I was fifty-five back in May.
Notionally, anyway, that means that I'm now less than ten years away from retirement.
And it doesn't really feel that far away somehow.
And I'm even more in my Middle Years looking backwards and forwards.
Three days before I turned fifty-five, my father turned eighty-five. My mum is quite excited that they will both celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary in February of next year. Apparently, you get a telegram from the Queen if you achieve that milestone.
I'm not so sure that this will happen. Albert has suddenly started to lose weight. Shirts that were a good fit some six months ago now seem enormous round his neck. And he's detaching himself from reality more and more. He and Grace went on holiday to the Lake District at the beginning of July. Even the following week, he couldn't remember anything about what he'd done or what the holiday was like. So, he's certainly in the twilight of his years and gives me some evidence of where I might be going.
Looking thirty years in the other direction and reminding me of where I have been, there's Robert, who, at 28, has moved into adult life at full tilt. In mid-July, I crossed several Rubicons by travelling down to Lewisham to visit him in his flat, meet his long-term partner Anna, have a meal with them both and then stay over (I took earplugs with me - there are some forms of knowledge I do not wish to possess). They cooked up a very wonderful lasagne and plied me with Peroni lager. So, I felt very well fed and watered.
All in all, it went very well. I enjoyed Anna's company. Meeting me seemed to fill in some of her background knowledge of Robert. We all went to Tate Britain the following morning. I've invited them to Crosby whenever they like; I've got the green light to visit them again some time.
And I'm not a little envious. I certainly don't envy the two of them the uncertainties of early adulthood but I do miss the sense of expanding horizons and countless possibilities.
Which is what I distinctly lack in my work.
On the whole, I like the work that I do. I think that Steve, Jill, Ian and I do as good a job as we possibly can in the circumstances. We work in one of the few areas of the company which can say that it does make a difference to people's lives.
However, as I've recorded before, the constant and unvaried repetition bores me. I was asked to do some interesting commercial work in February. Since then, nothing. Recently, our CEO Colin, called us all in for an important meeting. By the end, none of us knew what he wanted and his usual talent for demoralisation had been made evidently abundant. I came away having heard that, whilst we all did very good work, we are expensive and expendable.
The irony of this is that over the past couple of weeks it has been other teams who have been showing their weaknesses. Steve has spent several days waiting to see a content managed website on which he was scheduled to deliver training. He finally gained access the day before. Goodness only knows how much it would cost to keep a freelance hanging around like that. Except that, of course, our expense is simplisticly attached to one area of company thus masking the inefficiencies elsewhere.
I've had exactly the same experience with the ITQ project for which I am the Internal Verifier. There is supposed to be a crucial deadline this Friday. There are eleven people whose work is supposed to be signed off by then. I have seen two sets of work each of which I have passed back for further consideration. There appears to be no sense of urgency about getting the job done. Frankly, I think that other areas of the organisation should be asked to emulate the efficiency of our team rather than lambasting us for being over-priced.
My one high spot in all of this was the Level 3 teaching qualification I gained in June. It's title is PTLLS which stands for Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector. Given that I've been working in this area for nearly twenty years now, the content of the award was well within my compass. But I did enjoy the studying. It was good to feel my brain working again as it got to grips with concepts such as differentiation and Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains.
I also had some training through my association with the Children's Group at Quakers. It was based around a technique of story telling which comes within the tradition known as Godly Play and encompasses a number of Montessori educational principles. Shortly after I got back from seeing Robert, I put the training into practice by running an All Age worship based on the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. It was well received.
All of which is taking me in the possibility of a new direction.
I am looking at how I may become a primary school teacher. I’m weighing up the options open to me for 2010/11 and I’m looking at
There's much to be said for having a year as a full-time student. After more than thirty years of being in the workplace, a sabbatical sounds like a very good idea. The down side would be the dramatic fall in income. Which is why it can't happen this autumn and why Ross and I are looking to save a little money in the next twelve months.
The other two options are based in schools rather than in college. The latter is actually a paid option which would suit my current circumstances far more. Whichever option I take up however, I'm hoping to spend some time over the next year in a Primary School discovering if the work suits me and I suit the work. It's likely that that will be in the school in Litherland where Ross acts as a school governor.
So, family and work covered - that only leaves home and love life.
The home has been much disrupted by having Ross's brother Sam to stay for the large part of the spring and early summer before he went off to India for his period of elective study. Having endured temperatures of 40°C, dust storms, high pollution and blips in accommodation, he has now returned from Delhi having completed some work in foreign surroundings. His main sense of frustration was more around finding it difficult to be of use when he didn't know anything of the language. I wonder if that will make him more respectful of doctors from the Indian subcontinent working in our National Health Service.
Anyway, the disruption was not so much having him here or not having him here but the unfortunate accidents that happened whilst he was here - like the ring main for the downstairs power sockets blowing, like the shower head splitting and needing replacing, like the flood in the bathroom which required the floor tiles taking up and brought part of the kitchen ceiling down.
None of these in themselves would have been a show-stopper. However, they coincided with us just having paid off a major project - the demolition of the out buildings in the back garden.
And again, we might have just about weathered that sort of financial storm when Ross discovered that, owing to an oversight in our company accounts which had left a tidy sum of income on the credit side of the balance sheet even after the project had been cancelled, he was some thousands of pounds out of pocket.
This all happened within the space of a fortnight and we went from easy solvency to strict belt-tightening at a canter - all of which played into my middle-class insecurities about debt and loss.
We've gotten over it but it was a wobble.
And Ross and I mostly continue and endure.
My main area of, oh concern might be too strong a word, is that there is very little romance between us. There is companionship and there is affection. But I would like romance, I would like fun, I would like seduction, I would like flirtation. But these things only ever seem to happen when I initiate.
Compared with the early days, romps are a rare as a week of fine weather. If I were to say and do nothing, then I know that Christmas would come and go and Ross would apparently be oblivious that anything was missing. And that is a deep sadness.
