Sunday, 14th December, 2025
Warm night and a warm day for mid December. No heating needed and sitting in shorts and tee shirt writing my Blog. We are using so little gas and electricity that I am £400.00 in credit on my Dual Fuel plan. It’s the luck of the draw, I suppose, to have a warmer Winter. Our actions in moving South, of course, have also influenced it. We even won the Lottery again last night. Goodness knows how we will spend the £30.00 but the Beautician will probably be grateful for it.
I was thinking about Luck/Fate set against individual intervention in achieving things this morning. This photograph of Littlehampton Beach was posted of wartime defences against invasion. My generation have been lucky. Unlike our parents, we haven’t been asked to fight. It’s beginning to look like the current young crop may be called upon soon to do exactly that. My generation and subsequent ones have benefitted from the Peace Dividend and freedom to live our lives and make our own decisions.
Of course, some of us make bad decisions. I was struck by these kids who I taught and have really made something of themselves in different ways. One runs a thriving Beauty Business in the Oldham area and the other two have a successful Building Company in Oldham. They have come from working class stock and an impoversished environment and made their own fortunes through hard work and commitment.
Contrast with this chap who had a similar start in life but took a different path, became a leading light in a football thug gang, spent large chunks of his life in prison and died at the age of 62 in an act of pure lunacy. Some people never learn and that is what marks us out.
Depends whether you believe in the Determinist or Free Will philosophical position. Did the Union Jack death come from a predisposition to lunacy and criminality or did that lad choose his own fate? Did the kids I taught learn self reliance and determination or were they born with it? Admittedly, it is never quite as simple as that but you get the idea.
My life has been lived resisting the Determinist view, believing that my efforts are what define me. That’s why I am constantly disappointed in myself for regularly falling short of my own expectations. As I’ve got older, I have realised increasingly that my origins and background have played a significant part in who I am. Well, that’s my excuse. Anyway, going in the Gym now to punish myself for all round failure. Have a nice day, Dear Reader.
Monday, 15th December, 2025
So dark this morning. Warm but dark. Actually next Sunday is the shortest day and longest night of the year. From then on, everything gets better – theoretically. Dry, warm but grey today.
I don’t do God, as Tony Blair once famously said before converting to Catholicism. I don’t do Christmas either. I have no wish to deprive others of their joy just don’t include me. Actually, we are going up to Surrey for a commemoration of Pauline’s sister’s life. They would always meet up at Christmas so it seemed an appropriate thing to do. We are going to the chapel where her ashes are scattered, going to the Pantomime which she liked to do with her grandsons and then a meal at a restaurant nearby. It is not about me so I can fade into the background and observe. My favourite occupation.
Christmas is a time to communicate with people from our past. I approve of that. I like to do it. It helps to keep our lives in perspective. The lad who was a boyhood friend from Repton and has lived in America since 1969; the girl I knew in the late 1960s/early 70s; the teacher who left my school in 1976 and I haven’t seen since; the friends who moved to Edinburgh 45 years ago and who we have exchanged the same two Christmas cards with ever since to the point that they are so stuffed with little annual letters and bound by tape that we have to have them weighed before posting.
These are lovely, poignant, slightly painful events which attempt to retrieve those times. Some do. Some don’t but never say never. Occasionally, people fail to send a card to us but my rule is that we don’t give up. Until death is confirmed, I fullfil my obligation. More often than not, the chain is re-established next year.
When I first moved to Oldham in 1972, I couldn’t find anywhere to live and had to settle for the most dire accomodation in a down at heel street which was blackened by the previous century of industrial pollution. Oldham was the town of mills and chimneys, of smoke and of damp and blackened stone. It was a hell of a culture shock. I felt bewildered and alone. I felt miserable. I had come from a comfortable, middle class home and felt utterly out of place.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/S97Bqlj8hfA?feature=oembedOldham in the late 1960s
The weird thing is that even that experience has mellowed into poignancy which is tender to revisit. When I moved there, a huge area of old, slum housing had just been cleared and ‘smart’ new 1960s Estate housing errected. Quite a few teachers in my school had moved into the Shaw Road Estate which was clearly an improvement on the old – they even had bathrooms and indoor toilets but they only lasted 30 years and been declining for half of those.
I was eventually taken to Huddersfield to live. Actually, it was a grander, more prosperous and cleaner Northern town which I quite enjoyed living in. Nowadays, when I go back it is in severe decline. Commerce is dying on the streets. The Local Authority doesn’t appear to have the money to raise the town’s head to the light. It feels a bit depressing. I was pleased to find this report from the early 1970s comparing Huddersfield with Halifax and the rennovation of the wonderful Piece Hall. Sometimes, you have to go back to advance.
