Picture This

Alexander correctly identified the subject of the latest addition to the Family Portrait Gallery (my Mum's upstairs corridor) as his Mummy and Daddy. That having been said, he has recently pointed to a picture of Sean Bean and declared it to be his Daddy. Rosie, however, responded with a complaint that I had given her grey hairs. It's supposed to be light.

Not the end of the world

This is one of those times in life where a lot is going on, and life seems to be moving in a very positive direction. Yet instead of feeling great about this, I find myself anxious. It's coming and going, I'm not consumed with worry, but that it is coming at all is a source of great irritation.

The subject is pretty much unbloggable at this stage. But as with anything worth bothering with there are lots of uncertainties. Worse case scenarios are scary, but very unlikely. Up from the bottom, there are scenarios which could be very stressful, but remain unlikely. However, this is a risk we've decided to take because if all works out (most likely scenario), it should be very good. Obfuscation is making this sound terribly exciting – it's really not, at least not for anyone else.

I hate worrying. I hate that about myself. For I am, alas, one of nature's worriers and in recent years I've worked very hard at suppressing this tendency. All the nonsense I used to worry about still occurs to me, but I have learnt to close that book and move on. To some extent.

The thing I hate most about worrying is the possibility of wasting time. My maternal grandmother is in her eighties now, but has wasted an enormous proportion of her life to upset and worry. Probably the greatest and most ironic source of her anxiety is illness and death. Even now, when one might have thought she had triumphed over those two spectres as much as a person might hope to, she worries terribly about diseases she might acquire, about vague symptoms which she fears may indicate something sinister.

I wouldn't suggest that older people should not worry about their health, but one imagines that age brings significant perspective; at eighty-something, you're lucky to be around at all and you're even luckier if you're mobile and independent. George Bernard Shaw got to ninety-four and died of kidney failure; he damaged his kidney when he fell out of a tree. Now that's the spirit!

It is the greatest waste of time worrying about one's health. If it is worth worrying about, it is worth making a doctor's appointment and waiting to hear what an expert things. If it is going to get worse, then you are wasting the time you have now when things are not too bad. Even if you are going to die soon, then you are wasting the time you have now when you are alive and blissfully ignorant of your impending demise. I mean, it's not as simple as that if you really are going to die, but I mean during the stage when it is merely a persistent cough, a curious lump, a steady loss of blood from the jugular vein or whatever.

The same applies to all Bad Things Which Could Happen. Say the unbloggables go wrong and disaster strikes in a few months time. Well, everything is okay now. And of course, everything may continue to be okay and I will have wasted all this okay time. Because Bad Things are going to happen in life. Jobs are lost, marriages fail, hopes are dashed and people die – often with poor timing. However, these things are relatively rare in the course of life. Hopefully, there are periods of years where none of these things occur to us as individuals.

Often the things we worry about are Super Bad Terrible Things which hardly ever happen to anyone, or perhaps haven't ever happened yet. I don't know whether anyone was actually worried about the end of the world happening yesterday, but people do worry about that stuff, as Jack wrote about earlier in the week. Human beings will not go on forever, but it is unlikely that we will be destroyed by a single whoosh!, or indeed a bang! and almost certainly not a pertwang!. There are far less dramatic and more preventable disasters we should concern ourselves with.

So anyway, although this post is being written largely in an attempt to reason with myself, I shall nevertheless provide my five top tips for coping with a worrisome mind:

1. Accept that despite all the logic, your mind will be troubled by this stuff from time to time. This is natural and can't be resisted – any more than we can stop farting. But much of the time, that's all it is; sometimes there is a problem that needs wrestling with, often it is just an emotional waste product.

2. Worrying a lot about unlikely or fanciful events is usually symptomatic of some other problem. It is important to make a conscious effort to look after oneself, address sources of stress, watch our diet, exercise and sleep.

3. A cliched but nevertheless excellent test - and sometime cure - for worries is to write it down or tell someone about it. Often the mere thought of sharing this thought with someone else forces one to realise how silly it is and thus cure it. If not, putting it down in words or talking it over can often do the trick.

