In December 2016, having agreed to attend counselling sessions and continuing to work from home, I gradually began to accept the idea that my life was necessarily going to change, and my mood gradually improved as the year end approached. I enjoyed a quiet Christmas and New Year which felt very normal. The thought of […]
I don’t think I ever knew nor understood how my parents became who they were. I only remember their lives from the mid-1960s and when I try to imagine their own upbringing as children and young adults, I am at a complete loss. I can only go off half-remembered stories that they would occasionally tell […]
In the weeks following my heart attack in 2016, initially everything was good. I was happy to have experienced what I considered a near miss, in the sense that things could have been so much worse. Before the illness in late September I had no idea that I was in any danger, and so I […]
My Dad was a lovely, peaceful man. He survived three World Wars (two hot, one cold) but fought in none. He was deemed too young for the Great War (it started 2½ weeks before he was born and finished when he was only four) and his eyesight was too poor for him to sign up […]
In an earlier autobiography, ‘By Such Things we are Formed’, I gave an account of my life up to November 2016, just after my heart attack, but before the operation to rectify the problem with the plumbing around my heart. Since then, my life underwent several significant changes until about two years ago when it […]
This year it’s been 40 years since Band-Aid released “Do they know it’s Christmas” but do you realise that 40 years had also passed between the Band-Aid song and the D-day landings? I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel really old. This year, in an attempt to feel a bit less old, […]
This year’s reminiscences actually begin in 2022. I usually write these letters on a wet and windy day in late November when I don’t want to go out (I often have plenty to choose from) and last year was no exception. In mid December, after I’d written the letter, we heard that Geraldine’s Auntie Sheila […]
Each year (since 2002) I have sent out a Christmas letter to certain friends (especially those whom we don’t see too often) to update them with what’s happened in our lives. I’m aware that this is a controversial move: such letters are often the subject of jokes on TV panel shows where a parody of […]
This has been a year of the UK short break. Geraldine and I decided last year that due to Covid travel complications, we would not go on a foreign holiday in 2021. This year, we reached the same decision for different reasons. The climate issues altered our view on flying and so we reviewed our […]
It’s only when watching pre-pandemic TV programmes that I fully realise how much we’ve all changed since 2020. Welcoming handshakes are now very scarce, and we stand just that little further apart from each other. Some other changes, like my appearance, became more obvious, and in February, sixteen weeks after last seeing my hairdresser (due […]