A to Z Challenge

My friend Faith is doing the A to Z Blogging Challenge this year (you can find her posts on Catholic Books here) and I made a last minute decision to take up the challenge myself. The idea is that you write a post each day during the month of April with each one themed on a letter of the alphabet from A to Z. As there are only 26 letters and 30 days in the month, Sunday's are taken off. You can, but don't have to, choose an overriding theme, but it seems that most people do. I decided to take "Archives" as my topic, and as it is partly history related to put the posts on my new, but already rather neglected, History RoundAbout blog. I have made a start with A is for Archives and B is for Boxes.

Endings and Beginnings

My life often goes on much the same for long periods, then a number of big changes happen within a short space of time. This month has been one of those times of change, a month of endings and beginnings.

On March 10th my mother died. She would have been ninety next year and had become increasingly frail and disabled. Her walking was very limited and she was only able to go out in a wheelchair, her memory was poor, and she was physically tired. A week before her death she was hit by a stomach bug which left her extremely weak. She was very clear that she did not want to go to hospital and my brother and I agreed she was better at home where she was comfortable and where we were able to look after her. For a few days she seemed to improve a little each day. On the night before her death she became much worse. The on-call doctor visited, diagnosed a chest infection and confirmed what we already knew, which was that she was not going to survive it. He fully supported our decision to honour her wishes and keep her at home. She died less than three hours later, peacefully and without pain in her own bed, with my brother and I each holding one of her hands. During her last few days all three of her grandchildren had been able to visit her, and all her affairs were in order. While I am sad that she is gone, there is also great comfort in her natural and easy death. She was ready to go, her body was done struggling with years of arthritic pain, and as a lifelong committed Christian she was, I am sure, ready to meet the God she had served faithfully for so many years. Along with some of the many people whose lives she had touched, we said goodbye to her at an Easter funeral which we hope was a fitting reflection of her life and the faith that sustained her,

This month has also marked the end of four years in which I have been juggling full time work (or for the last three months almost full time) with family life. From the beginning of April I will only be working two days a week. M will also be working part time from home and we will be moving into a new phase of life, where for the first time in over twenty years we will have significant chunks of time when neither of us will be doing either paid work or childcare. I feel too young to call it "semi-retirement", but in reality that is what it will be. This is the first of the new beginnings. We have various plans, the most important of which in the short term is to tackle the clutter and domestic disarray that has accumulated over the past years of busy-ness.

There have also been new beginnings for our two older daughters. Senior daughter started a new job in February and has started the process of buying her own house using the government's help-to-buy scheme for newly built properties. Or in this case a not-yet-built property - at the last check it was three bricks high! She is hoping it will be finished and ready to move in by the autumn. Our middle daughter failed her driving test at her first attempt at the beginning of the month, then took it for a second time two weeks later and sailed through with an hour of faultless driving. In the UK the driving test can be failed either by making one major mistake, or by accumulating too many small errors, known as "minors". She passed with no minors, which is quite a feat - she has no idea how she managed it! She now has the use of the smaller of our two cars (needed much less now that M has no commute and mine is much reduced), and is utterly joyous that she does not have to rely on scrounging lifts and overcrowded buses to get where she needs to go.

And so life changes. Time to take a deep breath and plunge into the next stage.

A Scandinavian Interlude

The last couple of weeks have rather run away with me so I am behindhand with posting about the short trip we took during half term. One of the budget airlines had a sale on flights during the winter and we managed to book flights to Copenhagen for £50 - that was the total return cost for two adults and one child, which is just ridiculously cheap! We left home early on the Friday morning and got home again late on Saturday, giving us nearly two full days in Denmark. For all three of us it was our first ever trip to Scandinavia.

As we were travelling with a nine-year old we did child friendly things, visiting the zoo, the aquarium, and Experimentarium City, a "hands-on" science activity place (museum? centre? I really don't know what would be the right word!). The weather wasn't great. It was mostly dry on the Friday, but Saturday threw sleet, rain and wind at us. As a result we did not see a great deal of the city as we dashed head down from bus to metro (or in one case, ferry). I would love to go back and explore in the spring or summer when the weather is better. Ridiculously, the flight times and prices mean it would even be feasible to go for a day trip.

First stop the Zoo. The highlight for all of us was the polar bear in the Arctic zone. I'm sure he appreciated the weather, but I'm not sure the same was true of the flamingos, who looked rather out of their element although their colour contrasted nicely with the snow on the ground.

Copenhagen has lots of painted buildings. Being Scandinavia, the streets were all very neat and clean, as was the metro which was very efficient and appeared to run on a trust system with no ticket barriers, just points at which passengers could scan tickets or passes.

I loved these coloured bird boxes which brightened up the street. I noticed some more near a canal the next day, so wonder if they were an art project?

We had a lot of fun at Experimentarium City where there was a section with eight activities to take part in as a family team. Here is junior daughter on the hamster wheel.

Copenhagen has a number of canals - not quite Venice or Amsterdam, but definitely plenty of water. We took a short trip on a water bus across to Experimentarium City at Christianshavn, but if we had more time (and better weather) I would have liked to take a boat tour of the canals.

I loved this little painted boat.

