The present is a foreign country

'The past is a foreign country' is a) one of the best first lines of a book ever, b) a bit of a cliché.

But it feels to me much more nowadays that it is the present that is a foreign country.

Yes, they do things differently there. Much of the time, I feel like a stranger. I just don't understand the habits and conventions of daily life any more.

Partly, it's not having children. I often wondered why young people walk around on the phone all the time. My sisters explained to me that their kids phone them when they are walking from place to place because it saves time later and because they like to have the company. I kind of understand the first reason (mum gets squeezed into dead time, because they are so busy), but not really the second. I've always been quite happy with my own company, and I like the chance to get some thinking time.

I don't actually understand young people. (This feels odd, because I used to be one and, like most people, remember it vividly. But it all seems different now.) And on the whole, I find them pretty irritating (apart from the ones I'm related to, who are, of course, wonderful human beings). Is not liking young people a definition of being middle-aged? If so, I've finally made it.

And I don't get modern manners. I was brought up under a different rule book. People said please, thank you and sorry. People didn't have private conversations in public places. No-one threw litter. In shops, the customer was always right.

Presumably, people nowadays aren't deliberately being rude. So has a different set of conventions taken over? Is there another way of showing respect? And why didn't I get the memo?

Up to now, I've never considered myself old-fashioned. After all, I live on the internet. But, outside of social media, I don't get popular culture. I don't watch the X Factor. I've avoided the Christmas ads. I refuse to give in to the bread and circuses. And I'm genuinely scared that too much TV will rot my brain.

I'm really trying not to be a grumpy old woman. I'm just a bit lost. Please can someone show me a map of this new country – or maybe a guidebook? Or, at least, let me know that it's not just me.

When did you ever see ‘wisdom’ on a job description?

This time next week I will be unemployed, or workless as our politicians like to say. It’ll be the second time this year I have left a job and both times I was glad to do so. The first time was redundancy after several years in the same place, some good, some bad, so I left with mixed feelings. It felt very much like a divorce. The job I’ve been doing for the last six months was only ever supposed to be temporary. It feels like the rebound relationship that you know all along is not going to last.

The next step is to find out what I really want to do with the rest of my life. That’s where the relationship analogy breaks down, because I don’t want another job. My plan was always to work for myself and although it scares me more now (because I’ve had more time to think about it), I realise I have to make that happen. Partly because I now know that it would be very difficult to get another job even if I wanted one.

Staying with the same company for several years meant I’d been a bit cocooned. I’d heard about people over 50 being thrown on the scrapheap but it was one of those things that happened to other people. As long as there was someone in the company older than me (and I think it was just one) that didn’t scare me.

I’d heard from other people, only a bit older than myself, about the knockbacks you can expect at a certain age. I didn’t think it would happen to me. Recently, it has.

Only yesterday I read two things that made me stop and think. First, a throwaway remark in a book review that women in their fifties earn less than women in their thirties. It took me years to work up to what felt to me like a decent salary. Is it downhill again after all that work?

Then, an article about workplace trends that talked about ‘millennials’ taking over from ‘boomers’. ‘And it’s about time’ they added. Bastards.

I’ve seen jobs advertised that I know I could do well, but I know that former colleagues I’ve trained and mentored could also do well. Those women are second-jobbers now and those jobs will go to people like them, not to people like me. They’ve already got the skills that I took years to acquire (and yes, I’ll concede that it is because they are ‘digital natives’). I could still bring more to the job than them because I have wisdom and experience – but when did you ever see ‘wisdom’ on a job description?

So, I will make that first sentence a lie. I’ll rely on my wisdom to take the right path. I won’t be unemployed. I’ll be self-employed.

Wish me luck.

Showing the sunlight outside: why I will always love reading

There was a nice piece by Neil Gaiman in the Guardian this week about why reading is a Good Thing for children, and the rest of us. It ought to be obvious, but it obviously isn’t because there was a lot there that needed saying: about the importance of imagination and information, the value of culture and wisdom. And about fiction that opens a door and ‘shows the sunlight outside’. 

It reminded me to feel grateful for the gift of literacy. It’s easy to take for granted, but I can’t imagine life without it.

I still remember the day I first learnt to read: it’s one of my earliest, and most precious memories. I was sitting with my mother and she was reading to me from a book called Farm Babies. She’d read it to me many times before and the pages were familiar. I remember pointing at a word and saying: ‘That says lamb’. In that moment, I understood what reading was. I got it.

My mother doesn’t remember. I couldn’t communicate the significance of that moment. I didn’t know the word ‘eureka’. But it was the beginning of something important.

I’d like to say that from that moment on I read everything I could get my hands on. In reality, it took a while. I had to go to school first and get officially taught to read. (Flashcards, I recall, were the fashion in the early ’60s.) But once I knew how to do it, I was the proverbial kid with their nose in a book. My favourite school report had an entry against ‘Reading’ that just said ‘Almost incessantly’.

At junior school we had a brilliant school library, and I got the run of it when I’d finished all the books in our reading scheme. I worked my way through the Moomin series very happily.

There was also a book-buying scheme, run through the school, that provided worthy novels with educational aims. I remember one about the American civil rights movement – still topical at the time – and another called Helen Keller’s Teacher. Eye-opening stuff. (As an adult, I still learn from fiction as much as from ‘factual’ stuff.)

Happy memories: Saturday visits to the local library, getting car-sick on the way home because I couldn’t wait to start reading. Visits to friends’ houses where I raided their book collections instead of playing with them. Christmas holiday trips to spend book tokens. Puffins, of course, but Green Dragons too. Exotic places like Narnia and Mallory Towers and Wyoming (I read the My Friend Flicka books for the human interest because, unlike my sisters, I wasn’t very interested in horses).

I hadn’t realised until just now that those books are among the most vivid of my childhood memories – more than most of what happened in the ‘real’ world. And I can relive them any time I choose, just by going to the bookshelves.

I read less now. Less fiction, anyway. There’s the internet, of course. And there are times when I say I won’t read novels again (I’m the person who hates everything in the book group). Then I find another one that has the magic. And when I’m too tired for newspapers, and too depressed for television, and too bored for anything else, only a book will do.