Posts filed under 'Family'
Back to another of my families, the work one, and some fairly momentous news. Not only are we finally gaining one new post (or rather, half the time of two different people), I get to give away some of my work…
It’s been pretty full on for the last three years, one way or another. Former devotees of my birthday parties may have noticed there hasn’t been one for a while, partly due to the combination of work deadlines around the same time…and so on.
Finally, it seems, we’ll get to stop running a big course we normally do in July, I’ll stop doing my Ireland work (and so avoid hanging out with demob happy teachers over a weekend in early February…), and even give away probably around a third of my workload of students.
Two or three days on from the announcement of the work plan by my manager, I’m getting used to the concept. Less time away from home. Fewer deadlines hitting me all at the same time. Hopefully no budget to run for a while.
There is a loss to these things too. It can become too easy to base your image on what you do, and when you show you can cope with silly amounts of work, it can also become an identity, even if not a very healthy one.
However, it should hopefully mean, among other things, that I can become a little friendlier to our students again, because there’ll be a little more of me to share around c. 500 of them than there is around c. 750. Still too many, really, but more people to take the strain, which should be really good.
I will miss having an overview of all the countries we work with. But I can finally do some of what I’ve been asking to do: start offering opportunities up to new people coming in, gain a bit of enthusiasm back from them as they start to get to know the work.
Maybe I’ll do some new stuff. There’s plenty of communications work that I can see needs doing. But perhaps I can work out how to keep a bit more of a balance. In the past, I felt compelled to do stuff because I ’saw it needed doing’. The last few months in particular have made me more wary, more keen to conserve energy for other things.
This evening we went to see the film ‘Ratatouille’ at the cinema. It was funny, it was clever, all that great Pixar stuff. But it was also about passion, about the things we love doing, and are good at, and doing those whole heartedly.
I love cooking, so the film was a happy message as far as I was concerned. But I also love writing. Music. Reading. Being with family. Going for walks in the sunshine on autumn days (as we did this morning with my parents). Because there is time for these too. There should be. And thankfully, it looks like there will be.
October 20th, 2007
Never mind Wimbledon, or indeed the start of the summer festival season.
Being at our place for our weekly church group is the place to be!
Or so we’ve said…but as our little group changes over the next few weeks, it’s one way to keep things simple.
This week saw one group member return to the Czech Republic with her husband, another (Brazilian) return from an extended humanitarian trip, and a new member join who’s Finnish, and doing a study placement in Edinburgh over the summer.
Meanwhile, another former group member and her husband have had their first baby, back home in Australia; and others have bought their first house, down in deepest England.
New group members do find themselves getting an introduction not just to who’s there that night, but who is currently part of the group, and who has been that we might mention in conversation. I’ve been thinking of commissioning a blog from Dan as a way to keep that wider community together…
Whether people are from the UK or elsewhere, with English as first language or another in their collection, somehow we retain some key things: sharing our stories, and what God is doing in our lives; looking out for one another, and keeping cake on the menu as often as possible….
Whether we get to know each other for a short time, or longer, it’s great to see how we do learn to ‘weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice.’ We see breakthroughs for each other; we also share ordinary frustrations at work, or other situations that concern us.
No tent or wellies required.
June 23rd, 2007
Family of the work kind again. Yesterday brought news of two more departures - one colleague to work in a new post in Manchester, the other to change to lobbying work with a charity.
Our first piece of positive promotion? One colleague who’s been with us for some time got the promotion she wanted, and will now be a couple of rungs above me, looking after the work of quite a large cross-sectoral team.
Tomorrow sees actual departures of two more colleagues, one to a secondment in an office abroad, another home to Eastern Europe to take stock, and work out her next career move.
So if any of you want to work in the same office as me, there’s a few spaces at the moment…
Morale is a bit of a problem when over a third of the office has moved on, or is about to. If I thought our ‘folk thin[ned] lamentably’ a month or two back, they do all the more now. Our little team of three has developed a chocolate habit this week, to keep us going in the afternoon, but we need not to let that one continue too long…
Nice meanwhile to welcome one of those back in a couple of weeks to help at the course we run for our students before they go abroad. Here’s hoping she brings some Parisian sun with her!