A rather grey and rainy Nyhavn, one of the best known areas of Copenhagen  - in better weather this would be a great place to sit outside a cafe or bar with a drink. It would also be packed with tourists, so I suppose we at least avoided the crowds!

The Invisible Woman

I have been reading The Invisible Woman: How to Navigate the Vintage Years by Helen Walmsley-Johnson which I picked up in the Kindle sale. As I am 55 and therefore have to admit to being inescapably middle-aged, I thought it might be an interesting read. It was, in many ways, but my experience of mid-life (so far!) has been so very different to the author's that I found it difficult to identify with her. Helen Walmsley-Johnson's 50s have been a rough ride, with a traumatic post-surgical menopause, depression, other health problems, the death of her father, the discovery that it was virtually impossible to find employment as a woman in her late 50s and consequent financial crises. Her life experience has been very different to mine in many ways, with a difficult divorce, life as a single mother, adult children, and now grandchildren. After reading her story I was rooting for a happy ending - or should I say beginning of a new phase of her life - so was delighted to find that the book ended very positively as she approaches her 60s with a new career as a freelance writer and a new home in the country.

In comparison I have been lucky in many ways. The worst the menopause / perimenopause flung at me was occasional failure of my personal thermostat, which never greatly bothered me. I normally feel cold so kind of enjoyed the novelty of occasionally being hot. I have felt younger and fitter in my 50s than I did in my 40s. Pregnancy and extending breastfeeding in the second half of my 40s left me feeling as though I had been run over by a bus; discovering that the exhaustion, aches and pains were temporary was a very pleasant surprise as I had imagined much of it was age related and that I would carry on going downhill for the next however-many decades. I don't think I have ever felt particularly visible, but neither have I been aware of any loss of visibility or (for lack of a better word) status as I have got older. I have never been someone who thought of myself as attractive or good looking, so I have never associated losing youth with losing beauty. As it happens, through no effort of my own I look younger than my age, but I am not worried about the inevitability of whatever genetic protective effect I possess wearing off. Apart from being more prone to asthma and chest infections if I get a cold, my health is good. I changed careers at 50, learned to play the trombone, lost weight, and took up yoga. All in all, if you take middle age as lasting from age 50 to 65, as Helen Walmsley-Johnson does, the first third of my middle years has been very positive. There have been stresses, some quite extreme, but they have not in any way been a function of my age.

Reading Helen Walmsley-Johnson's experiences has left me feeling more appreciative than before of my own good fortune, and more aware that I tend to take it for granted. It has also left me a little apprehensive. Am I now at an age where I would find it difficult if not impossible to find alternative employment if I needed to do so? Am I living on borrowed time with my relative good health? Am I not so much ageing gracefully as simply pretending that I am stuck in a perpetual mid-40s? I wonder. I suppose there is no point worrying about what may not happen - or may not happen yet - but I am glad of the reminder to count my blessings.

50 Week Photo Project: Week 3 - Colour

I thought I would find this quite easy, but not much caught my eye during the week and the few photos I attempted didn't come out well. This was the only one I was happy with - yellow gorse against a deep blue sky on our walk last week. This week we didn't get outside much and on Thursday went to the cinema to see The Big Short, so no walk. We both enjoyed the film - very well acted, and interesting to see that at least some people spotted in advance that the financial crash of 2007-8 was inevitable. I can see this film being  compulsory watching for future economics students!

A Gorgeous Winter Day

Sometimes the weather just does perfect. (In England this is rare enough to be notable!)  We hit lucky and last Thursday was one of those perfect days. Continuing our theme of getting outside as much as possible we went for a walk starting from a nearby village. It was like this:

I found a website which lists dozens of walks in Bedfordshire, searchable by location and length. While I can read maps perfectly well and could make up my own routes, a described walk has the advantages that it is likely to include places worth seeing and use well defined paths. When I work out my own I somehow always manage to pick at least one footpath overgrown with nettles! (For anyone not familiar with the UK, these are nasty, stinging plants - not dangerous, but painful!)

St. Botolph's Church, which looks deceptively old. Although the core is 15th century (itself not particularly old for an English village church which are typically one or two hundred years older) it was largely rebuilt in the 19th century.

I think maybe this could be my country mansion!

For anyone interested in a little bit of local history I wrote a post about St. Botolph and an Anglo-Saxon charter on my history blog.

50 Week Photo Project: Week 2 - Emotions

My heart sank when I saw the theme for the second week of Michele's 50 Week Photo Project. (Thought: maybe I should have taken a picture of my own face!)  I knew this one would be a tough one for me. My immediate family are generally reluctant to be photographed, so I couldn't see myself getting the chance to use them as subjects; nor could I see there being many (any!) other opportunities to get any photographs of people. I was determined to manage something and came up with this:

A statue of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, at the Oxford Natural History Museum. His expression struck me. He looks stern, grim, even unhappy. The blank stone eyes don't help - I wonder what his eyes were like? Knowing little about him beyond the fact that he discovered steam power I looked him up on Wikipedia. It describes him as "something of a worrier. His health was often poor. He was subject to frequent nervous headaches and depression." However he was also "a much sought-after conversationalist and companion" who enjoyed "congenial and long-lasting" relationships with his friends and colleagues. So it seems those frown lines in the statue are worry and pain rather than stern and standoffish.