Category: Ageing
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A new, tangible project
Although we’d carried my beloved’s Harris loom from one home to another, over the past four decades (London’s Shepherd’s Bush; Edmonton, Alberta; Burnham, Berkshire; Geneva; Sparty Lea, Northumberland), we finally realised that it was time to divest. It was a big floor-standing loom all right, but the real issue was the crawling around underneath to…
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Memory lanes . . .
Our new task, in one of the writing groups I’m part of, is to write a memoir segment. The challenge, I’m led to believe, is to write something that anyone else beside ourselves might be intrigued to read. As we left it at the end of our session, everybody and their uncle are writing memoirs…
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A trip down memory lane . . .
I had cause yesterday to renew my mental acquaintance with the research fields of my youth, adult and middle-age experience. Now that I am old(er!) I have to traverse back some two decades to remember some of the epiphanies of my research endeavours. After finally being redundified from my postdoc passions at the hoary age…
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Running hot water
Having lived not far from Hadrian’s Wall, where there’s a lot of archaeological evidence of the Roman occupation, I’m aware that the concept of hot water on demand is not exclusively a modern lifestyle. But perhaps the universality of running hot water, if one can afford it in these times of cost-of-living crisis, is more…
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Roads from confusion?
The last ‘joy’ I could develop was in the middle of fraught tensions before Christmas, and life has been a frenzy of strenuous physical effort since to pack up all our stuff and vacate our home. Now that we can sit still, in our tiny bolthole within a pleasant village, and sigh in some relief,…
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Joys and trials of battery life
My joys lately have been constrained by a difficulty in keeping my laptop charged, which is in fact a problem entirely of my own making: I inadvertently left the charger plug across the border! I have, however, been working in good cheer on things like final clearance of the loft, so that all four rooms…
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The joy of 50 words . . .
I’ve got so much work to do today, all on my keyboard. I’m behind in most of my writing tasks. But I was given a fillip of joy yesterday evening, and early this morning I think I’ve managed to finesse my 500 word short story with the grace of an additional 50. The task was…
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Resilience: the gift that keeps giving . . .
I don’t know how a parent teaches resilience to their children, except by some sort of example. We’re pretty sure that ours have seen enough situations where we’re down, struggling, and have somehow managed to get back up on our feet and try again. Let’s say rather that we’ve certainly felt we’ve had our share…
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Clearances . . .
I’ve spent the past afternoon and again this morning clearing up my laptop’s desktop. Not only does the struggling machine, uncluttered, work much faster now that all the accumulated images are whisked away, but the space is neat, tidy, and restful for my busy mind. The extended display is open for new material, while a…
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Delight of a new story
It’s been a while, it feels like, since I tried to create a story out of nothing but my imagination. And yesterday was no exception, because in fact the reality of the lived experience was still so vivid that I could re-create it from real life, and cast it into story mode. So I did.…
Roads to Joy 