June 20th, 2007
It’s another seaside outing, and this time church family. Last Sunday saw a group of us head down to St Abb’s Head and Coldingham Bay, between North Berwick and Berwick on Tweed.
It’s been a mite wet in Scotland recently (she writes, having come home half soaked tonight), so our hopes were not great for the beach trip part. However, coffees and biscuits in the church hall there helped us settle once we’d arrived, and the sun came out in earnest by c.2pm.
I was on rockpool duty with the two little boys of friends of ours for part of the afternoon. The eldest had a theory that sand turned into wet sand, turned into frogspawn, turned into tadpoles…I decided not to knock the theory, so we went on to have a chat about frogs, while I also tried to avoid him hurling himself into the water while throwing the next handful of wet sand.
Last week involved a lot of late nights at work, so the contrast of sunshine, a few sandcastles, and slice of good cake being handed out was a good one!
After all, Brits discuss the weather so much that when it actually turns out all right, it ought to get a mention.
June 20th, 2007
Dan and I worked out one time that we had relatives covering all of the above.
Dan’s great grandfather (surname Barry) came from Ireland, and the family there did sell items, as far as we know.
Dan’s grandfather, where the Frydman connection comes in, was a tailor, in the east end of London.
My great grandfather (Gawthorpe) was a career soldier, though all our grandfathers were soldiers too, in World War II.
My father (Mackenzie) can lay some claim to being a sailor too, having been in the Merchant Navy.
I’m not sure if the rhyme offers you options, or whether it’s effectively all down hill from there on in…rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief…is probably not one you want to lay before a careers officer as a possible job progression.
The reason for writing this has been musing on how certain job characteristics might be passed on, in some way. I’m well aware that my grandfather (Mackenzie) was a diplomat, and although I didn’t aspire to doing that, my own job, with its international perspective, has echoes of that.
My grandmother (Mackenzie) trained as a teacher, as did her two sisters. Even though Granny didn’t do as much actually teaching as her sisters, education is still part of that side of the family, and the main focus of my work is on education, which I am happy about.
More recently, I have come to wonder about what skills I have inherited from my parents. In my teens, when I was a bit more aware of Dad’s job, he was working for an agricultural cooperative, looking after the parts department. You name it, they sold it…gas canisters, chicken feed, equestrian blankets, nuts and bolts for combine harvesters.
Sounds less immediately like my job. But it does suggest a certain liking for systems, cataloguing, stock control…all of which I find myself responding to. The university careers advisor suggested that one area linguistics graduates had gone into was logistics, and that is quite a good way of viewing the work I do with languages students.
Dad gave me some other helpful pointers in this department: stamp collecting, cataloguing audio cassettes, carefully noting who had given what on Christmas morning so we could all write our thank you letters.
Mum trained as a secretary, working both in a hospital and in school. Dealing with pupils, parents, teachers, governors, the local vicar, other community members…sounds a bit like the mix of groups I work with too!
The best way I could sum up the collecting and ordering things was in the term quartermaster, overseeing provisions for an army. I like food shopping, but sometimes even better than the actual food shopping is the putting it all away afterwards, looking on at well-stocked cupboards.
However, the real test will come later in life, when I have to decide whether or not to succumb to subscribing to Which?, the UK consumer magazine that is meant to help you sort out which hedgeclipper to buy, amongst other things. Grandpa did. Dad does. It may be only a matter of time…
Meanwhile, the secretary side of me continues to write posts. Should you send in your subscription for the PTA, I’ll know you’ve been reading carefully.
June 10th, 2007
It’s not really beside the seaside, living in Edinburgh. The big rolling ocean is still quite a while away. But it’s really about the smell. Waft some seaweed under my nose, and I’m happy. Instant holiday.
