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.