23 of 50

Welcome to my newsletter where I am recounting 50 things – memories, stories, musings, missives from my half-century of life. If you have been forwarded this from a friend or come to it via a social media link and would like to receive it directly each week then you can do so by clicking the link below. It’s completely free and will end when I’ve reached the 50th thing – what happens after that I haven’t decided yet, but I won’t be keeping the email list for any other purpose.

Welcome to new subscribers that have joined this week.

The headteacher at my primary school was a big influence on me. I can’t cite any specific examples of things that he did for me individually, it was more his general demeanour and attitude. He was firm but fair – always, and he treated everyone equally. He would also step out of his role as an authority figure to join in the fun. Whenever it snowed for example he would come out of the school and allow himself to be target for as many snowballs as we could throw at him while he ran a complete lap of the school playing fields. I think he used to count on the fact that he could probably run faster than we could, whilst at the same time trying to make and throw snowballs.

As I moved on from my time in his school we stayed in touch. He retired the year that I left, but of course he stayed active in many different things. When I went to college in the same town as he lived I visited him on a couple of occasions, and we chatted over tea and biscuits.

Sadly he passed away when I was in my late 20’s / early 30’s (I think), I can’t find or remember the exact date but I do have a very vivid memory and funny story of attending his funeral and I think it would have made him smile, so I’m going to tell it here.

His funeral service was held in a very small country church, on a very hot and sunny summers day. It’s one of those days when the last thing that you would have wanted to have been doing would have been wearing a suit and tie, but obviously that’s exactly what we were doing. I’d gone to the funeral with my Dad, as he had also known him too and wanted to pay his respects.

As you do for these things we’d allowed plenty of time to get there just to avoid getting stuck in traffic, of course this meant that we arrived early and rather than sit in a hot car we decided to go and stand under one of the large yew trees in the churchyard in the shade. We were trying to stand there respectfully, sort of “at ease” but no too casual. After a few minutes the vicar arrived, and seeing us standing under the tree came over to speak to us.

“I see you’re trying to keep cool.”

“Yes, bit too warm to sit in the car.”

He nodded. “When’s the body arriving?”

We were a little slack jawed at this, thinking surely that he would have better knowledge on that front than us. “Sorry?” I asked.

“The body. You are with the undertakers are you not?”

“No. I’m a former pupil of the deceased.”

I think that’s the only time I’ve seen a Vicar blush, and I can understand why he might have thought that two men standing in his churchyard wearing black suits and ties might have been undertakers, but I suspect that’s probably the only time he ever made that mistake.

The service was lovely and unsurprisingly very well attended by many friends and family and other former pupils. I’ve been looking to see if I could find anything on-line but there doesn’t seem to be anything published about him, despite knowing that he was in local papers many times.

I’ve also never taken my fledgling career as an undertaker any further. I’m not sure whether being able to look the part is a flattering compliment or not, but it’s not a vocation that I have any intention of following any time soon.

Thanks for reading.

22 of 50

Firstly a quick welcome to new subscribers, thanks for clicking that link that allows me to drop a missive into your inbox once a week. If you enjoy the writing here then I also post (less frequently) at my website, where you can also subscribe. If you want to check that out here’s a link. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the link in each post, but obviously I hope you’ll stick around.

If like me you have parents who grew up during and immediately after the Second World War you’ll probably be familiar with the phrase: “Don’t throw that away it’ll come in handy one day.” Very much a way of life to a time when resources were scarce or expensive and secondhand or reuse / recycle was very much more en vogue than it is today in our supposedly enlightened but still disposable society. Clothes where handed down from generation to generation until they did literally fall apart, and then tins of buttons and zips were kept from the clothes as they were relegated to dusters. Bicycles were passed on or sold secondhand when your legs got too long for the frame or cannibalised for parts or go-karts.

