I am forever amazed at the barrage of self-help material urging us to aim for the top, follow our dreams, and especially to be better than everyone else. Just a minute: how can everyone be the best? I figured out the maths around 1972, when New Zealand’s favourite poet, Sam Hunt, told me that female poets (unlike male poets) […]
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It’s official. I’ve retired from my day job. While my friends barely blink at the news, the change in my life is massive. Fact: on 31 March 2016 I ‘retired’ as Director and half-owner of a wonderful little online business, Contented Enterprises Limited. Retirement is not headline news Most of my friends raise a puzzled eyebrow […]
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I like lists. Writing them. Ticking the boxes. Moving on. But sometimes I feel my life is becoming one great list, or worse, a monstrous database of lists within lists within lists. A scatty bitsiness pervades my life. I hear many retired people say they are busier than ever. Busy is good … up to a point. But […]
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Every baby looks like a baby. When you look at a baby, you can guess its age to within a few months. No 15-year-old looks like a 5-year-old, either. Gradually the differences between individuals of the same age stretch out. The difference between two 7-month-old babies is miniscule, and the difference between two septuagenarians is vast. Many, many of us give a […]
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Did you have a label slapped on you as a child? It’s common, goodness knows. In large families they are kind of useful as an identity short-cut for outsiders. I used to think that such labels were all bad, constricting and sometimes condemning us to be a certain sort of person. Now I’m toying with […]
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