13 May 2016

Rambling

Remember Higgy? He is far too thin. Today I am taking him to a clinic that specialises in eating disorders. He's fifty seven but I guess he'll be there with a bunch of anorexic teenage girls. I might have an eating disorder myself because my appetite is ravenous and whenever I eat a meal the plate is entirely emptied - bones, gristle, skins - everything. Sometimes I even eat the cutlery.

I should be out mowing our grass just now but hopefully it will still be dry when I get back from the clinic. It takes about two hours to do a good job of the grass and this will be only the second time I have cut it this year. I need to do it today because tomorrow Shirley and I are catching a train down to Derby to watch Hull City play Derby County in the first leg of the Championship playoffs semi-final. Of course, I have prayed to Google, asking for victory. Up The Tigers!

There was a blast from the past when an old university friend got in touch to say that he and his wife are coming down to Sheffield from the wilds of Bonny Scotland and could we meet up? With some trepidation I have agreed to this. Unlike many people, I have tended to shun events like  school reunions and something in my sub-conscious has caused me to cut away many links with my past instead of nurturing them. It isn't logical I know but I haven't been able to help myself. It's like I want to leave the past behind and just move on. A psychoanalyst would have a ball with me.
Yesterday - rambling in Birch Hill Plantation near Scarcliffe
I think of my parents - Philip and Doreen. They met in India during World War II and were both in The Royal Airforce. After the war, they attended annual service reunions in Leeds, meeting up with colleagues they had served with in Delhi. Families came along too. They were  all-day affairs with a buffet meal and endless cups of tea. The parents chattered away about their wartime memories while we kids raced around the old church building, waiting to go home. The reunions happened throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, finally coming to an end in the late eighties as old age and death came into the equation and attendance tailed off.

But that idea of reunion has never appealed to me. Not everybody is lucky enough to attend university but those who did often maintain strong links with old university friends right through to old age. But not me - so meeting up with my old chum and his wife will be, let's just say, interesting.

I guess I could have cut the grass yesterday but as it was a nice day I plodded around north east Derbyshire after parking up in a small village called Stony Houghton. It was meant to be a shortish ramble but on returning to my silver car (Clint) I looked at my watch and  observed that four hours had passed by...And I still haven't told you much about Monday's walk out of Warslow - rambling around The Manifold Valley. Another lovely day in my remarkably unremarkable life.

24 comments:

  1. We have much in common.

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  2. I feel the same way about reunions. I've never gone to any of my high school reunions...I hated high school and have zero desire to revisit that part of my life.

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    1. Funny how so many American films show high school life as sweet coolness - living the American dream.

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  3. I don't go to reunions either. It's not that I didn't enjoy that part of my life -- it's just that I've moved on. I want to spend time with my current friends.

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    1. I sometimes think that my instinct not to turn back has been a self-imposed deprivation.

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  4. I am not much for reunions either. Both as a child and as an adult, my life has been pretty much passing through places and then moving on. That kind of life has been both good and bad. The longest I have ever been anywhere is on my mountain for the last 12 years. So, pretty much had no longtime school chums to reunite with. It has always been amazing to me to meet people who are still close to friends they have had since elementary school.

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    1. Yet more evidence that you and I are like-minded Mama Bear.

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  5. No reunions for me either. Nor have I been tempted to go back to my workplace after retirement. I always feel it's time to move on and look to the future. Not that I haven't made a good friend here and there, along the way, but we wouldn't want to continually dwell on the past. I always felt that those people who couldn't keep away, after they had left, or retired, were rather sad people.

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    1. In the schools where I taught, departed teachers would sometimes return and yes I hear what you are saying about such behaviour being rather "sad". I could never do that. It just wasn't in me.

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  6. Oh My Goodness your photo today is wonderful. I want to walk there.
    No reunions for me. I was too busy working far away. I have a great friend from University but we write letters. She is on one side of the states and I am on the other.

    cheers, parsnip and thehamish

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    1. Thank you for the photo compliment Parsnip. And thanks for calling by...

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  7. Ok, so I am the odd one out - I love reunions and regularly meet a small group of people from school, plus bigger events for special anniversaries with even some of our old teachers attending. Also, I am still friends with someone I have known since pre-school, with someone I went to school with since the age of 9, two of my class mates at Librarian School (1986 was the year we started) and some ex colleagues from where I worked until 2002.
    My role model there is my Mum - she has been creating close, long-lasting and long-distance friendships all her life, something that was never more obvious than at her 70th birthday two years ago.
    Of course, having lived in my birth town nearly all my life makes it easier.

    The path through the woods looks so inviting!

    Hopefully, the people at the clinic can do something for Higgy.

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    1. In some ways I am envious of the fact that you have always lived in the same town. That would almost make the question of reunions redundant. Though I have avoided reunions it has certainly not been a logical choice.

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  8. I'm with you, Yorkie....I don't do reunions, either. I purposely shun them. So maybe we should both go to a psychoanalyst together a confuse the whatsits out of him/her! :)

    I hope Higgy is okay...he's lucky to have someone who cares about his welfare. From the sounds of it you're the only one who does. I wish him well.

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    1. Though already painfully thin, Higgy has lost three pounds since his last visit to the clinic.

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  9. Good on you for helping Higgy. Now here we could say leave the grass. We don't get much rain. I don't see many old colleagues except the five I have lunch with.

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    1. Mowing lawns is a preoccupation of all British garden owners in the summertime. Open your window and you can hear the mowers humming away like mechanical bees.

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  10. Like Meike I have friends from my youth and one particular very close friend has been a friend since we were 4 although she and I went to different schools. However I eschew reunions from school or Uni or anywhere else really. But that's probably because I don't do parties and things like that either. However a friend who is staying with me at the moment still has a group of friends from school who meet all the time and even go away every two months together to explore somewhere new. One now lives in North America and is still an active member of the group and sometimes hosts those get-togethers. My friend is in another group from College days who do likewise. It's all beyond my ken.

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    1. If, like Meike, we had always lived in the same place, we wouldn't even need to consider the business of reunions.

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  11. I do agree about reunions YP. The past is another country as somebody said, and I never wish to return there.

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  12. I was looking out for you in the crowd on the telly. I thought I caught sight of you once, but I couldn't be sure with you wearing all that black and gold face paint, not to mention the jester's hat in HCFC colours. It was a good game though, especially that double deflection for the second goal!

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    1. I was wearing my full Bengal tiger outfit and carrying a big bass drum. I enjoyed the game immensely. It looks as though we are heading for a final with Sheffield Wednesday but you never know. It can be a bit awkward being a Hull City supporter in Sheffield...but I can handle it - especially if we win.

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