So, we managed an outing with my parents yesterday - took their car up to Silverknowes, and walked along the beach to Cramond. Dan and I managed this earlier in the year for the first time, on the bus at either end. In the car, you’re there in 10 minutes, and there’s a nice walkway for any number of pursuits: roller blading, pushing a scooter, cinching up your top (alongside your friend) so that you are both showing as much torso as possible. That kind of thing. (Sensitive readers may be relieved to know that none of us did any of the above mentioned activities, but we did discuss Dad getting roller blades, and maybe me too. It’s a slippery slope.)
For years, our main family holiday was on the Isle of Jura, and Dan and I still go there around once a year (though it was crowded off the itinerary last year). For cheap seaweed intake, we can go down to Granton Harbour and walk along the sea wall. But yesterday’s walk offered a bit more of the holiday experience: there was also beach, shells, opportunities for dogs to get wet and gritty with sand, and ice creams at the far end before turning to walk back.
The sun also shone, enough to believe it might be summer. Grey and possibly dour city that Edinburgh is, however, there was also sea mist sweeping in for much of the walk. Don’t enjoy yourselves too much, now.
June 10th, 2007
April and May have seen further departures from my office. Out of around 50 people, 15 have left, and potentially another 5 may do so…that I know of…
It’s hard to keep up with. On each of the main days of my work trip to Paris, we learned of another departure to come. Coming back from the Spanish equivalent meeting in London last week, there was another. In between, people actually have their last days, and fewer people are around to see them off.
I’m aware that work life moves fast in the UK, but in my small section of civil service, it hasn’t tended to do so as momentously as this. We may have to re-employ the earlier people if only to pay for the next leaving card and contributions at this rate.
At the same time, those who remain are starting to look out for each other a bit more. A former colleague visited to show off her twin baby girls today, and even with fewer people in the office, there were still a good 10 or more who turned up to meet the girls and their mum.
Dan has Inigo as a category for this blog. Perhaps I need one for my workplace. But the organisation does liken itself to a big family around the world, and family seems an appropriate one, particularly when I’ve now spent as much time with these people as I did at secondary school.
To continue in Sylvia Plath’s words:
“Frost drops even the spider.
Clearly the genius of plenitude hides himself elsewhere.
Our folk thin lamentably.”
It’s taking some perseverance to think of spring, not winter, at this time.
May 14th, 2007
Having revisited one former home, found myself visiting the town where I spent my secondary years, only half a week later. (Reasons for this less positive, though perhaps I’ll do a separate post about that.)
Otley has its market, and Upton-on-Severn has its maps…and also morris men (though thankfully not all the time). I used to live in Malvern, where the water comes from, and Morgan sports cars. A good place to mention with the centenary of Elgar this year - one theory suggests that the outline of the Malvern Hills was an influence on the structure of his Enigma Variations. That’s something to ponder during the ad breaks on Classic FM.
Upton, meanwhile, is a few miles away from Malvern, and tends to be good at various festivals, including folk, and jazz. The weekend when we were around happened to be one where over 100 different morris dancing troupes had gathered together, so it was testing stuff elbowing your way through the bells and floral hoops and along to the river to have your sandwiches. This is the advantage of central England - a great location for all the nutters to travel to and congregate in.
Upton also has a map shop…Mum loves maps, and with my brother about to do an extended trip to Australia and New Zealand, this was the opportunity to investigate what maps might be available.
This particular shop has previously offered maps of obscure parts of Warsaw that I would later teach in. This time, it had no difficulty in turning up a multilingual copy of a map of the Tatras Forest Park (alpine part of Poland, with the main mountains mostly on the Slovak side). Had I wanted to go back to Legnica, where I also worked, I would have been able to buy a map of it on the spot - and of at least a dozen other small Polish towns that most people have never heard of.
(Mum incidently made it out the shop with only 4 maps, which was quite good going for a trip that she isn’t going on herself.)
I saw the map shop recently featured in a travel article, as one of the top five map shops in the UK. It stocks 55 000 items. You can also buy items online. What are you waiting for?
