Ups and downs

My sister Hilary rang at lunchtime to say things had all gone pear shaped: Mum's blood pressure was very low and they were giving her a transfusion, but rated her chances at about 50-50. My sister was asked whether they should try to resuscitate Mum if her heart stopped, or not: what a decision to have thrust on you! She said no: Mum has never wanted to be just kept alive, and if it's time for her to go she'd rather just go, she's said that before. I agreed, when I talked to Hilary, and gave her what support I could: she'd just got home and was very tired, both physically and emotionally. When I rang the hospital, they said that Mum's blood pressure was rising a little, and she was a bit better, and later this evening they said she was definitely better than she had been in the morning. So we'll see what they say tomorrow, and if need be I'll go down then to be with her. But that will mean not doing the day of teaching I have planned for Saturday, which will let a lot of people down, and I don't want to do that: it's a very hard decision to make. I suppose that if there's any risk of her dying, I'll go to be with her: I'd feel very unhappy if I'd stayed away and she died without anyone there. Ah well... we plan and life turns out differently - and so, of course, does death. Nothing prepares you: not even knowing your parents are 94 and cannot last much longer prepares you for the actual event. I thought I was cool about it, an almost welcome peaceful end to a long life with a lot of happy times: but I've been distracted and out of myself all day. And writing this has helped: I'm now clearer that going is what is to be done.

Oh, Mother!

My Mum was 94 last Thursday: and yesterday she grabbed a towel instead of a grab handle (she'd had the most convenient one removed because she felt it was in her way) and fell over and broke her hip. So now she's in hospital in Warwick, having it mended - or possibly partially replaced - and she'll be there the next ten days. My Dad, who is something of a victim, apparently perked up as soon as they took Mum off in the ambulance, and has been much more lively and awake than usual, watching television and generally taking an interest. It worries me that Mum doesn't let him watch TV, she's blind so she can't see it and so she kept telling him to 'turn off that racket' until he stopped bothering to turn it on. And so, denied the only pleasures he has left, because he's pretty immobile and at present can't even be taken outside the house, he sits and dozes all day - but what else is there for him to do! Mum listens to talking books, but both of them must be pretty bored with the daylight hours when the carers aren't there. I think they'd be happier in a home, but Mum won't hear of it. It's a bit daft, though, when they build flats for old people where every door has a step up to it, and the main entrance is into a porch about three feet square with a right angled turn to get into the house - not the remotest possibility of wheelchair access.

Meanwhile they live in temperatures that would make a sauna seem cool, expending energy with gay abandon as if the planet had no tomorrow. And this, too, worries me: in a home they would at least be sharing the energy use with many others. Their electricity bill is over £80 per month, and that's not keeping pace with their useage - and that's in the summer! I want to get a room thermometer to see just how hot it is in there, but it won't make any difference: when my mother has decided she wants something, she decides everyone else wants it too and that is what will happen, and evidence to the contrary is just not welcomed. As a child, I never had to work out what I wanted, because Mum told me: it took me ages in later life to learn how to develop my own tastes, and even now I have problems over choosing what I want.

But I wonder, now, how far old people generally don't see green issues as relevant to them. Neither of my parents has much sense of taste left: fresh organic chicken to them tastes the same as frozen battery cardboard, and they can't really chew meat at all anyway. My mum always has an excuse - it's undercooked, it's overcooked, it's too dry or whatever: and she can't see what she's eating which must make it very hard for her. But the carer who shops for her has no idea at all about the Planet, and buys a curious mixture of 'the Best' expensive stuff which she can't appreciate and the cheap 'value' brand which is mostly factory produced food. When I'm there I transform their shopping and eating, and if I get moved down there I can do it all for them: but there must be millions of older people for whom the kind of issues even faint-hearted greenish people like me think are important just don't exist. And what, pray, do we all do about that, without abusing the elderly?

So what's greenish here?