Ultimately though this resulted in a store of things being accumulated, and this is when perhaps “it’ll come in handy one day”, drifts unintentionally towards hoarding. Having to clear my parents house really brought this home to me. The boxes of “stuff” that served no real purpose but they had obviously kept because it might at some point in the future. My Dad in particular had hobbies that varied widely and liked to keep current. Everything from amateur radio to photography and all points in between. I was able to pass on his amateur radio equipment and sell some of his cameras and other kit, but some of it was considered obsolete and no one wanted it. I kept a few items myself but ultimately some had to go and be recycled.

My Mum collected elephants. Fortunately she never opened the elephant sanctuary, but she has a lot of carved wooden elephants, some china and others of different material. I don’t know what to do with these, I can’t bring myself to throw them away or donate them to charity so at the moment they’re mine to look after. She has some of them with her in the care home where she now lives but there are too many for her to have all of them in her room (although the devil in me would like to see the look on the care staff faces if I took them all in to her one day when I visit).

Having to do all this sorting of their stuff has also made me conscious of how much of my own I have stored. Not all of it really having a purpose. I’ll never be one for a minimalist lifestyle, although I doubt that if I lost all my possessions tomorrow that I would replace them like for like. Of course I have accumulated more stuff sorting through my parents. I didn’t adopt a one in one out policy or anything like that, although what I have accumulated since has mostly been on the basis of sentimentality more than anything else. Ultimately I currently have no heirs, so although someone will have to sort through my stuff when I’m gone the burden won’t necessarily fall on a relative, but I do feel the need to do some serious decluttering as we head towards our house move. I’m sure there is stuff in our loft that was put there when we moved here and hasn’t been touched since, so I don’t intend to move it again, at least not any further than the recycling centre or ebay. I want to be much more intentional about what I keep going forward. There’s nothing wrong with keeping things that are of sentimental value or can be genuinely reused, but I don’t think I need 3 tins of buttons and 2 tins of zips.

Thanks for reading.

21 of 50

probably not the most reliable master. I know that most of the things I relate here are as I remember them, but are they actually what happened? I’d like to think so, and I think the fact that I can remember them at all means that they are probably about 90% accurate. I suspect some of the finer detail has been lost over time.

Take this for example:

I am sure that this is a photo of my Auntie Elsie, but it is the only photo I’ve been able to find of her and it isn’t marked. My memory says that this is exactly as I remember her, but I have no real way of verifying it. I did share it with my cousin who agrees with me, but anyone who would definitely know has either passed away or probably can’t remember.

I have very fond memories of Auntie Elsie. As a preschooler she used to baby sit me during a period when my family were having a particularly difficult time – I didn’t know this then and only found out much later, I suspect because I was being insulated from what was happening. I remember those days as some of the best from my young childhood, we used to have such adventures and really these were just in her home and garden which were both quite large and amazing playgrounds, with books and boardgames and all sorts of things.

Sadly she died a few years after those days. I don’t remember her passing, but do remember some events surrounding it. One of my most treasured possessions is a pencil and pen set that I was given for the Christmas that year:

If my memory of the events are still quite clear, how come I can’t be sure that the photograph is who I think it is? I’m both sure it is and yet not sure I am correct. Maybe it is the physical gap between the two times. I’ve only come across that photograph in the last month or so and don’t think I’ve seen any in the intervening period. The original memories being set over 40 years ago. I also remember being told that Auntie Elsie was a retired school teacher, but again I don’t know if that is actually true, it certainly seems plausible given how good she was with me as a child.

The memories are there because they were good times – for me at least – even if they aren’t always reliable, does it matter? I don’t think so.

20 of 50

My first job – one where I was paid by someone other than a member of my family – was as a paperboy. I’d get up early each morning before school and deliver papers from the village newsagents to houses around the village. It used to take about an hour to do the round, kept me fit and gave me a little money, which I often spent in the newsagents.

At the same time as the paper round I used to cut lawns in the summer months. Gardens in the village where on the large side and many of the lawns were big, but I could do this with my walkman on, lost in my own world.