May 14th, 2007
I shall start this blog with a couple of literary references, neither as yet checked. My French is also not strong enough to be sure whether biscuits needs ‘perdu’ or ‘perdue’.
Anyway, Proust wanted to do a bit of rediscovering of the past, and managed something like that through the (for him) evocative taste of madeleines, the shell-like sponge cakes that you can buy fancy moulds for in nice cookshops.
I can’t claim that I’ve read Proust - and I am told that his Recherche de temps perdu is pretty long, so this could be deliberate on his part. However, I have now attempted my own equivalent, on a long weekend in and around Leeds.
I lived about seven miles outside Leeds between the ages of c. 4 and 7, in a village called Bramhope. (Small world statement: a lady from my church in Edinburgh also grew up there, and the pictures of her eldest being taken out in the pushchair around the village look very like those of my younger brother in the same setting.) A few miles up the road is Otley, a market town, and site of the hospital where my brother was born. At the time when you had to be born in a particular county to play cricket for it, it was heartening to know that he had got the best - Yorkshire.
Bramhope has now become quite posh, and we saw at least one DJ’s car (with souped-up number plate) as well as what are some huge houses. But this is still Yorkshire, where people are careful with money. The lady in the travel centre in Leeds would not allow us to buy two adult bus day tickets when we could buy a family ticket and save 20p. (I have to say that we also got slightly odd looks from the bus drivers that day, wondering where our brood had got to.)
Here comes the second literary reference. An ancient Greek writer claimed that it was not possible to step in the same river twice, because it was always flowing, so the water was no longer the same, even though the river continued. A good statement to bear in mind when revisiting former haunts, as time, like the river, does tend to move things on.
However, what amazed me that weekend was how much was still there, over 20 years on. One particular highlight was visiting the market in Otley, and finding that they still sold the same kind of ginger biscuits that we would buy there when I was a child. Not only that, but they sold them out of a mobile caravan type van, as they did years before. The only difference was that now they are pre-bagged in plastic rather than sold in paper bags. This means that the stall holders can’t indulge in the knack of swinging the bag round by the top corners to form a seal, but otherwise it was very satisfactory.
Are the biscuits truly the same? Perhaps a little less gingery. But then I think this has more to do with my tastebuds tolerating spicier food than I might have done at six.
Sadly, I don’t know what Proust actually did when he got his madeleines. We bought two bags of biscuits and went back to Bramhope on the bus. A grand day out.
May 14th, 2007
So, the soup making has abated a little, mostly through being away a bit.
In the meantime, the seed potatoes passed on by Mum have actually been planted, and are starting to come up.
Mum and Dad grew potatoes in pots last year, and we were with them one weekend when we earthed up a pot. “Treasure!” said one. “Lucky dip bran tub!” said the other. (The parents, not the pots.) It is quite fun reminding yourself that potatoes do come out of soil, rather than pre-printed bags from the Co-op…
So, this year, we were given six seed potatoes, nestling happily in an egg box, with a useful instructions postcard which explained that we should put them in the soil, they grow, we put more soil on, they grow more, and we put yet more soil on.
I can’t tell you it was excitement I felt when I checked today and saw they’d done the first growing spurt, and were due their first soil top up. But at least they were doing the stuff.
Those of you who knew our previous flat in Inverleith would have seen our garden all in pots. I became confident with things that grow in shade, damp or both. (Scottish gardening at its best??) Moving to a garden with soil and grass, I became a bit afraid of the big stuff. Doing a job where activity peaks in spring and autumn doesn’t really help for gardening either.
Anyway, now we have some plants in the two flower beds, and plans for a further one. I suspect we’ll enlist the mums again. But for now, it’s back to stuff in pots. Self-contained (naturally) and satisfying. Almost as much as picking snails off things and whanging them over the fence into the gap between our garden and next door’s wall. That’ll set back their plans for world domination…for a few more hours.
I will of course give you an update when it’s tattie howking season, but if I’m lucky, I might even manage another food crop like lettuce before then. (The snails meanwhile think I’ve planted several: clematis, magnolia…)
May 14th, 2007
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