Are You Satisfied With The Life You're Living? Uh!

Personally, two children, five grandchildren, two pretty rotten marriage experiences, ( probably my fault TBH), now a great third one…retired, financially rubbish ( see above marriages), spend a lot of my retired time caring for my elderly and increasingly needy mother ( payback for my youth ), but quite contented. And I can sit inside a pub today

 

Better than outside right now ! Big Man up there taking the piss

 

Suspected this for a long time! It was clear your expertise was in criminal law but you always phrased your comments in a very precise way that meant you never claimed to practise law.

Edit: having read further down the thread, I'll add my voice to those that are sorry to hear the news, best wishes to you and the family.

 

Does anyone know any jokes?

 

Knock knock

 

Sorry to hear that. I lost my Mum to Lung cancer. They gave her 6 months to live, but she actually lived for 3 1/2 years following a stage 4 diagnosis, and most of that time she carried on as normal, going on holidays etc. There is some hope and some better treatments around

 

Whose there?

 

Cows go

 

really sorry to hear that. Having been in your situation more time’s than I want to remember, the key to everything is be upbeat around her and talk..a lot..about her childhood..your childhood and make sure she knows she’s been loved. May I wish her well

 

I specialise mostly in bird law.

 

You must be familiar with the Pocono Swallow and it’s distinctive unibrow?

 

You might remember me, possibly, as a man with small hands

 

Just catching up with the thread.

That's sh1te news. My sincerest condolences. Hopefully, you'll still be able to spend some quality time together.

 

An old boss of mine. Chain-smoker, drinker, constant traveller, high-stress etc. etc. diagnosed with late stage lung cancer. Had lung removed. Then brain tumour. Had that removed. That was 10-12 years ago and he's still pootling about now. He needs a cane to stand and get about and has a library named after himself. The tough old buggar. So, everyone, never give up hope.

 

My sister's youngest is dyslexic (he's just turned 19). He was never "diagnosed" with it at his school. My sister (who has a PGCE amongst other things) happened to be visiting his class when he was in primary school and saw that his teacher was telling the class what to do and was writing things on the board. Virtually all of the class started getting on with their tasks while he and a couple of others just sat there doing nothing. She asked him why he wasn't getting on with his tasks and he said he couldn't understand what the teacher was asking him to do. The school wasn't equipped to assess or help him so she took him to see a specialist who recognised his dyslexia, gave him some tasks to help, and also helped instruct my sister and her husband how to really improve his reading skills. Which is what they did to get his reading up to a good standard. My sister was interested enough to expand her teaching skills and has now trained to help children with various learning difficulties, including dyslexia. What people fail to understand with dyslexia is apart from the reading difficulty it also affects a person's ability to organise their thoughts. Give them a list of 10 things to remember and they'll probably only manage to remember the first 4 items. So, as you can imagine, organising and revising for exams is not the easiest for them. Despite these challenges, he has managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get a place at Swansea University to do a computer science course, 1 year foundation + 3 year degree, he probably needs the extra year to get used to a new way of learning. He loves anything to do with computers and technology and has a fantastic imagination, he won a creative essay writing competition when he was younger and at times comes up with the most funny, original things you've ever heard. Ha, but I digress.

My point, apart from praising my sister's hard work and my nephew's sheer determination, is that things like dyslexia don't have to be a barrier to fulfillment and happiness. The world is still their oyster and so it should be.

I rue the day that the polytechnics and technical colleges were turned into "universities", with their former vocational training and qualifications unfairly downgraded/ditched, to be transformed into unsuitable/unrealistic "degrees". We were much better off with the former wider learning base rather than this homogenised mess that we are now presented with.

 

His name isn’t “Watford Central” by any chance is it ?

 

We meet many students at university level who are dyslexic but have never been diagnosed until starting with us.

The cynic in me wonders whether this is often because parental “involvement” in the child’s school work means it isn’t spotted sooner.

 

I am so sorry to hear that UEA and apologies that I've only just seen your original post. All I can say is that I hope she gets as much time as possible.

 

I feel a bit guilty now for writing such a flippant post at the start of this thread.

I sometimes feel I have a guardian angel looking over me as throughout my life I seem to have been guided at the right moments into doing the right things, it's bl**dy spooky when I look back, even recently when we had bad news after bad news, it was almost meant to be. Let me give some examples...

Career: I love the industry I work in but after working for 15 years left my company due to them slowly going bust. I had a few jobs that were just dead ends and couldn't see the next move. Then the Bunsfield oil depot explosion happened in December 2005. It wrecked a building I used to work in, so I went up there, took photos and posted them to a group of former work friends. One of those old colleagues got in touch saying they were looking for someone with my skills to start right away. I'm still here now.

Housing: We lived near Harrow for many years and were settled, had a nice house, good friends around there, babies arriving every few years and were probably going to stay there for a long time. I was only slightly concerned about schools for when the kids were older and that the area was going down hill a bit. Then there was a major fallout between the school gate Mums which turned toxic, to the point where my wife said to me one day "we need to get out of here"! Two months later we were gone, and where we ended up for all aspects of our kids future was absolutely spot on, and I'm so grateful that fallout happened. I literally shudder when I think we could have stayed where we were but for the fallout.