My first ‘proper’ job though was as a Saturday and holiday relief in a secondhand bookstore. In 50 years this is probably my ideal job and I think in career terms I peaked a little early, as I could quite happily be doing this job now as I was at 16. It helped that I had a love and good knowledge of books and I stayed in that job until I went to university and then did holiday stints when I could. Of course I also spent quite a bit of my wage in the same shop, but this time with a healthy staff discount. I still have some of those books. That shop is in a different location, but as far as I know run by the same person now as then.

Since then I’ve done all sorts of things, including as I do now working for myself. The job I look back on most fondly though is in the secondhand bookshop. I wonder nowadays if you could make a go of such a business, without having some kind of financial cushion or bias in your favour. There’s not a huge amount of money in secondhand books (I’m not meaning rare or antiquarian books, just ordinary secondhand), with business rates, rents etc., could you make a go of a secondhand bookshop? As I say it feels like you need something else other than books to be working in your favour.

Now I’m not thinking about opening a bookshop or anything, but it has got me thinking about how lucky I was to be able to work in one when I did. A few years ago I looked at Christmas work in a branch of a national chain. I went into the store and got a application form, and I was quite shocked at the questions. This is much more about marketing and promotion than knowledge of books and authors. I still like to think my knowledge of the latter is pretty good, but you could write what I know about the former on the back of an envelope, certainly not the 250+ words required to answer the questions on the application form.

I think over the years, some jobs have come to me at the right time. I think latterly I was a bit tied to the promotion/advancement cycle and jobs were just a way of paying the bills. I miss the days where job satisfaction rated higher than the wage slip, and I think I am slowly working my way back towards only chasing work from which I derive a sense of satisfaction whenever I can.

I doubt that you’ll see me behind the counter in a bookshop any time soon, but you never know, maybe…..

19 of 50

I’d just like to say welcome to new subscribers of which there have been a few just recently. Thanks for subscribing, hopefully this email has found its way into your inbox rather than your spam folder, because if it’s there you’re probably not even reading this are you? Anyways I hope that you’ll enjoy this newsletter, but you can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of each email.

This week’s post is a little bit of a follow on from last week.

There’s a piece of conventional wisdom that says you should say “No,” more. That whenever you say yes to something you’re actually saying no to other things. It’s all about balance though.

When I was about 5 or 6 I think I used to say no, to a lot more things than I do now.

“Tidy your room.” – No

“Eat your greens.” – No

“Go to bed.” – No

I was also a cunning, or perhaps that should be devious so and so when I wanted to be. I once gained considerable plaudits from my Mum for having such a tidy room after she’d asked me to do something about the disaster zone that was my bedroom. At least that was until she discovered that my solution wasn’t to put everything away where it belonged but to push it all under the bed and pull the covers down so it couldn’t be seen. I think most of my toys were confiscated for that one, or at least all of the ones under the bed were, which in reality was most of them. I also suspect that my Mum considered sawing the legs off of my bed so that I couldn’t pull the same stunt twice.

Nowadays it’s a little bit more straightforward. I’ve been booking a couple of speaking gigs for next year this morning (I talk about allotments, veg growing that sort of thing, if that’s of interest and you’d like a talk obviously do get in touch). Now that Covid rules have been relaxed, most of these talks will take place in village halls in the evening, and involve an element of travel to get there and back again. Each time I say yes to one of these is an evening that I don’t spend at home with my family. Of course I am compensated by a small fee, but sometimes I do wonder if that’s all worth it. I enjoy it though, I like standing up in front of a group and talking – I know I’m weird like that – I also know that the minute I stop enjoying it, I’ll be saying “No,” more.

It’s a bit like being 5 or 6 again. I only used to say no to the things that I didn’t like doing. I really didn’t like tidying my room, I liked it being a mess and having all my toys out so that they were close at hand to play with. Okay it might have been a bit of an obstacle course, but that’s part of the fun too. Until of course you tread on that upturned Lego™ brick and……

40+ years later of course there are some things that I have to say yes to that I don’t enjoy doing. Life and society is like that, otherwise it would be anarchy. Mostly though these are things that we don’t get to have a choice over, or rather there are more stringent punishment than just having your toys confiscated for non-compliance.

