Its that time of the week when all good Bloggers, (and some not so good bloggers) have to commit to writing something which should be entertaining and a little though provoking. Now some people I know can sit down and knock out an article in twenty minutes, which makes sense and has just the right amount of Irony in it to make it a joy to read.
I on the other hand write in a dialect which comes from living in the northwest of England, as one voiceover guy once asked “do you want this script reading in English or with an Oldham accent”?
So to this weeks literary masterpiece. As most of you are aware my long suffering other half figures fairly large in my life because unlike most couples we know we don’t have a great deal in common. This means that we spend a great deal of time doing stuff the other one likes to do.
For example we went to watch the Jersey Boys and I found it more entertaining watching Ann sing along rather than the event itself. Equally there have been times when she has been on very long boring film shoots just so we could spend time together. However having said that we muddle along together very well and life is very comfortable at our place.
We have now been married 34 years in June and it has flown past in the blink of an eye and when people ask us what is the secret of our longevity we jokingly respond by explaining we were that busy trying to pay the mortgage for the first twenty years we hardly saw each other.
More seriously though I put it down to the fact we learned fairly early on that we had to compromise in order to make life tolerable and it seems to have worked.
So what got me thinking about this was this afternoon we were lucky enough to be invited to a 40th Anniversary Party being thrown by some very close friends of ours. Now I have now reached the age were most parties we are invited to are in the afternoon, the reasoning I think has something to do with the fact we can keep awake and enjoy ourselves without dozing in a chair and dribbling.
To make the party entertaining they produced the wedding photographs and quite a few people at the gathering were actually at the wedding. We all had a Laugh at various dodgy 1970s hairstyles and fashions but on the whole the people who are now in there sixties didn’t look quite as old as my parents did when they were that age.
I urge you all to look at your family photographs and look at your mothers and fathers and look at them carefully and see if you can spot the hint of them having a hard working life. I am sure that I am in better shape than my parents were at my age.
My Dad worked Sixty hours a week all his working life and I never heard him complain once, even when he was leaving for work at six in the morning. So next time I start complaining about my 35 hour working week and my daily commute of around Ten miles, I think I need to get a grip.
I just need to cast my mind back to 1970 the year I started work when I worked five and a half days a week, from 8.00 in the morning till 6.00 at night and 8.00 till 12.00 on Saturdays and travelled an hour each way on a bus. By comparison even though my job can be stressful at times my working days are marginally shorter and I very rarely work weekends.
John d eccles 