What are your goals?

What are your goals? and not just training goals. That's what the young man who trains me in weightlifting asked me this week. At 70, your goal is just to get on with life. But a goal when achieved isn’t as satisfying as the aim of achieving it. See Bisy backson in the "Tau of Pooh". "Goal" sounds like it relates to physical training, like achieve my next Dan grade at tae kwon do, lift a heavier weight. What's the difference between 'goal' and ambition'? Opportunities allow to you achieve your goals. In January 2020, I identified lots of experiences I wanted to achieve.

Is wanting to achieve an ambition?

One of my earliest ambitions was squashed when I was six. My mother's ambitions for me were that I get a job that would support me whether or not I married. So nursing, civil service clerk and teacher were deemed suitable. The goals to achieve such careers were to get five GCEs. My school put me in for seven GCEs of which only four qualified me these careers. My mother arranged private lessons so I achieved the goal. I went to teacher training college, and the goal was only to complete those three years. 

A longer-term goal that I'd had since I was nine, was to go to India and see Rusi Uncle - achieved in 1975. I told a fellow teacher that had been something I'd wanted to do all my life and her reaction was, "But once you've achieved it, what are you going to do for the rest of your life?" Well, I wasn't putting off achieving what I'd wanted to do for nearly 15 years at 23 just because I might have more years of life. I responded that I'd find something else to aim at. I went again to India in December 2007 and I'm going again next month on my way to Bhutan. >But when you get past youth, your goals change. In middle age, I had one at 44: to raise our children by myself. Then I had only to worry about my mental health, my health so my children were safe, how to manage money and eventually what to do when they left home. I remembered a discussion with their father, who hadn't completed his DPhil, and I had no degree when we married. I told him I'd change my name to his when I completed my doctorate. A few years later I'd completed my doctorate. Sad that he wasn't there to see, but our children and their stepfather came with me to celebrate the achievement.

In old age, you've achieved most of your life's ambitions, and as you get older, your goal is almost just one year at a time, one month at a time, one day at a time. Just keep healthy. However, I have a new goal: to qualify as a t’ai chi teacher. And the training is fun, just challenging enough and the teachers and the colleagues I am training with are inspiring.  I’m not going to teach t’ai chi for money. Money is not my goal. At my age, I just need to keep healthy, fit, happy, sociable. So, I'll teach and practise with friends, so we keep us all healthy, fit, happy and sociable.

Thirty years on

La Motte du Caire.

Today, for the first time in thirty years I was so busy that I didn't have the time to take the photo of the glliding site. You can see only the shadow of the mountains and two parked gliders.

Daughter remembered and has WhatsApp'd me to chat. <happy>. I moped a bit at the beginning of the month, the time we set off optimistically on that gliding holiday, but today I was too busy from 9 till 4.30 at a tai chi teacher training course, and that occupied me pleasantly. It's something I can learn and do for the next few years - doubt if I'll manage another 20 let alone 30.  Maybe ten. What has he missed? Half what of what should have been his life too. His children growning up, his career, more gliding, electronics, hi-fi, wi-fi. Wi-fi didn't exist when he was killed. Getting his MBA. My later degrees in research. His children's graduations, their marriages, his two grandsons. <sigh>

Pensions and mortgages

How unfair it is that the baby boomers got such a good deal on buying houses and super pensions. No. Hang on a minute. Not everyone bought a house - we still had council houses then. Till Mrs Thatcher let people buy them at a 70% discount and then they stopped bulding new council houses, so now we're extra homes short.

The male baby boomers might have bought a house and had a super pension but the women didn't get super pensions if they got one at all. And as for a woman getting a mortgage - not on her own - she had to have a man as guarantor. And to get a mortgage - okay yes houses cost less, but you couldn't get a 100% mortgage and you had to have a deposit. Until the mid 1990s, the deposit was calculated mainly on the man's salary - something like 3 times his annual salary and one and a half of hers. Hence late husband and I got a £25,000 mortgage. Work out what we were earning. On top of which, remember that the interest rate was 16% so we didn't start paying back anything other than interest for years.

And a pension, for a woman - not often. Baby boomer women who did work were often in lower paid jobs and hence with lower pensions, and they stopped full time work in their twenties, worked part time from their late thirties and got even smaller pensions. Some part-timers, like university lecturers were not allowed to contribute to a pension so I asked a specialist in pension provision from my bank to sort out a pension for me. But I was not encouraged by the question, "why do you want a pension when you've got a husband?"
So give over with the jealousy.

Family wedding

June 6 was a gloriously happy day being nephew's wedding in a garden, in Geneva, Switzerland. Hordes of us invaded to meet his wife's family and celebrate their marriage.
The invitation to us all meant we four siblings, met for the first time since our mother died, nine years ago. We flew or trained in from the US, Scotland and England. Who knows when or if we’ll meet again? Nephew, T, has three cousins who married quietly during the years of Covid and lock down, my daughter on another continent, giving us only 23 hours’ notice! 