Tuesday, 16th December, 2025
Another grey but warm and dry morning. Had the joy of spending time in M&S yesterday afternoon. I felt old just standing there. All around me seemed to be old. I’m never that comfortable walking through the bra displays but that’s what you have to do to get to the Collection Point. My wife buys clothes online like there is no tomorrow. On this occasion, she bought a coat which she could pick up in store.
The coat was meant to keep her warm when walking. She looked nice in it and we brought it home where she test-walked it in quite a chilly breeze. It failed the test. It was light and comfortable but didn’t keep the cold out.
Guess where I am going this morning. I want my £100.00 back so M&S will be the first place to visit. The next few days will see some frenzied clothes site surfing. Many coats will arrive. Maybe one will be retained. The rest will be returned. You see, Dear Reader, how exciting my life is.
At least while we were at the store, I was able to cross the road on to the beach. It is just as interesting under grey skies as it is in full sunshine out of clear blue. Yesterday, it was lovely and bleak with all the sadness and softness of collective memory. Gulls cried plaintively on the wind and the pier was deserted.
Just back from the delights of M&S opposite the Worthing Pier. Workmen are renewing the groynes on the beach. Gorgeous, huge hunks of wood being driven into the shale to form a barrier slowing down the onslaught of the waves. I spoke to the men. They told me that these massive oak logs would last around 15 years of twice daily salt water beating.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Life is fragile and uncertain. My Brother in Law is currently in hospital recovering from serious surgery to cope with Bowel Cancer. For whatever reason, it was diagnosed too late. We wish him strength and a quick recovery. We know what cancer can do to one and we hope for the best.
It is a truth universally acknowledged you may recognise as the opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride & Predjudice. This phrase is extremely current because Jane Austen was born 250 years ago today. Can you imagine what the world of 1775 that she was born into was like? Have you read Pride & Predjudice, Dear Reader? I haven’t.
Wednesday, 17th December, 2025
The Ghosts of Christmas Past drifted through my mind in the early hours of the morning. It was sparked by Radio 4 unusually playing a snatch from:
Feliz Navidad
Próspero año y felicidad
I haven’t been following pop music since the early 1970s but in my teens, José Feliciano appealed to me for some strange reason. Over Christmas 1968/9 I was singing:
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
I was 17 years old. I don’t know what I was thinking. I loved the raw edge to the voice and just the foreign name of the singer. I can see myself singing in my bedroom alone.
The next ghost was one of the most exciting Christmases in my memory as I watched the pictures on television in 1989 of the toppling of Romania’s tyrannical communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. I was absolutely gripped and I can see the pictures clearly in my mind now of Ceaușescu berating the crowds of protestors and of them storming the building as he ran and was eventually captured and lined up with his wife and shot.
Twenty years on, in 2009, my sister had just come back from a trip to Istanbul with her friends and sent me photos. She looked in her element. Today she is struggling with the stress of an ill husband.
On this day in 2009, I was retired but still driving across the Pennines to visit my Mother in Law. On this day back then I had the time to pause and photograph the moors which were bloody freezing. I recently talked to the Doctor who bought our house but has now moved to Norfolk and he said, as I do,that he didn’t miss the winters of the North of England. They may be all floating by on safety rafts at the moment after all the rain but it was the snow that got to me.
This morning, I received Christmas greetings from Nigel, a flatmate of mine from 1971 and a photo that I have absolutely no memory of being taken. Chilling to know that the girl smiling happily back left has been dead now for 5 years when I think of all the life I’ve lived over that time.
Thursday, 18th December, 2025
Warm but wet. Mmmm! A warm but wet day with brooding skies. Had to collect fish – fresh salmon, smoked salmon, hake loin – and then on to the beach.
I love the drama of the sea intermittently attacking the land. The shale roars as it is drawn back into the waves. Foam flies everywhere as it crashes back up the beach.
We could walk to the beach but I drove because it was wet and I had to collect about 5kg of fish to bring home. One of the worries of aging is mobility and driving. Almost every residential area requires it. I have spent most of my married life doing the driving even though my wife is a much better driver than me.