Apart from the text colour, that is! Well, I've become aware more and more in the last year or so of the increasingly urgent need to save the planet. I've been partially aware for some time: I did an Adult Ed. course at Newcastle University some years ago called 'put your money where your mouth is', which was about practical ways in which to have a lighter footprint on the Earth. It was quite an eye-opener: some things most people think are being green simply move the problem one step further up a chain, for example. But it didn't affect my behaviour a lot: I was already recycling bottles and cans and newspapers, long before we had recycling bins, and I wasn't a profligate car user - though I did go to my green classes as one person in a Vauxhall Cavalier, which was rather defeating the object! Now I'm much more aware of what is possible, and I started this blog on June 6th which was World Environment Day - I'd signed the pledge the day before, at the Farmers Market (there you go, buying local produce, mostly organic, very expensive but better tasting and better for the planet) to say the things I'd do or already did. I was doing most of them - showering of necessity, because six weeks after having an abcess on my back lanced it still needs dressings on it, and using low energy light bulbs. And since they made both metro (we have this great local rail system in Newcastle and I live about 300 metres from a station) and bus travel free for ancients like me, I've been using both a lot more and the car much less for local journeys. I even put the statutory brick in the loo cistern, and it's a relatively small cistern anyway: if I was staying here I'd have the bathroom and loo both redone, with a dual flush system.

But: I know I'm rather half-hearted. Like the meat-eating when so many of my friends feel it right to be veggie but I just don't want to give up rump steak, there are other things I don't want to stop. I want to travel abroad, as soon as I can afford it (my pension muddle will be sorted very soon and I'll have some back pay!): one of my ambitions is to go to the opera in Sydney, and I don't take too kindly to being tutted at by people who have already been to the Antipodes. But maybe I will give something to an environmental charity to compensate for the emissions of my flight - for I've neither the time nor money for a boat. I looked at crossing the Atlantic on a ship and it's about five times the cost of flying, or similar to going club. And sometimes, like when I go to visit my aged parents, a car is pretty essential: I can't do as much for them on foot, I've tried going by train and it has serious disadvantages. There's no bus, not now, to their little complex: there was a lovely electric tram (how green can you get!) but they took it off.

I do try. I go to my Quaker Meeting now by metro, even though it means getting up earlier in order to get the train. I've even been to committee meetings by metro, though I don't like standing alone at night on Jesmond station waiting for a train: as a woman on your own, you do feel rather vulnerable. I drink organic milk, though it's not local - it might be better to drink local milk but then I'd have to drive to get it! So there are always going to be compromises. What I'd be interested in is any comments with new and different suggestions for a greener lifestyle, beyond the obvious ones that I either follow already or simply aren't willing or able to follow. I want my great grandchidren to survive: after watching the second David Dimbleby programme last week I began to wonder if it was even worth trying. The political will, particularly amongst the middle-of-the-road Americans, seems to be totally lacking, and without the USA on board the planet is doomed anyway. When they have a president who's seen the effects of Katrina but still isn't convinced that climate change is a reality now, let alone in the future, then really do we have any hope, at least till he's gone. I curse the way they ran that election in Florida, for Gore won there without a shadow of doubt: and we might have had a planet left with him. But then, when a sizeable proportion of a nation's population believe in creationism, you do wonder quite how backward that nation is.

I don't want to end on such a pessimistic note, however. I do think that if enough of us do enough to make it clear to our political leaders that yes, we do want to save the Earth and yes, we will pay more to do so, then there is hope and the Americans might just follow where we lead. If Britain is top nation for environmental care, the US will surely want to beat us: and then we may just be in time to save not only the Polar Bear but also the whole Earth.

What I look like

I'm new to this! So I thought I'd just try a couple of photos, so you can see what I look like. This one on the right is a rather glam one I'd had taken at a cut price makeover. I was told the photographer was Heather Mills' stepmother: she was from somewhere in Central Europe but she certainly knew her job!

The second one is the rather more ordinary me, taken on a self timer down on the rocks at St. Mary's island at the north end of Whitley Bay. One of these days I'll get one or two more 'ordinary' ones, just me in the house maybe, for later inclusion.