Now that my eldest is in her 20's I see that my work life was perfect. Early starts meant early finishes and spending lots of quality time with the kids, (taking them to and picking them up from school when they're young is just a joy, (but not in Harrow)). I have friends who worked all hours and are much wealthier but missed that "kid" time and they'll never get that back. The key to life for me is to separate work/leisure time and make a life for your kids that is much better than yours was, have hobbies that you love and get that "me" time regularly.

 

It's great that you can say that above - don't knock good fortune!

Certainly work time is a big thing with kids. My dad is a lovely bloke who worked as a deputy head at a sixth form college. He worked late a lot and at home at weekends and had several nervous breakdowns from the stress he would end up under after never saying no to anyone and taking on excessive amounts of work. He was also the governor on a school board and other things a couple of evenings a week too. He never got any thanks for it and I remember being a kid and thinking "why are you doing all this"? He never seemed to do anything for himself and saw us less as we got older. He got a list of each salary he'd had since starting work from his pension company and forwarded it to me - I was really sad to see how relatively low his salary had been for all the stress and time he'd spent working.

I'm lucky to have had modern thinking and understanding employers, but I've also always set my stall out that I'm not working evenings or weekends. I've taken my kids to every appointment they've had and made sure I've gone to sports days etc. as well as being home in time to see them and make dinner. I couldn't / wouldn't work anywhere that made that too difficult.

 

His name is actually Ashburner. Quite appropriate for a former compulsive chain-smoker. His caffeine habit was impressive too. If he wasn't travelling, and not in his office, you could find him in Savino's coffee shop in Cambridge. He was also a master of the one word e-mail.

 

A close friend of mine has a dyslexic half-brother. His Mum pushed the secondary school he was attending at the time to test him for dyslexia. They found he was dyslexic, but they deemed it not severe enough to warrant any help from the school.

 

What a great and sometimes sad thread. Best wishes to @UEA_Hornet and indeed anybody else on here that has suffered in any way at all
I'll be honest I'm fairly happy with how my life has gone. I could and probably wished I'd done things differently but I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason and I can't change these things anyway. I live in a little village in Berkshire who's football team are in the FA Vase final this weekend, with two great (most of the time) kids, a great (some of the time) wife and an ageing dog. I have a decent job job as does my wife which allows us to do most of things we want within reason. We're not rich by any means but we do ok. I love my sport and still play football, cricket and golf despite my age(48) and a gammy knee. Most of my family (apart from my dad) have lived long and reasonably healthy lives and up to a year ago my great uncle was the oldest man in the world!!
I have one big regret and sadly it's nothing I could have done anything about. My dad died when I was 29. He had struggled throughout his life with awful Eczema, fought and beat cancer and had three heart operations but it all took his toll and he passed away two weeks before retiring. Despite all the ailments he always smiled, loved to chat and was a fantastic dad. My regret is that he never saw me pass my coaching badges (loved his football and was chuffed I was doing them), didn't meet my wife and worst of all never got to meet his grandchildren who would have loved him. Rather bizarrely I've never really talked about him like this to anybody else and although it makes a little tearful I realise I was hugely lucky to have known him.
Reading some other posts on this thread I think I'm quite lucky in a way
Best wishes to you all

 

Blimey. "When Karens attack"....

 

Just when you thought it was safe to drive your Audi Q5 to the M&S Simply Food....

 

That’s interesting and resonates. My dad died just over three years ago when I was 33. I was very close to my dad and it broke my heart when he died, and it still hurts like buggery every single day. One element of it is anytime something good happens in life I immediately think of him with the thought “I wish he was here”. Life has been kind to me and since he went I’ve had a significant promotion, moved to a new house, got a really nice car...and yet all of it is tinged with sadness that I can’t tell him or share in the good times with him. When Watford beat Wolves at Wembley I became one of those saps who cries at the football - I’m never one for showing emotion but the final whistle crippled me and I just couldn’t stop thinking about him and blabbing.

My dad fell into a coma on a Tuesday and stayed there for three weeks before his time was up. My last memory of him awake was on the previous Saturday when I went to see him and my daughter was cuddled up to him on his sofa whilst he was shoving chocolate buttons down her throat. She was being funny and he was belly laughing. It’s a memory I’ll treasure forever as it was the last time I saw him truly alive, but it still doesn’t feel quite enough and I feel a mixture of being cheated out of more time with him, and a feeling I should have made more of the time he had.

I’m rambling now so I’ll shut up, but your post has resonated with me and helped to put my feelings into words - so thank you.

 

Good for you to have been so close to your Dad. Don’t feel bad about crying at Wembley. My own Dad died when I was 22 and decades later I still wish he had been around longer to share more of my life: getting married, moving house, great holidays etc.