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Monday 4 January 2021

Scrooge - Reflections of Christmas past

Reflecting quite a lot at the moment and expect to continue for some time.   

 

First day of 2021 at work went as well as could be expected.  Got up as normal at Shamila's in Billingham. Sham prepared my breakfast cereal and toast.  Took my morning tablets, sat down and flicked through the news on my phone before driving to my house in Acklam where I work for HMRC.  I sit there on my own all day.  I send and receive a few emails/messages from colleagues and my manager and attend the occasional team meeting.  Obviously, what I do is of national importance and top secret so I can't divulge in such a public arena but ring HMRC with a tricky tax problem tomorrow and you never know.

 

Today was a bit more exciting than normal because I had a wardrobe delivered.  Juggling my work around the odd delivery is just one of the perks of working from home during a pandemic.  Actually call it singular perk that I've enjoyed loads of times.  I've had a lot of workmen in since the beginning of September, so I've saved a stash of leave (that's what us posh Labour lot call holidays don't you know).  Anyway there's a big unsightly scratch on the front of one of the doors so I guess they'll be back to sort it.

 

I digress.  So today was my 42nd new year return to work since I started my first (and only) job in 1978.  


And what are my recollections of that time? 

 

I was 17, a bit shy, very awkward socially, very immature.  I used to blush all the time, still do actually. I was so self-conscious.    I felt pressure to get a girlfriend but hadn't the faintest idea how to get one.  And of course I thought it was just me.  I almost certainly wasn't.  I'd left all my school/college friends behind and was like a fish out of water in the 9 to 5 environment of 'real work' with adults.  

 

It doesn't sound long now but I'd been working 3 1/2 months up to Christmas, it seemed like an eternity.  I was losing my confidence, not that I had that much to start with.  I remember being conscious that I had to make friends and it felt like I was running out of time. God knows what I thought was going to happen.

 

The Christmas holiday with my brothers and mam and dad must have been great, they always were.   Obviously presents and that and the New Year’s party round our house and the Freeman's 2 doors away.  Our mam and dad loved New Year’s Eve and they let me play a couple of my records. I remember playing First Time by The Boys (terrible song) and our mam and her best friend, Edie Freeman trying to dance to it.  A great memory,  probably my last memory of being a kid at Christmas.  


I have strong memories of resenting going back to work after Christmas,  jeez, I'd only had a week off.   That's all wrong, I don't think I ever properly got over to having long school holidays off. Then again I was loaded, picking up about £30 a week.  After giving our mam £10 I still had £20 to spend on records. It was more cash than I needed.  Lots of regrets about the holidays not unpaid college mind.

 

Our parents were what now seems to me relatively youthful. Our mam was 41 and Dad 46 and although our grandads and nana/grandma were no longer around most of our blood uncles and aunties were.  Uncles Joe, Jack and Alec and aunties Madge and Pauline.  

 

Sadly that was as good and serene as it was going to get because our mam's younger sister Pauline died of a heart attack in January aged 40.  Little did we know at the time but the heart thing had already become a family thing and still is.  I remember us being notified by phone and Kenny next door driving me and our mam 'round to our uncle Alec's in Thorntree to let him know.  I thought my head was going to explode.  Jeez.

 

And I just went to work the next day.  I was shell-shocked but I didn't know how or what to tell my work colleagues, so I didn't tell anybody.  


Not sure where all that came from or where it's going so I think I'll leave it there for now.



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