Rock around the pools

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.

When I grow up I want to be…

Realising that I’m into a time of quite a bit of musing about work, and what I could be doing in the future.

Perhaps it’s taking me a long time to find the courage to make a change…while all around me colleagues have been doing so quite happily. This last week has shown me two more people who are leaving, and have been chatting to another who’s about to take up a secondment to work in Germany for several months.

One reminder came from Robert Crampton in yesterday’s column in the Saturday Times. Commenting on kids writing to him, asking him how and where to start writing, his advice is: just start.

Paul Simon steps in straight after:

“Want to be a writer?

Don’t know how or when?

Find a quiet place

Use a humble pen.”

Today, we had a speaker at church who had climbed major mountains with her husband, trecked to both Poles, that kind of thing. Among her tips: preparation and perseverance are in there, but the first on the list is passion.

There are a few other things that get in the way of having a complete break, like mortgages, standing orders and the like. I suspect it is not necessarily a clean sweep that I am after, but a change of stroke. 100 lengths of breaststroke done – time to master the butterfly. Still swimming. Still keeping going. Just not doing it in quite the same way.

I am forced to remind myself that my job entails encouraging people to have a gap year, to try something new, to gain a fresh perspective. I’ve been lucky – I had two gap years, and a return to university for a year, before trying to earn a crust in a serious way.

Perhaps it’s the seven year itch, transposed to a work context.

Some kids had a clear idea of what they wanted to be, early on. I remember a school essay when I was around the age of six or seven, ‘My ambition’. I didn’t really have one – I made one up, although I got quite into it once I started writing it. I was going to be a physiotherapist, according to the essay. You can probably tell that one didn’t work out.

I’ve remembered the other prompter – watching Dr Who Confidential last night, where David Tennant, the current Doctor, interviewed various people working on the series to see how it might have inspired them to do their current jobs.

All of a sudden, it was back to thinking about passions, excitements, views into an adult world that might even be OK to grow up in.

What did I love doing? Listening to and playing music. Reading and writing my own stuff. Escaping to other worlds, or being transported inside someone else’s world. Finding that someone else thought as I did.

Perhaps the hope is that I can get involved in writing the next chapter of my story. Relearning the art of the possible.

What does it look like? Still no idea. But ‘story’ seems to be coming up a lot.

If art is taking a line for a walk, perhaps it’s time to take some more words for a walk…and see where we find ourselves in the process.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…quartermaster?

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.

Beside the forthside

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.

Other people’s jobs

What do you want to do when you grow up?

We’re both into our thirties, and sometimes we still ask each other about things ‘when we’re grown up’.

My parents are probably of the last main generation when you did make that ‘decision’. We’re in one where yes, you can do ‘just’ one thing all your life, but where you could quite happily have five different careers in a working life, and it would be fairly acceptable.

All of this makes it quite fun looking at other people’s jobs, and a good opportunity for this was a recent documentary as part of a series on ‘The Museum’ aka the British Museum in London.

I have a soft spot for behind the scenes things, finding out how things really work. So now I know there’s a few more jobs out there (in addition to being a curator, for example), including: renovating very large heavy gates; being a ‘spider man’ cleaner and fixing things at roof height; or on a more more long-term level, devising a huge storage system that won’t melt down or damage the objects that are to be housed in it, which may corrode, break, dislike fresh air, that kind of thing.

Another reason for thinking about it was yesterday, suddenly having two references to linguistics, my main subject at university. One was seeing my former director of studies, Bob Ladd, appear in an article in the Economist – go Bob!

The other was meeting a distant relative for the first time, who is doing sociolinguistic study of Sorbian, a language spoken in the south-east of Germany, and of the issues for those who still speak it.

All of a sudden, I was using terminology that had not been dusted off for around 10 years, and rather enjoying it.
My relative is having to make decisions on whether she takes a particular research path, and ends up having a ‘life’s work’ form of project with this particular language. On ‘The Museum’, the storage guy is probably facing a similar kind of project.

It can seem slightly unreal in a world where more staff at my work are still planning changes. Part of me would like that kind of job for life – and I’ve worked with two people who retired only within the last couple of months, who did exactly that.

Part of me would like to revisit some of my old haunts, in terms of things I loved to do, and see what they are looking like these days.

And part of me wouldn’t mind doing something completely different, unrelated – or more than one something different.

But also, I understand the privilege of being in a society and a time where I am able to choose – and to have job opportunities at all rather than mass unemployment, for example.

Other people’s jobs? For now, a day just to be at home sounds good…