The build up days of the week before the wedding included an evening get-together. Our side met Friday evening at an Auberge where half the family were staying. Prosecco and nibbles followed by pizza or pasta if you wanted to avoid gluten.  I got to meet my nephew, C's new wife, and nephew, G's girl friend. I left after we'd got through a couple of bottles of wine or more, but the twenty and thirty year olds went to a whiskey bar found a wonderfully smooth one, made locally, so local that it was the bartender who made. It's great that these cousins too have got see each other and meet their partners after so many years - the last meet up being their grandparents 60th wedding anniversary in 2010.

My grateful thanks to T & I for inviting us all, and to I's parents for hosting us in their garden.

First jobs

Coffee group people were discussing when we started first working and what our first jobs were. The men said they'd done paper rounds. You were allowed to do those even before you were 15 but I couldn't because I had to get an early bus to school five miles away. One of us, JH, went straight into an accounting firm and trained as an accountant. Most of us didn't go to university. I didn't.

My first job was as soon as I was allowed, immediately after my GCEs. I went down the high street, starting at the garage because friends had got jobs in petrol stations, going in every shop and asking. You didn't have to take a CV with you then, just ask. I think I went to my favourite shops first, like the art supplies, but I didn't have to ask in many because the supermarket took me. Silly thing was they knew I'd done maths GCSE and thought I could do arithmetic so put me on the veg counter. Can you work out how much a quarter pound of apples is if they're one and six a pound? Remember it was pre decimal. 1/6!

They moved me on to check out where the till did the arithmetic. I still managed to mess up though. Because every time someone asked me for carrier bag at the end of the transaction, I'd input the whole cost and then the thruppence extra for the bag. How many times did I do that? But it made the till not balance at the end of the day. For some reason, they still kept me on for five weeks of that summer, and then I stayed there doing Saturdays throughout sixth form. Patient and optimistic manager.

I was naive and vulnerable to the more worldly workers there. At 17, I passed my driving test, and my parents would let me drive the multi seater Bedford Utilabrake around. I must have told someone at the supermarket what I was driving. Anyhow, after a few weeks, I got a message that the lad working on the butcher's counter would like a date with me, which was a compliment but a surprise as we hadn't talked much, if at all, and I had no idea what we had in common or what we'd do on a date. Fortunately, one of the older women warned me off, that he was going to ask me to come with the Utilabrake and drive him and a load of mates. So I made an excuse and refused that first ever date!

In the second year at college, I was too far away to work at the supermarket, but one day some friends were interested in finding Saturday jobs, and a few of us went job hunting together. We asked in Harrods. They like Lorrie who already had retail skills, and took her on, but wouldn't put me in fashion. They offered me a job in their posh Swedish sandwich bar on the fifth floor and I worked there for about a pound a day for nearly a year. You got a free lunch with the option of the most enormous creamy gateaux. But the clientele were not always very nice. One of my fellow waitresses (we only cleared tables because it was self-service), was nearly 16 and in a children's home about to be thrown out to live on her own. A customer called her over and told her that his wife had dropped a shilling and she could have it if she liked (to pick it up).

Then the Irish girls at college told me that William Hill, the bookmakers paid something like £1.50 a day and I went there instead. Nicer work and easier than being on your feet. I worked there till I left college, including working at their offices in my home city in the holidays, even being given the responsibility for opening the offices. You meet a variety of interesting people in a bookies.

This is why I sing

I now sing with two f2f choirs and an online one. Why? because I was born Catholic.

I sing in the local Anglican church because it's high mass, which means we learn a lot of ancient choral music. Someone who used to sing there told me they needed sops so I joined for the Friday rehearsals. That was someone in Next Stage Choir who knew I live near this church. I was in NSC because Fionnuala used to play the piano for its director, and she told me he was opening an Aylesbury branch. F plays the organ at the local RC church, and my daughter was there at a service when Fionnuala told her that the church choir needed singers, whereupon my daughter volunteered me. I'd given up going to services years earlier but I like to sing, so I let them twist my arm and I sang at the Saturday evening mass (A view from the pew) until lockdown when the choir atrophied and never restarted. But by then I'd joined NSC Singing it's a wonderful Christmas)). In lockdown someone in a locl choir told me of a newly formed online choir, (https://ejh2.blogspot.com/2020/10/singing-in-isolation-and-singing-in.html) now called HomeChoir, which is fun and amateur and lighthearted and you learn a few songs, folk, and pop, and church and made up and maybe send in recordings. HomeChoir spawned Choir of the Earth, which encouraged us to sing parts, record and upload them so their techie people can make a concert performance of all our voices. Choir of the Earth has taught me the Messiah and Memories of music: the Hallelujah chorus), Elijah, Bach, Beatles, Abba songs, Haydn's the Creation, opera choruses, Rutter, Bryd's Mass in five voices, and recently, we're learning Joanna L'Estrange's beautiful adaptation of Vivali's Four Seasons.

Both choirs, NSC and Choir of the Earth and arrange trips to perform in various places. NSC has been to the US & Canada, Arizona, Germany and is planning a trip to Finland in November. Choir of the Earth is planning a performance in Leipzig and is advertising a course in Lincoln cathedral next January - I might sign up.

But I wouldn't be in CotE and NSC and St M's choir, if my daughter hadn't been talking to the RC church organist because I'd been born a Catholic.

Poor news, dim thoughts

 CBA in March, nothing to write about. Well I could write about two cousins dying, and another cousin putting himself in a care home. Mmm.