Here’s an interesting situation that I found myself in just
this evening past.
It had been a busy week at work and so I was looking forward
to my usual pre-weekend wind down which starts at about 6pm on a Friday with a
rattle of the cooking pans in readiness for a chilli cook-up and a glass or two of
wine.
I am reluctant to call it a routine as it is far from mundane. In fact it
is my favourite time.
What could be better than getting a few ingredients
together, listening to the radio and having a chilled drink to hand.
This Friday
was, however, different.
I had agreed to house- sit for a friend who was going
out for a rare theatre trip with my wife and a family group. The reason being
that it was usually quite difficult for her to leave her mother without
recourse to a helper.
Clarice celebrated her 100th birthday last
year.
She is a physiological marvel and was playing tennis well into her
nineties but in the last few months her health has wavered a bit with her being
particularly susceptible to what most of us would regard as minor afflictions such
as colds, sniffles, sneezes and shivers.
Her condition was a bit worrying in the
run up to Christmas and we, my wife and I, were on the highest level of alert for
that phone call but wonder upon wonder Clarice rallied and is currently as
robust as you could expect for her centenary of years.
This is the thing that I
find hard to fully appreciate. Clarice was already in her 46th year
when I was born.
Think about that a little. Her birth year was 1917.
That, to
my perception, was a world in black and white and where, as seen on the grainy
newsreels of the time, everyone walked about at about one and a half normal pace.
That year itself was momentous with the Russian Revolution and marking a
further period of tragedy and misery in the First World War.
If I think about
my own key years and apply them to the relevant years in Clarice’s life it
makes for startling and sobering comparison.
For example, I started at school
when I was four and if the same education was available to Clarice she would be
in the infant and primary school classes during the early to mid 1920’s. That
will have been an austere era with the country emerging out of the ravages of conflict,
perhaps hopeful of a sustained peace and yet barrelling on towards the financial
crash and Depression that marked much of the following decade.
I went to
Polytechnic from the age of 18 and graduated to take up my first employment
aged 23. Clarice will have been experiencing the onset of the Second World War
at the same stage in her life.
There is no doubting that her generation was unfortunate
to hit just about every momentous national and global event of the 20th
Century.
It was not just a time of upheaval and changes in the world order but
also in the socio-economic and demographic make up of the UK.
I could not wait
to be a thirty something, largely influenced by the characters in a TV series
of the same name. I was expecting that decade in my life to be one of family
and career and I was not in any way disappointed. To some extent the prospect of
reaching the age of 40 was a bit daunting to my younger self. Clarice reached
that four decade milestone in 1957.
Britain in the post war years, as soon as
rationing ended, was in a period of huge growth in output and the wealth of its
working population who enjoyed almost full employment in a thriving industrial
and manufacturing sector.
So, in the year of my own birth, 1963, Clarice was in
her mid forties.
You would think that we would not have much to talk about but
I have a lot of time for Clarice and I really enjoy asking her questions about
her life and times.
Her generation are an invaluable source of facts,
information and wisdom and what could be better than their first hand
recounting of experiences. No, Wikipedia is nowhere near.
Yesterday evening was
one of privileged access to the vast memory bank of someone who has seen so
much change in the world let alone on her own doorstep. I learned a lot.
If
there is just one bit of advice that I could pass on to my own generation is
don’t play cards for cash with a clever centenarian.
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