4. Keep a list of the most important things in your life. These may include people, your job and past-times, aspects of yourself and your life which make it worthwhile. Most of the things I worry about have very limited bearing on any of the items on my list. When I consider this fact and concentrate briefly on the many good things I have going for me, I gain a lot of perspective.

5. Schedule a time to worry. This is a trick which I find very useful. If you find yourself anxious a lot, decide that you shall give your worries your full attention at a certain time of day, for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Decide what time that'll be, use the same time every day and stop everything else for that period. Almost always, I find those worries that haven't fizzled out in the mean time can be reasoned with and resolved quite painlessly.

The Sea, The Sea

This weekend we went to visit our friend Vic, who was holidaying on the North Norfolk Coast. Well, it was kind of on the edge of the Wash, but we couldn't see land the other side of the water. I haven't seen the sea for almost two years (I almost saw the sea when I was in Hampshire, but the Isle of Wight was in the way). I have missed it rather badly.

Despite having rumbled and rained for most of last week, Sunday was a beautiful day and we sat outside looking at the water. [...] went for a walk on the beach and kept going until we could only see his head, at which point he decided that the water was a wee bit too nippy. And because we were facing west, the sun set over the sea - admittedly in an unremarkable way behind clouds. It was all very beautiful and we had a lovely weekend.

Leave them kids alone.

In many ways, we expect young people to complete their education at the worst imaginable point in their lives. Okay, so their brains are still young and supple, but everything else is against them. You've got the ranging hormones, which makes it quite difficult to concentrate on anything in the same room as other young people of the compatible sex. You've got this weird status where you pass as an adult in some situations but are treated as a child in others. And then there is rebellion.

Teenage rebellion isn't entirely due to the hormones; older people keep pushing you around. Older people who, as you increasingly realise, aren't very much smarter than you are. Teenagers are really quite rational beings – beings with less experience and know-how than adults of course - and rebellion is usually rational too, in context. Adults who wish to help them need to address the context; teenagers who behave themselves are not more rational than the others, they just want different things.

Anyway, it is at the peak of all this that you are expected to decide what you are going to do for a job and pursue the appropriate qualifications.

Universal education is one of the best political ideas anyone ever had after democracy. Tools for thinking, knowledge and understanding empower us and enrich our lives. But school qualifications aren't terribly useful for anything. Nobody above the age of about twenty needs more than the basics – but they do need to keep learning. If you want to be a lawyer, you need to study law at university – and you needed your school qualifications to get in. If you want to be a hair-dresser, you need to be trained in hairdressing and you may need your school qualifications to get onto the appropriate course. And if you want to live a full and productive life, you need to keep on taking in and analysing information, finding new ways to solve problems and generally furnishing the dark and dusty shelves of your noggin with items of interest, incite and beauty. You can't get a GCSE in that.

However, school qualifications are a very useful political tool. The electorate care about education and qualifications are one way in which a government attempts to prove that they are doing a good job. Every year the exam results are getting better and better, so clearly everything is going well! When folks begin to doubt this, the government introduce more tests in order to increase the volume of evidence for their efficacy.

So the way things are done have very little to do with the needs of the individual student. What a young person needs is a good solid education, but that is a matter of quality as opposed to the time it takes. I don't know how long it does take, but I left school at fifteen because of illness and I'd say I had enough; my education wasn't over, but that level of tutoring, supervision and coercion had no longer been necessary for some time. After that, young people need to get the qualifications and training that they need to do whatever it is they want to do next. Not for the rest of their lives.

It's not only that it is some decades since a time when most people expected to get a job and keep doing it until they retired – I reckon most people still stick to roughly the same work for most of their working lives. It's that adolescence is a stage of identity crisis which can continue well into one's twenties. Even then, things can change and people need to adapt. The very idea that we can get all our learning out of the way in one go at one stage of life is both naïve and somewhat tragic.

