Memories

I'm a bit ambivalent about the value of memories.I'm not sure that their impact on what we do or say is entirely beneficial. Even more importantly how they can make us feel is not necessarily good. 

I've never been very good at remembering things that have happened. Friends & family can remember times we shared far better than I can. I have very few memories of my childhood & they are not very clear. I can remember a place in the countryside I could walk to & really enjoy being in very well, even how I got there. I can remember a time in primary school when I was very upset, but not why or what happened afterwards. I can remember playing in the street with other children. I can remember a huge argument about me going to the Ideal Home exhibition with a friend. I can remember practicing the piano in a very cold front room. My childhood is little random vignettes. Even having hypnotherapy didn't help me recall more.

For some reason I don't understand my mind seems to have erased a lot. It isn't a new thing, I've always had a problem with it. 

I can remember far more of my life as an adult, but even then there are lots of events that other people remember & I don't. Mostly what sticks in my mind is polarised, either very pleasurable experiences & places I've been, or the complete opposite. I can remember emotions & feelings. I can remember faces.

My feeling is that it is important to know what has gone before in our lives, but dwelling in the past isn't helpful. It's gone & can't be changed. Everyones memories will be a melange of good & bad. Few of us will sail through life on a rosy cloud. I think that we should try to live in the moment & really value where we are now, what we are doing & who we are with. Life passes by so quickly, it's easy to become a slave to routine & not take chances that are offered.  

I know people who hold grudges, who misguidedly think that everything was better in the past, who hold onto sadness & anger. Lives filled with those sort of memories are not happy. We all need joy in our lives & we need to actively try to create good new memories. 

Now is what is important & what we do with it. 

Memory

Here I sit at my PC losing my mind & minding my loss. As I think I have mentioned before, there is plenty of data in my brain, it's retrieval that's the problem. 

I have just realised that I completely forgot to do my volunteer stint at the community centre last week. Normally it would be on the wipe clean weekly calendar on my fridge, in the paper calendar on my desk & in the calendar on my smart phone. Alexa would then remind me becase she is synched to my phone, as is my computer calendar. None of that happened, so I blithely went on with my day - in the wrong place.

The good side of that is no one needs to worry about me repeating gossip, I won't remember it. I may well not remember that I have told you something though & repeat it. (Please do tell me if I do). I may also completely forget that you have asked me to do something, so you may wait a long time to see it done. 

I am a compulsive note maker in my smartphone - but it isn't infallible because I may forget to look at Notes. Even more likely I won't remember what the cryptic note means!

In common with a lot of my friends I can set off to do something & be distracted & completely forget what it was I was going to do. I can almost feel a thought drifting out of my head. It's no good trying to remember what it was, but it might creep up on me if I ignore it.

All of this can be a bit frustrating, but there is nothing more I can do to counteract the loss of short term memory. I have known several people who had Alzheimers or vascular dementia & I'm reasonably sure I haven't got that, thank goodness. I'm just a bit unreliable. But I know I am & actually it really doesn't worry me much. I don't feel any compulsion to be perfectly reliable & organised anymore.

I think that along with so many physical & mental changes that take place in old age you have to go with the flow. Acceptance is a blessing. 

Just so long as you don't give up or bang on about it!

Christmas Waste

My book club had a clothes swap last night. Great fun & a really good way to recycle unloved clothes, especially when it's the Christmas season & we all need a nice outfit for Christmas day. Fast fashion comes into it's own at this time of year. I know people who buy a new outfit for Christmas every year. Often the clothes will only be worn a handful of times. Nothing I will be wearing is less than a few years old & some items have been in my wardrobe over a decade. I love them & I'm comfortable wearing them.

Christmas must be the worst period for food waste. Sprouts & Christmas pudding are probably the most "marmite" foods we eat at Christmas. I love both, but lots of people don't & a great deal ends up in the green food waste bin. I tried making sprout soup one year, but it wasn't a success. How many people actually use all the left over bits of turkey to make a fricassee for example? Even less people I imagine use the turkey bones to make a wonderful soup. The art of cooking from scratch & not wasting good food has been replaced by the big 5 supermarkets Christmas food.

Then there are the Christmas cards. I stopped sending them years ago & send email greetings & give the money saved on the cards & stamps to charity. I see little point in sending cards to people I can actually wish Happy Christmas to in person. The waste of paper, whatever the source including trees, or even if it's recycled paper, really isn't acceptable to me. My time is valuable, so I send the cards electronically in batches to different groups. Writing individual cards by hand just isn't a good use of my time. If I get cards I do cut up appropriate ones to make gift tags, but I still think it's a waste of finite resources.

