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When I saw this lady on the news last week I was full of admiration for her. She is a 75 year old granny from England who retired to Spain with her husband. He died from leukaemia and she decided that she must find an interest so she took up Salsa dancing and was so successful that it became her main interest.
After the first feeling of admiration other feelings kicked in. First came shame, because she is five years older than me and so much more energetic and nimble, then came envy and finally came determination!
I had already decided that one of my resolutions this year would be to take regular exercise and seeing this has reinforced that resolve. If I lose some weight and an inch or two around the hips so much the better, but my main aim is to get fitter and increase my stamina, so thank you “Salsa Granny” for giving me the spur.
For twenty years we lived on the west coast of Wales in a country bungalow. One of the things I missed most when we moved to the city was the wide variety of wildlife, which entertained us in our large garden.
There were many different birds, from the tiny wren living in the rockery, to the red kites who gave us a daily aerobatic show as they whirled, dived and glided over the field next door.
JW bought sacks of wild bird food every Autumn and made feeding tables complete with food hoppers, which he fixed in the trees around the house. The birds were used to him refilling these every morning and waited around quite patiently for him to go out. We were amused to see where the saying “pecking order” came from, as they waited patiently for their turns to visit the tables.
Inevitably some of the food fell off the tables and we did get a few strange crops under them! After a short time the pheasants from a neighbouring farmer found the food and eventually they became regular visitors and some even started roosting in our trees, and as soon as JW went into the barn to get their food, they would come running from all corners of the garden.
Of course we don’t see such a large variety of birds now, but a week or two ago we noticed that we had not seen any birds, so he went off and bought bird food and filled the hopper on our one table. Still no birds, so JW tweeted about it and within an hour a bluetit and a robin had arrived and started feeding, so that is why I asked “Do birds tweet?” 
This morning a letter dropped through our letterbox. It was from the Reader’s Digest Association and the envelope was marked “Financial Services” “Time sensitive information enclosed” Important!
Had I at last won one of the prizes they had been offering me? They are constantly telling me that they would really like to announce me as a winner, so maybe my day had come.
I wouldn’t have to choose the next cruise, we could go on all of them and take the family. We’d be secure for life! We could put money into trust for the boys’ education, we could…….
Sadly no. When I opened it, it was to invite me to buy one of their funeral plans!
Do they know something I don’t know since they marked it “time sensitive” or have they just worked out that I have passed my three score and ten?
I was feeling quite well when I got up this morning.
When we went to town this morning, I had a compliment paid me, I think!
As I hurried along to meet JW, a young man in his early twenties stepped out and, with a smile, handed me a small gospel booklet. I glanced down amd was bemused to see the title……”A message to the young – where are you going?”
I smiled back at the young man and asked, “Are you sure that you want me to have this? It’s meant for the young”
“Well you are comparatively young aren’t you” he answered.
It put an extra spring into my step and I felt quite chirpy. This lasted until we came home and I related the incident to my lovely daughter, who brought me swiftly back to earth with, “Compared to whom, Metthusalah?”
When we finished our fourth year at our training hospital three of us decided to take time out before we started our midwifery training. This was in the days before the “year out” became so popular, so it was regarded by our peers as a bit odd!
I had been to Geilo in Norway for a skiing holiday and had fallen in love with both the country and the people, so I persuaded the other two that we should start our travels with a summer there. It was a small village which became very busy in the winter season, but returned to being a more peaceful village in the summer season and catered mainly for tourists who stayed for only one or two nights as they travelled around Scandinavia or as the Americans said ”were doing Europe”.
We were offered jobs as chambermaids for the summer season. The hotel was (then) the largest in the valley and had a small permanent staff and the rest of us were seasonal workers. The majority were university students or recent graduates and were mainly British and Scandinavian all of us in our early twenties. There were three in their thirties J1 had been a teacher in England, who had met and fallen in love with a Norwegian a few years before. By the time the love affair was over she had fallen for the country and stayed on. J2 was a legal secretary from Edinburgh who had seen an advert in the Scotsman and on an impulse replied to it. K had gone on a skiing holiday5 years before and never gone home again!
We got on well with our fellow workers and had a very happy time, spending our off duty playing tennis, walking and generally enjoying an outdoor life. It was a great contrast to our previously hectic time on the wards (and was actually better paid!) The biggest responsibility we had was keeping the guest rooms clean enough to satisfy the very particular housekeeper, so it was fortunate that we had been so well trained by the ward sisters
We all wanted to learn Norwegian and the Scandinavians, who had all learned English in school, wanted to perfect their accents, so we had a mutual help society where they spoke to us in English and we tried to answer in Norwegian. Some words are spelt the same in both languages but pronounced differently so it was always worth trying to ”blag” your way by using the appropriate accent. Sometimes it worked but other times it produced strange or embarrassing results.