At the moment I’m having to give considerable thought to whether I say yes or no to signing a revised contract with a client. They want something more formal than our current arrangement, unfortunately there version is a bit too formal for my liking, so we’re talking about it. Ultimately we’ll reach an end point that either we’re both happy with or one of us (mostly likely me) walks away from. For me this is very much about if I say yes to this, what other things am I going to be saying no to, and is that compromise worth it. I’ll see. If life has taught me anything is just because someone tells you your room has to be tidy, doesn’t always mean they are right.

Thanks for reading.

18 of 50

50 years… 18,261 days… 438,264 hours… 26,295,840 minutes… Time passes quickly doesn’t it? Except perhaps when you’re waiting for something. Like when you are 10 and you’re a week away from your birthday, then each day feels like a month. You get there and the whole day passes in a blur.

One of the things that I’ve learnt from doing these posts, which are in part me telling some stories and hopefully also some of the things that I learnt along the way, is what I value most. They are the things that over the passage of all that time I can still remember, mostly happy memories.

As you get older though, some of the things, and in particular the people that made those memories with you pass on. I’ve noticed that a lot of the famous people from my youth have been passing on with increasing rapidity over the last few years, no surprise really given that they were 20 to 40 years older than me at the time I was watching / listening to them.

I’ve also been looking through a lot of old photographs recently and that’s been triggering particular memories of when certain photographs were taken or of certain people. Coincidentally I’ve been reading and listening in other places that life shouldn’t be about working until you die, but about enjoying it while you can.

All of this had left me thinking a lot about my own mortality and life path – both past, present and future. The Stoics would have you remember death – Momento Mori – and not seek to put off until tomorrow what you should do today.

I’m in the relatively fortunate position to have very little debt, in part because of work related decisions that I’ve made at various times, which looking back weren’t made on the basis of enjoyment but from a position of financial benefit. I’ve sometimes said if I was able to make those decisions over again with the hindsight that I have now I might make different decisions. Of course in doing so I’d be in a different position in life both personally and financially. So those decisions were made for the best reasons at the time, based on the knowledge and information available and I am where I am now because of them.

That said decision going forward now could easily be made on the basis of different reasoning and I think looking back at those enjoyable stories – I doubt I’ll tell any of the horrible ones, although I wouldn’t rule it out – means that seeking enjoyment and happiness is more important now than perhaps financial gain is. Do I really need more money? Well it’s nice to have but not essential, although there is a recognition of at least a basic level of income. Do I need a happy life? Absolutely.

I’m cogitating a lot on this and thinking about what I want so that it can underpin future decision making. If fifty years worth of decisions have taught me one thing it’s to learn from each and everyone of those decisions, even if at a later point in life you think you wouldn’t make the same decision again if you could go back and change it.

Ultimately there is never a wrong time to change direction if that’s what you want to do, but as time passes some of the options become limited due to age, illness or for other reasons. Making decisions when you’re older may mean that you have more information and knowledge to draw on, but you still might not get the answers you want.

17 of 50

We’ve all been there. You’re cast as; a King, a Republican, a Prime Minister, a Shepherd, Jesus, Mary, Joseph or the wee donkey. It’s either the school play, nativity performance or some other “production”. You rehearse for what seems like months, and then the great and the good – your parents, other relatives, school governors and the local vicar come along and watch your performance.

I think I have a particularly impressive list of characters that I’ve played:

Second Shepherd,

Slim the Cowboy (brilliant gambler, terrible pistol shot),

Oliver Cromwell,

Part of The Dragon (slain),

A rabbit.

Despite these successes I retired from acting at an early point in my career. Instead preferring the lure of outdoor life. Looking back I wonder if I made the right decision. If I hadn’t maybe I could have stayed the course, gone to Hollywood, who knows. I’m pretty sure though that I made the right decision.