In the beginning

I've created this blog because although I have no fewer than three others in different places, they are all restricted (sometimes for good reason!) and this is public. And I'd like to put some of my thoughts before the public: I have this vain hope that they might be of interest!

Why do I have three other blogs? Well, one is specifically Quaker. Being a Quaker is important to me, and not unconnected with the title of this blog: it's because of my beliefs and leadings that I'm trying to be greenish - I don't think I'm deeply green and I'm certainly not fanatical! Put it this way: I'm a vegetarian who eats meat. Does that tell you what 'greenish' means? A second blog is my autobiography. Some of that is intensely personal, and until I'm a best selling author I don't really want quite a bit of my life story to be public. And the third is about a very private side of my life, and is strictly for a very few who are my confidantes about that.

So this is the public blog, the public me, the modern day 'diary of a Nobody'. Whilst I wouldn't presume to emulate George and Weedon Grossmith who wrote the original Diary (and if you haven't read it, do - it has me laughing helplessly every time I read it), I hope at least to try to shed a little insight, a little humour, a little proselytising for what I believe to be the big issues of the day.

Who, then, is this nutty woman who dares to think her ramblings might be of interest? Well, I'm Sarah, I'm 64, I'm retired as of the end of last year, and I'm trying to be a writer. Most of my career I worked in various capacities in universities: first at City in London, as a more or less conventional lecturer in a rather specialist field somewhere in the middle of mathematics, engineering and computer science, and then at the Open University as a Staff Tutor, a manager of the 'ordinary' tutors who worked at that time for the Faculty of Technology and taught students in Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Finally I emigrated to Newcastle upon Tyne where I still live, to work at what is now Northumbria University, to help ease the path of would-be adult students. I won't go into that: the job, and my boss, were both disasters, and my solution was to walk away, to accept early retirement and to forge a different life for myself. It was a highly educative experience: my income dropped to a quarter of its previous level, and I discovered that money really isn't all that important and being at peace with oneself is. I'd swapped the one for the other and I'd do it again, any day.

I worked as what is called a 'portfolio worker' after that, doing a variety of part time jobs. I didn't want to work full time any more, I'd discovered the immense value of time to oneself. Why these people who 'earn' telephone number salaries for seventy hours a week don't job-share and settle for a mere £80K a year or so for half time work, I don't know: the world would be a happier place for it and they themselves would be even happier. In my last few years at the OU, I developed an intense desire for promotion, for someone to say they thought me worthwhile in the only way that was meaningful. When I went to Northumbria it was on the promoted grade, but I found it meant nothing: and when I'd just retired, a former colleague whom I had envied because he had been promoted very early in his own OU career was found one morning dead at his desk at home. He was younger than I am. At that point I lost all ambition for worldly success and settled for a meaningful life instead.

Now you've seen one of my constant habits: I digress, very easily! I was saying about my career in retirement: I spent a fascinating year as a project manager in the NHS, organising the distribution of grants to dentists in order to buy monitoring equipment to increase the safety of dental operations under general anaesthetic. But mostly I drifted back into teaching adults: I devised and taught a course for several years about using a home computer, for those who had bought one and didn't quite know what to do with it, but for whom the conventional CLAIT courses were not quite right (amongst other things they taught very little about the basics of Windows). I also taught for the OU, I assisted the woman in Newcastle who did the job I used to do, and I ended as a student adviser, trying to help potential drop-outs to stay on course. And then, last Christmas, I retired.

So now the days are often 'free', and I am left with only my own self discipline to fall back on. At the start I was going to write for half an hour every day: but that went by the board fairly fast. I have several things to fill my time: looking after 94 year old parents, for a start, and they live 230 miles away so that's not easy. There are also several Quaker committees, which is both interesting and personally affirming (gosh, they want me!) but also time consuming, especially as they are mostly in London. And now there's this blog.

If you've managed to read this far, I think you're doing well! I'll try to make future entries both shorter and pithier, more focussed. But it seemed right to start with a bit of background, so I hope that now you feel you know me just a little bit.