One of my bloomers came when one of the guests on my “station” (set of rooms I was responsible for) asked me to vacuum away a mess of crumbs which his children had dropped in the corridor outside his room. The housekeeper saw me taking the vacuum cleaner and asked what I was doing as she had already inspected my rooms. I could not remember the word for cleaner,so, thinking that maybe they used the trade name of the cleaner just as we say “Hoovering”, I substituted a shortened version of the trade name and thought I had done quite well until that stern face cracked into a smile. The name of the cleaner was Nilfisk and what I had said was that I was going fishing in the corridor for a man!
Johanna substituted the Norwegian word for dirty when she came round collecting the dirty sheets for the laundry bag by calling out “Has anyone got any sh***y sheets ?
Lars however made probably the most embarrassing bloomer. We had just finished our evening meal and, as he leaned back, he gave an enormous burp. This turned him pink as he apologised, ” Excuse me please, but I always rape after a big meal” When one of the boys explained what he had said his pink blush turned crimson!
Recently I saw a recruitment executive on TV who was giving advice on how to write a CV. He said that to write a CV which will be read was to keep it quite short, but interesting. He said that would be employers wanted to know not only your educational qualifications and a list of jobs, but what extra skills you had learned from them.
This set me thinking about my CV. At first I thought I have only ever done nursing and midwifery, but then I thought again.
My first paid “employment” was when I was about 9 years old and I was paid five shillings (25p) for two hours. This wasn’t exploitation of a child as I did have quite good fringe benefits.:)
My employer, my adopted grandfather, who had a printing business, invited me to help him with stock taking, (I think he was finding a way to keep me occupied in the holidays!). He called out the quantities of paper and card and I wrote down the size , colour, and quality etc. (Strangely enough I did a similar job many years later for Himindoors when he had a small gallery, but I didn’t get paid for that!)
After about 2 hours we went for high tea at one of the teashops in town and then to the theatre to watch the first house of a variety show. We went regularly to the theatre with my mother, but usually we were up in the “Gods”. With Grandpa we sat in the dress circle and at the interval we were served with a tray of tea and biscuits which was brought to our seats…sheer luxury! I think you will agree that the fringe benefits were pretty good. This became a regular holiday job and we tried out all the best tea shops so I gained experience in several fields, not only the obvious ones like counting and writing legibly, but also as a restaurant and theatre critic and how to make 25p stretch an awfully long way!
I always said that poverty was relative.
Today I heard someone on TV give the following tip. When you open a bottle of wine to make the gravy don’t waste the rest of the bottle, freeze it in an ice cube tray and then you can use it for the next gravy you make!
I can’t think what I shall do with all the money I will save.
One of my nursing friends was one of those people to whom THINGS happen! She could turn any crisis into a drama. She is the one who washed all the thermometers in hot water, fortunately the days had passed when nurses had to pay for broken thermometers, but she had a sticky time explaining it to our rather humourless Sister. Her next misadventure was when she was told to clean the dentures of some of the elderly patients and she collected them all together in a bowl! True, some of the patients said their teeth fitted much better after they had been cleaned, but it took her some time to pair them and reassign them to their (sometimes new ) owners.
Another salubrious job we had as junior nurses was collecting the metal sputum cups every morning, emptying them and washing them,ugh. We were supposed to examine the contents for abnormalities but Kate was even more squeamish than the rest of us and just tipped them down the bedpan washer between stomach heavings. One day she heard a suspiciously loud plop and found to her horror that she had just thrown a patient’s glass eye down into the Birmingham sewers. He had mistaken the sputum pot for a container for his glass eye, which he had removed for the night! I don’t remember how she coped with that one, but she survived to move to our second ward.
One day I was just about to go into the dining room when she caught up with me. She had her cloak carefully wrapped around her and was in a bit of a state as she gasped out, “You haven’t got time for lunch, we have to go out!” As nurses were constantly hungry this had to be desperate so I followed her to the Nurses Home. Once we were back in her room she showed me what she was clutching under her cloak. It was a rather soggy parcel which she unwrapped to display 3 very dead goldfish!
The ward Sister she was working was inordinately fond of the small aquarium which had been presented to her by a group of grateful patients. She had asked Kate to clean it for her and Kate had carefully filled a bowl with water and emptied the aquarium, put the fish into their temporary home, cleaned the aquarium, refilled it and turned to the bowl for the fish to find them floating on the surface. She had inadvertantly filled it with hot water!
We spent our afternoon off touring the pet shops, where she regaled the owners with her sad story and holding up the dead fish while they tried to match them! We managed to get pretty near matches so on our return she was able to put in the replacements before Sister returned from her afternoon split shift (they had 1/2 hour longer than us.) I don’t know whether Sister noticed but she never said anything, so once again Catastrophe Kate had got away with it!
PS. Kate finished her training, married an American and went on to have a distingished career as a Director of Nursing in New York!
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