To this day I can remember the line that I had to be prompted about in every dress rehearsal and performance when I played Slim the Cowboy – “But that’ll mean going all the way back to Sacramento again.” I can’t remember the context for it but despite not being able to remember it at the time I can remember it to this day, and it’s the only line I can remember from that play, from any of the plays.

Since my retirement I have kept my finger on the pulse of the up and coming actors. As a school governor I have attended a number of productions, and recognise myself in today’s aspiring actors. There seems to be a wider range of productions these days, although the old stalwart of nativity play still seems to be very popular.

They are of course there to serve and educational purpose, as well as entertain the legions of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles who come along to suffer through watch the performances. To transmit wider messages of good will, hope and happiness. I suspect that today they are an institution in schools throughout the land, like the school fete, carol concert and a wealth of other activities that make up the school year that are outside the straight lessons in classrooms that most people instantly associate with “being at school”.

So did you act when at school? If so who did you play? Or are you an actor today because of starting out at school? I’d love to know, leave me a comment.

Thanks for reading.

16 of 50

We’d slogged our way up a very clear steep path to the summit. We could see that there was a flagpole there and as we cleared the crest a memorial and a couple of benches positioned to allow a seated person a spectacular view.

As we stood catching our breath we could see that seated on one of the said benches was a little old lady. This caused something of a double-take. We’d been pretty hard pressed to clamber up the slope; there was no way that she’d managed the same feat with her walking stick. We figured we’d been had, and that there was another way to the summit that was less arduous. A little scouting around revealed that there was indeed a much shallower path, an indirect route that lead around the sides of peak but achieved the same ends. We went down that way.

This was on the first day of a family holiday in a little Wiltshire village where we’d gone to stay for a week. We’d been gifted a week in October in a neighbours’ holiday cottage on the condition that we closed down the cottage for the winter. Ultimately we did this a number of times over several years, and this became a regular family escape.

It was a little village with good access to the Wiltshire Downs, a good selection of small shops – newsagent, green grocer, butcher, general store, electrical store, small garage/petrol station, a chippy, and to my absolute delight a secondhand bookshop. I got to know the owner of the latter very well over the years, and although the shop is gone now I still own a few of the books that I purchased there.

In later years it became a stopping point on holidays to the West Country and Cornwall and immediately prior to Covid I visited again a number of times on the way to and from a client in the neighbouring county. There’s now a charity shop near to the old bookshop, with a good collection of secondhand books and I’ve also found a number of treasures in there. Some of the other shops have gone, as has the petrol station but many remain to this day and whilst many things have changed, it’s still very much the same village of my childhood and still appears to be a thriving community, even holding a literary festival in the autumn.

This village still holds a favourite place in my heart. I haven’t had the opportunity to visit since early 2020, so I do wonder how things have changed if at all in the last couple of years with the implications of Covid.

Once upon a time we looked at a possible house move there and at one point had a property in mind, but that didn’t work out and plans changed. I doubt that we will ever do that now, but it is a place that will be an anchor point in my life. One of only happy memories (I’m sure there were somethings that I’ve probably chosen not to remember) and some unfulfilled things, but still….

One that I am determined to complete at some point is to climb to the top of another nearby monument. This one is manmade and stands not far from this little village. Over the years, those family holidays and other visits, I’ve been there a number of times to climb to it’s summit. Although generally open to the public at certain times, each time I’ve tried it’s been closed for an unusual reason. It does seem a little like fate conspiring against me but one day.

15 of 50

In some ways this newsletter is a little bit of a journal and diary. It is afterall reflections from the past 50 years. I’ve kept a “diary” in one form or another since I was quite young. I started it after reading the The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively. The “hero” of the story is James Harrison who as well as unwittingly releasing the poltergeist of the title also keeps a “personal notebook”. In it he records such things as ‘financial situation’, ‘weather’, ‘food’, and ‘future plans’. My young brain at the time obviously thought that keeping a similar record would be a good idea, and well it stuck for over 40 years.