Wrapping paper is even worse. I am rubbish at wrapping gifts & doing it causes me repetetive strain pain. I try to take wrapping paper off carefully to re use it, but actually it rarely works. When you see the over loaded recycling bins after Christmas it gives you a small idea of how much waste there is.

The decorations & Christmas tree take quite a lot of effort & money. Goodness knows how many real trees are chopped down every year & growing them must take up land that could be used for food production or re-foresting with deciduous trees. It has become fashionable to change your christmas tree decorations on a regular basis according to the current fashion. I'm pleased to say that my daughter has all my tree decorations & some were her grandmothers. I gave her my artificial tree too. The sales, often starting before Christmas are full of reduced christmas decorations , wreaths & lights. 

Finally, the presents. Many will end up in landfill, charity shops or the "present drawer". I have come to the conclusion that really presents are only appropriate for children. I'm not a scrooge or a grump, but the time spent trying to think of & find presents people will actually want or need is often wasted. I do really enjoy seeing someone open a present that it's obvious they are delighted with, but that isn't easy to achieve. Much of the time people feign pleasure & to be honest what is wonderful about socks, ties, jumpers, nightwear or slippers. Surely we all buy those for ourselves?

https://www.asustainablelife.co.uk/12-not-so-fun-festive-facts/

It's a mad repetetive cycle. We consume & consume & in doing so waste so much. It's completely unsustainable. What are we thinking?

Obviously we aren't!

 

Having a Voice

Old people, especially women, often say that they feel they are invisible. They can feel like unwanted outsiders in society, and may withdraw into isolation, in reality it's possible that we oldies collude in that. It's a form of ageism.

According to research by the Mather Institute the UK had the most negative ageist attitude, followed by a cluster of India, Bangladesh, Canada, the US, and Kenya. The most positive were Sri Lanka, followed by Ghana and Tanzania. "They found that ageism was not related to the proportion of older adults in the population or speed of ageing population growth. However, greater long-term orientation and greater masculine cultural dimensions were associated with greater ageism". "Ageism may be greater in these societies because they favour strength and competition, characteristics that are generally not associated with older adults". Conversely countries influenced by Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, such as Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam all value wisdom imparted by elders and treat them with a high degree of respect.

Fridays debate in the UK Parliament gave a voice to politicians on the issue of assisted dying. For once, it was a debate worth listening to. As a free vote there was no party affiliation & cross bench "yah booing". People actually listened to the points being well made. The voices on both sides were heard. I wish that happened all the time. 

We all have a voice, whatever our age, position in society, education & condition. The trouble is some voices are louder than others, some out shout more moderate voices. Some people even feel that their opinion is actually more important than others because of their intellect, education or status. These things may be important, but I think that experience matters more. 

We need to listen to people who know first hand what a situation is like. That is why we do need to listen to the voices of the elderly. They have years of experience of a huge variety of situations. They see repeating patterns & cycles & learn from them. 

On the other hand, we oldies really shouldn't "bang on" about our lives repetetively & boringly. We shouldn't be trapped in the past, it really wasn't necessarily that brilliant. We should be selective & just pass on the real nuggets of experience that might help in our current very complex world. 

We need to earn respect. It isn't a right.

 

A time to Die

I don't sit around wondering if I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I do know that my body is a complex system of interlinked parts that has been working more or less efficiently for nearly 80 years. Therefore, I know intellectually it is wearing out. My sell by date is approaching. That is logical & entirely acceptable.

In the meantime I am going to enjoy the life I have. I'm going to do the things that give me pleasure. I'm going to decline to do the things that don't. I'm also going to spend as little time as I can with people who are negative & self absorbed because they drain the joy out of life. I want to enjoy being with people I actually like. If you know you have a finite time remaining, then why waste it?

I do however spend a little time thinking about the "how" of dying. There have been people in my life who have had a "good" death. There are also those who haven't. I don't have a problem with dying, but I am a little concerned about the "how". I've lived alone for 15 years & am happy with that. But I really don't fancy being incapacitated & unable to look after myself. I would not want to have a fall or heart attack on my own without being able to summon help. The idea of lying in my house slowly dying or in pain until someone realised they hadn't seen me in a while isn't appealing. It is a reality however because there are quite often days when I don't speak to anyone.

I know I'm a bit of a control freak. So I have a house I designed to be future proof for my old age. I wear a personal alarm linked to the phone. I have quite a wide circle of friends. I have an on line presence to keep in touch with people I don't see.

There is a time to die for all of us. It can come at any age, any time, or place. We often have little or no warning. In reality we are dying from the moment we are born. All of that is acceptable & part of the natural order. 

The big change in my lifetime is that we are living longer & as a consequence there seems to be far more dis-ease. More people seem to have chronic conditions that involve pain, fatigue & disability. Much of that is probably bearable. The situation I cannot accept is that a proportion of people will have a very poor experience of death, involving great pain & disability, which are not properly controlled. There is a lack of good hospice care & what there is is dependent on donations.

