Social Life

We walk up Main Street and turn left up Old Smithy Lane. The first cottage has a sign outside, “An old rooster lives here with a young chick”. We climb up past the old smithy and the [...]

In the past, Ann and I lived just outside the Lake District. Even by the early 1980’s, the area was full of dead villages. The cottages still stood, but the owners dwelt in Newcastle and [...]

The derelict cottage in the Peak reads rather like an old poem. Indeed, it even sounds like an old poem as the moping owl calls in the dead of night. The photograph shows the building exactly as [...]

Ah, life in the countryside. Back in Christchurch, my mountain jacket or duvet, and my big leather walking boots were, let’s say, overkill. Wearing them seemed odd and set me apart from [...]

I periodically sprinkle the word woke into my posts. That makes me, a pensioner, appear in touch with the modern world even if I have no idea what it really means. Well, that might have to stop [...]

As I slave over these posts I often have to fall back on the dictionary. Perhaps that is not apparent when you read them! The moment I sift through the pages, I recall a gruff man holding a [...]

Psychologists advise us to love ourselves, but what does that really mean? If it means taking a positive view of your past then perhaps I do love myself. This thought arose because I was mulling [...]

Increasing male violence during the pandemic comes as no surprise to me. All over the world, men have a problem. Any lockdown, with its frustrations, brings out the bully. As a result, they [...]

The government is struggling to manage the pandemic and deaths are rising. We were not ready for this pandemic anymore than they were ready for the 1918 Spanish flu. Indeed, over my 45 years in [...]

When I registered on NHS England as extremely vulnerable, I had to state whether I was able to maintain food supplies. At first, I said yes. Days later and unable to contact Sainsbury’s, I [...]