Society doubts one’s abilities with every older person’s accident. Actually, I am a much better driver in retirement than I was at a younger age. I am not in a hurry. I follow the speed limits. I’m not frustrated by delay. I also worry about the fact that I need to share the driving with my wife so she keeps her skills and confidence up to date.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my licence. I read about 92 year old Shiela Hancock passing the Advanced Motorist Driving Test. I believe in preparing and fighting. I am looking at enrolling my wife and I on the Advanced Driver Course. We need new challenges in retirement and this would be a useful thing to do.
This morning at 6.00 am, I managed to be in Knaresborough to talk to Peter Holgate, in Bolton to talk to David Weatherly, in Leeds to talk to Kevin and in Bridlington to talk to Nigel all in a matter of minutes. This lunchtime, I have been in Wales to talk to my old friend Dave Beaseley and, this afternoon, I am in Boston, Massachusetts talking to Jonathan. The magic carpet of the internet is wonderful!
Friday, 18th December, 2025
Glorious morning with deep, low sunshine that blinded me as I drove my Housekeeper to the Hairdresser’s. It is a journey that involves crossing a railway line and it is always a nightmare at 8.30 am. Today, it was especially busy. Unusually for well past mid-December, I will be spending the morning grass mowing and edging to smarten the street up for my neighbours for Christmas. It has been and continues to be so mild that the grass has really grown.
If you are a regular reader of the Blog or even just catch up with it occasionally, Dear Reader, you will know that I am not a secretive man. I am not reticent or worried about what people think. I don’t mediate my thoughts through political consideration. I say what I am doing, thinking and feeling in a fairly unvarnished way. Yes, I sometimes put a bit of a spin on it but mostly it is fairly stream of consciousness. I am unapologetic about its ordinariness, its mundanity. It is a catalogue of every day activities which we all do punctuated by shafts of light and shades of darkness that accompany the highs and lows of a life.
Because you could say my life is an open book, you could also characterise me as naive, emotionally unsophisticated, vulnerable, politically inept. I plead guilty to each and every one of those charges. It takes some serious stupidity to lay one’s life, hopes and fears out in a public place and not to worry about attack and ridicule. I am that seriously stupid. What it doesn’t prepare you for is where those painful humiliations arise. When I was going through a scary cancer treatment, I was shocked to find some friends ‘disappeared’ when I most needed them. Can you imagine? I could never do that although you do hear of it.
The more difficult exponents of the heartless arts follow The Prince of Darkness – no not Peter Mandelson – Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527). He is often acknowledged as the progenitor of modern political philosophy and political science. Machiavelli’s political theory argued in Il Principe / The Prince that deceit was an important tenet of maintaining control and retaining power. Current politicians refer to these Machiavellian methods in observations like: Speak softly but carry a big stick, Smile to their face while stabbing them in the back and Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It is an ugly calling.
Of course, ultimately, they get found out. We don’t need the Freedom of Information Act. They trip themselves up when they least expect it. We all learn and move on but life is just one more bit diminished, which is sad.
On the upside, the day is really warm and sunny. The lawns are cut and manicured. Returning neighbours say it smells like Summer again and the perfume of cut grass is evocative. I have quite enjoyed the exercise and the effect on the area. It doesn’t take much to please me. Machiavelli take note! What I will do in 2026, I’m not sure. I need a new lawnmower but I personally don’t have any real grass. Am I prepared to spend £600.00 to take care of my neighbour’s lawns? We will see! Machiavelli is already calculating the political value.
Saturday, 20th December, 2025
While God Squadders were earnestly looking for a star in the East, my little astronaut was gazing lovingly to the South where we are having spectactular displays from the International Space Station. It has been over our garden (Are they spying?) for a number of nights now.
Last night I was too lazy to go outside even though it was very warm. I took photos with my phone through the window glass – not the best method – at actual size and 100x zoom and then increased twice again on my computer. You can see the square inner shape created by the solar panels which generate the power to maintain it. Apparently, even though it shone incredibly brightly in the night sky, it was high enough to still catch the sun’s rays.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the most recently filmed dramas include lots of overhead filming. (You’ll notice it now.) because of the popularity, ease and cheapness of drone photography. Yesterday was the most gorgeous day and our area looked wonderful. I didn’t take these but a local drone photographer took these lovely shots of the Marina, River Arun and the shoreline in Littlehampton. I wish I had taken them.
And so it is just like you said it would be
Life goes easy on me
most of the time
Another wonderfully warm and sunny day. I’ve got a bit of grass cutting to complete while my Under Gardener cleans out the flower beds then a full Gym session accompanied by a football match on TNT Sports while Chef prepares Roast Chicken & Sage & Onion Stuffing for Supper tonight. Life’s hard but it’s not that hard!
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