls, back falls, forward falls, throws and chokes,  all practice that I need so that if I do fall, I don't break anything.

 I hoped Karina would try tae kwon do too. She knows Sarah Stevenson, the tae kwon do champion. Imagine Karina against Sarah.  Who'd win? Karina says that she would win, if she could get close enough to Sarah to throw her, but Sarah would kick her first!  Yes - that's what I'd do against someone as big and as skilled as Karina - keep her away from me.

And she's nice too.

Tattooist's parlour

In the tattooist's parlour, the piercer thought he recognised me.

Now, I'm a middle-class, middle-aged (more or less - well okay, rather more than less), white, educated woman that doesn't usually frequent tattooing parlours, let alone get recognised in them.  In fact, this was, I must admit, my first visit to a tattooing parlour. So if you look at me, would you think that a tattooist would recognise me, like do I hang out with tattooists  or with people that are covered with tattoos, or with people who have just a few tattoos?  Well, yes to that one because I've got a tattooed step-daughter and a tattooed PhD colleague.  But to look at me with my white hair, my middle-of-the-road if not somewhat conventional clothes, you wouldn't assume I have much acquaintance with tattoos.  Yes okay okay, so I've got three tattoos, but they're my radiotherapy tattoos and don't count.

What am I doing in a tattooist's parlour?  I'm escorting, chaperoning, encouraging - well she asked me to come - some female who is about to get her ears pierced.  Nowadays, you don't get your ears pierced like I got mine done at 22, in a back room sitting on a chair at a jeweller's shop.  You can get them done in bling shops like Accessorize, by some shop assistant while you sit in the window being watched by the world.  When I asked at the jeweller's about getting ears pierced, they said they don't do that any more but they advised me that a tattooist would be much more reliable and sensible about piercing ears than a shop assistant.   And indeed, I'm well impressed.

We walk in to a small dark, very full and very busy shop in the Aylesbury gyratory - that means it doesn't have exorbitant rents like the shopping malls demand, but from the outside it seems a bit seedy.  Inside the walls are covered with beautiful drawings of flowers, and fancy letters and flowing drapes on feminine forms.  The piercer, a strong beefy man in his thirties, tattoos peeping out at the end of his shirt sleeves, asks me if I'm worried about female friend and I assure him I'm not, that I had my ears done at the same age, and she's old enough to make up her own mind.  As female friend fills a form about her health and name and what she's having done, I chat with an assistant.  He tells me that he's only been there for six weeks, but that he's learned more about drawing in six weeks here than he had in four years in school - he has an A-level in art.  I'm impressed.

The piercer calls me into a back room to check that the marks he's put on female friend's ears are acceptably even. They look okay to me.  He tells her what he's going to do and how.  That's when he comments that he's recognised me.  Female friend lies down on the couch - I notice cleaning equipment round the room - this is a hygienic procedure. He tells her how to breathe, leans over, and that's one ear pierced.  She has to turn over, move to the other end of the couch so he can reach her.  I see some interesting models of body parts with various piercings.  The other ear is already pierced and it's bleeding a bit.  The piercer inquires if she drank any alcohol the previous evening because alcohol can cause the blood to flow a bit more but she hasn't drunk - it's just her.

It's all done; she can pay and leave.  I'm further impressed as a gaggle of giggling girls pile in and the piercer tells them that they are not all coming in his clinic at the back because he doesn't want any peer pressure on the youngster that says she wants her tongue pierced.  This man does a psychological assessment on his customers before he provides the service.

And yes, he and I do have something in common.  We both play tae kwon do and he's seen me at the black belt training sessions.