Now many of the early volumes of mine are thankfully lost, just as well I suspect. I don’t remember what I’d written but I suspect it probably wasn’t the sort of thing that I’d want to read again or for anyone else to for that matter. The emotional outpourings of a teenager are probably never great and maybe just better confined to a silent log.

I do have most of the more recent ones though. The really recent ones are to hand and others are in a box in the loft.

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

I generally, but not always, write in fountain pen these days but don’t always stick to that. I’ll use whatever notebook I fancy or have to hand when I’m starting the next new one. I generally fill each one before moving on to a new one, unless they get damaged in some way. One or two have succumbed to coffee or ink spillages over the years and have been retired from service early as a result. I write something most days even if it’s just a log and other days I’ll write quite a bit more. I might use a specific book for a particular period, like a holiday rather than risk losing a more comprehensive volume while travelling (there aren’t any recent volumes of those mind you).

I rarely seem to go back and look through them though. I did recently review those notes from the period of the first covid lockdown in 2020. A year on I got those notebooks out to a weird sense of deja-vu as if things hadn’t really changed all that much. (I’m thinking of doing the same thing again this year and looking back over the past two years).

So far I haven’t used them as source material for any of these posts and I’m not sure whether I will. I have quite a list of things that I could write newsletters about even before going to look at other material. Then again, maybe there are some good things in them that I have forgotten – who knows?

In some ways they are old friends, or places where I’ve done some thinking about something that was troubling me or I needed to work out my thoughts on a particular topic. Some tend to be more work related and others more personal. For this reason I generally have more than one volume on the go at any one time.

They are a record of my life but not one that I ever expect anyone to ever read, and although I’ve never thought about what I’d want to happen to them when I’m gone, I don’t imagine anyone doing anything more than consigning them to the recycling. That said, I do enjoy reading other people’s diaries, at least those that are published as such to be read, although I suspect some were similarly never intended to be read in that way. Did Thomas Merton or John Muir think that someone would posthumously take their diaries and publish them for the world to read? I’m glad they did, but I doubt that perhaps was ever their intention when committing pen to paper.

These words here are those that I choose to share, but there are many pages in my diaries even to this day that I probably wouldn’t. Then when I’m gone what do I care?

14 of 50

“Be Prepared” – the motto of the scouting movement is as a pretty good place to start now as it was back when I was 9 or 10 years old. I never wanted to be a Cub until I was one and then I’m not sure that I really wanted to leave. I think in part that was to do with the inspirational “adults” that ran the pack I was a member of and that the learning we were doing was always fun. Looking back I’m sure that I learnt just as much messing about at camps, in the woods and in the village hall on a Monday evening than I did at school at the same time.

We went on Summer camps to all sorts of places with side trips at weekends to London and other places that were of interest. These were always more than just places to go. Whilst we might take a tour of London at night to see the lights of Piccadilly Circus or visit HMS Belfast on The Thames, we’d also do the more wacky things like going and standing in the middle of Tower Bridge with a foot on each side of the bridge split waiting for a routemaster bus to go by so that we could feel the bridge roadway move, and hope that they didn’t pick that moment to open the bridge to let a large vessel pass underneath.

I’m not sure how scouting has changed today I suspect with safeguarding and health and safety it might not be quite the same – not that that’s a bad thing – but I think we were probably generally safer then than now, which is a bit of an indictment on the modern world. We all had our share of grazed knees, cuts and bruises and I’ve still got a couple of scars that were as a result of things that ‘happened at Cubs’.

Regardless of those changes I still do some things today in a certain way that I learnt at Cubs; lighting a campfire, making a bed, using a map and compass and many more. Those lessons are hard-wired into my brain, because they were taught in a fun way rather than through a strict academic approach.

Thanks for reading.

Were you ever a Cub, Scout, Brownie, Guide or something similar ? What do you remember of those experiences? Leave me a comment, I’d love to know.