I understand the complex issues around assisted dying, but I really hope that I will live long enough to have the choice if I get to that stage. I do not want to suffer. I want to have some agency over my death.

We are watching people dying in their hundreds of thousands around the world in places like Palestine, Yemen & Sudan & we are doing little or nothing to help. If we can tolerate that, surely we can make a conscious decision to help people who really want to die for very good reasons & have safeguards for those who shouldn't be helped. Or are our  lives more important than theirs?

Making a Difference - Individual Agency

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about holidays & travelling. He didn't feel that what he does makes any difference to the climate emergency issue & wants to visit as many places as possible while he can. We are good friends, and although we agree on a lot of things, we do disagree on some major issues. Fortunately we can argue our corner without getting annoyed.

It did make me think though.

I do believe that when individuals mobilise to make change happen we can be really powerful. I used to live near Newbury & supported the demonstrators at Greenham Common & Aldermaston. (I didn't camp out though). I have marched on issues I believed needed to change & would do so again if I had the physical capapbility. I lobby a lot & support charities financially. I try to tread lightly in our world & not aid & abet it's destruction. 

"We are like raindrops, but together we turn into the sea". Iranian protester.

Public opinion is very powerful for both good and ill. I don't accept that an individual can continue doing things that they know are harmful because they are just one person & many others are doing the same. That way just stops beneficial change from happening. To my mind, if what you are doing is both harmful & unnecessary, you are simply being selfish. I can understand that it is very hard to change ingrained habits & practices. But once you have evidence that you should stop, then you should.

The difficulty is knowing what to believe, what is evidence based. Greenwashing is rampant about Climate Change, backed by huge resources of money & power. We live in a post truth world where knowing what to believe about a lot of issues is very difficult. Everyone has a responsibility to be confident in sources of information & not to believe any crackpot or conspiracy theory. 

But at the end of the day the survival of our world & all it's inhabitanats is dependent on every individual playing an informed & engaged part. Everyone acting together can make a difference. No one can opt out. Do you really believe that something magical will happen to put everything right? I stopped believing in fairies & Father Christmas decades ago.

If we don't all use our individual agency to change it really might be the end of not just the day, but much worse.

Inherited Wealth & Inheritance Tax

I've probably mentioned before I don't believe in inherited wealth. So many reasons, but mainly - an accident of birth shouldn't be able to determine that you have wealth, position or influence that you haven't earned in any way whatsoever. I also think that wealth you have been given, but not worked for, means less than wealth you have created yourself through your own endeavours. I don't believe that wealth should be concentrated in a very small percentage of the population. We humans need to be altruistic & share what we have. We can and should be prepared to even out wealth distribution fairly. That doesn't mean I believe in giving hand outs to people who aren't prepared to make any effort to support themselves. But we can & should support people who are struggling to have the basics in life. It also doesn't mean that I am not prepared to help my family or friends if they get into financial difficulty.

I actually think that the excesses of many of the extremely wealthy are obscene in light of the fact that people are starving, dying of curable disease, don't have clean water & sanitation, are displaced & don't have homes.....I don't know how they justify it. 

I actually don't mind paying taxes, including inheritance tax. I would be willing to pay more if it would improve life & support people who needed help. I do, however, object to our outdated & complex tax system, which very few people, including tax officers understand.

A report by IFS researchers, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, argued that the parts of the UK tax system that dictate how different forms of income are taxed are not fit for purpose. "There is no pain-free way to fix the current tax system: any meaningful reform will create losers as well as winners. But keeping the status quo is also a choice – one that unfairly penalises ordinary employees and investors, and creates inefficiency and administrative costs that make us all poorer.” "This report highlight(s) the unfairness, inefficiency and complexity inherent in the current approach to taxing different forms of income, specifically the different treatment of employment and labour income compared to business ownership and capital incomes. This penalises employees and distorts investment decisions, to the detriment of social well-being". 

The tax Competitive Index has repeatedly selected Estonia as having the best tax code in the OECD.  "Estonia’s transparent and simple tax system attracts investments with no corporate income tax, no capital tax, no property transfer taxes". The UK is 26th in the 2022 list.

Surely we can do better than this? The UK government uses the tax system  to achieve social and political goals rather than simply using tax systems for what they are good at – raising revenue for government spending.

I've been fortunate to become far more financially secure than my parents were. Partly due to both my husband & I having secure professional jobs with good pensions & partly due to circumstances in the property market. If people with disposable wealth simply hold on to it all & pass it on to their children we perpetuate unfairness & inequality. 

Not all are born equal, but all should have equal opportunities.