This is what Sue is constantly being asked in Borneo.  When indeed.  My life right now is made of lists.  I spend my days ticking things off, adding new things and studying.  Studying English, trying to get to grips with stuff which for some reason I never learned when I acquired the language in the first place: adverbs; clauses; perfect tenses and; past participles.  Studying funerals, I've now written my first Humanist funeral service for my course. Also trying to sell the boat.  I've slashed the price and four people were interested at the last count. On my laptop I have two countdown clocks: one showing how long before I return to the UK for my teaching English as a foreign language course and to finish my funeral celebrant course (14 days, 1 hour and 56 minutes) and; one showing my deadline for leaving for Borneo (64 days, 2 hours and 55 minutes).  Why the extra hour?  Of course, the clocks change. Sue meanwhile is having a fascinating ...

God I feel old today.  I flew from Bari to Birmingham via Zurich this morning, so I could attend the first day of my Celebrant course.  Having checked into my hotel I took a stroll around the city centre.  I have been coming here since the early seventies.  First as a schoolboy in a canal boat and later as a stressed executive in a company car.  As I walked around layer after layer of memories began to be peeled away. On the way back to the hotel I dropped into an Indian restaurant and found myself in a building over the canal that you can see in both these photos, looking out over Gas Street Basin.  When I first came here forty years ago the Basin was derelict and forgotten and the only way to get into it was through a gap in the fence of the ATV Television Centre car park.  Now it's a fashionable post-industrial residential and shopping zone.  In the intervening period there has even been time for a new pub to be built and fall derelict, now b...

The day after my last post Sue got confirmation of her job in Borneo along with a whole raft of information, so we are now running around like maniacs. Sue sets off for Kota Kinabalu from Bari Airport on Friday.  Last weekend we spent booking tickets and pouring over Google Earth at the 20 possible postings Sue had to chose from.  She finally settled on Mukah a small fishing town in Sarawak. Originally I planned to join her before Christmas, but already I can feel the pull of a new adventure and hope to depart by the end of November if possible.  This would mean leaving Puglia in mid October to go to the UK where my current plan is to do my British Humanist Society celebrant training and a one month Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Brighton. I feel scared and disorientated by the speed with which all this is happening and I will be sad to see Sue off on Friday, even though we will hopefully see each other again before November is out. The local spe...

Ha, ha!  Nearly two weeks ago I expected that our lives would by now have some shape and clarity.  Well not quite.  Sue had her interview and on Monday was made a provisional job offer by the British Council in Borneo.  However, since then we have heard nothing further despite the fact that the job is meant to start in less than two weeks.  Knowing how Byzantine the processes are for this kind of overseas aid work Sue can’t yet be sure that the job is in the bag and therefore can’t really begin preparing to go.  I know she is excited about the job and in her head she is already driving around remote village schools, but she is also conflicted about leaving our home.  Over the last couple of days she has been taking pot plants from off our terrace and planting them on our land – as if she is releasing them into the wild, which made me sad. I heard nothing about the interim management job I went for and sent an email to the agency last Friday when the ...

Considering it's the dog days of high summer our lives have been very stressful waiting for things to happen.  Usually I write about this stuff after the event, but this time I'm in the middle of it.  Last Thursday I was accepted onto a training course to become a "celebrant" at humanist funerals.  It's a short course, but after it I will be able to officiate in crematoria and other places in the UK where people want a non-religious funeral or memorial service.  Last Wednesday I sent my CV off to an agency for a well paid interim management job in London.  I know that I would be very good at this particular job, but that because of my age and (for an accountant) "exotic" lifestyle I don't stand much chance of getting an interview.  Realistically, if I don't hear today I can forget it and I will need to start accepting that the chances of finding well paid consultancy work in the UK are getting increasingly remote.  As a fall-back I am considerin...

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight. If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”. Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joint...

I was 56 on Friday and it’s more or less a year since I started this blog. When I began I was unsure what I was writing for. Looking at the stuff I’ve written since I find much of it seems self-satisfied and self-justificatory. Actually, paging at random through the blogs of others, the majority of whom seem to be female christians of various ages from the mid west of the United States, I am clearly not alone. In my case I guess it comes with the territory. Brought up by a controlling Mother who used her anxiety to keep me constantly accountable, it’s like a part of me is for ever engaged in the process of answering the question “where have you been, I’ve been worried sick about you.” Over time, the process of creating a bland and positive narrative becomes ingrained. So, as I approach a second year of blogging about myself, I think it’s time to become a bit more real and a bit more interesting, if I can. Starting with the question “why am I writing this blog?” The answer is...