The primary objective of school education should be to give young people the skills and motivation to learn. If you keep talking at them for years on end, some of it might sink in before the law says they're allowed to go, but if you teach them how to learn, they will keep doing it on their own steam. The most valuable thing a school can give to a child and that can't be measured. This, together with a culture, as opposed to a catchphrase, of lifelong learning, would mean that whatever happens, people could dip into education and training when the need or desire arose.

But this wouldn't provide very many objective statistics – at least not any time soon – by which we might judge a government's investment in education. So instead, they're increasing the length of compulsory education. A person will now be able to marry, have children and be obliged to pay tax before they are allowed to leave school or college. Having bought more time, there will be more exam results to boast of. And it will all look very good, whether it serves any useful purpose or not.

Having said...

Having said I had returned, I am now feeling guilty for neglecting you. But once again, I was busy then tired. Last week it was a shopping trip to Cambridge, which was great fun. I spent £6.25. It was a spree!

Well it's not quite September yet. Come September, I shall blog more regularly.

Return of the Goldfish

I was very slow, then I was very busy and then I had some serious sleeping to do. Now I'm picking up again and making a tentative return to blogging and the world generally.

The busiest bit involved a trip to Southampton to visit Alexander. I was only there a few days, but they were very full days, as days tend to be in the company of a two year old.

Alex is still not saying a great deal, but he made several admiral attempts at my name. He is also adept at pointing out churches and miscellaneous Christian iconography (crucifixes etc.) with a very musical "Dong!" (the sound a church bell makes, presumably and much easier to pronounce than church

I have been monitoring Alex's verbal progress on account of the competitive auntying my friend Vic and I engage in; Vic's two-year-old nephew is using grammatical tenses and learning to count in Cantonese! However, my mother informs me that I didn't have a lot to say for myself at two either. See, I wasn't a smartie-nappy (which is like a smartie-pants, but smaller).

I got to see the school where Alex is starting nursery in a few week. I know, two years old, but now I've inspected the place I reckon it'll be a lot of fun for him. It'll only be a few mornings a week in any case.

For his birthday (which is actually this Wednesday), I made Alex a playmat, a blanket with roads and fields sewn on. This took me ages, sewing it all by hand, hours and hours and hours.

Fortunately, it didn't cost me anything, as I seemed to have a few green remnants from things like Alex's jacket plus two green tops, one of which had paint down the front and the other had an irreparable hole on the chest. I found a scrap of blue lining fabric for the river and teh roads are made of less than a remnant of black PVC that I bought ages ago because it was very cheap (although I told my sister it had come from one of [...]'s old catsuits). There are even road markings embroidered on there but you probably can't make them out.

Oh yeah and the blanket I sewed all this on? It was the accursed wheelchair blanket my mother gave me some years ago. When she noticed, I claimed it had been on my lap (serving its purpose) when I had begun to sew and it accidentally got stitched into the project.

Hopefully Alex will be able to use it for lots of different games, for toy cars, farm animals and later on, as a landscape for a Lego town (which was the favourite use for the one Mum made us as children).

Alex knew exactly what to do with it and I could only get blurred images of his zooming a toy truck around the roads. I tried to observe whether he 'drove' on the right side of the road. Even though the steering wheel of his Little Tykes car isn't attached to anything, he nevertheless steers in the correct direction every time he turns. Which I think is genius.

In other news, tomorrow marks twelve years of the Dreaded Lurgy. I am rather proud of my near indifference to this event - not quite so near that I haven't noticed, but pretty damn near.

Summer Holiday

I'm now so very behind with blogging, with reading blogs and keeping up with the world in general that I have decided to give up for August. As I said a fortnight ago, it is not that I am especially ill, I'm just really slow at the moment. There are also things going on this month which I want to save my energy for. Fortunately, only three you are still reading, and the Internet is generally quite quiet in high summer.

I'll probably be posting again in a couple of days, but this is just in case I vanish for a bit.