I can’t remember what I wanted to be as a small child. But after I hit about fourteen, I had a plan that involved never marrying, living in a small, remote house with a garden and a duck pond; and keeping a flock of ducks and a string of lovers.
Some of this has happened. Some of it has been sadly lacking.
I grew up on a smallholding. My background is one where ones income comes from growing or making stuff and selling it. After I hit fifteen, my pocket money came from keeping a few dozen ex-battery hens and selling their eggs in the local market every weekend. Ma and Pa took a load of vegetables and flowers in to sell every Friday for the Saturday market and they’d take my eggs as well. Ma paid my sister’s school fees with the sales of apple pies and jam each weekend. She says she knew she had to make a certain amount every week to cover the bill, else that was that.
When I left home, I went to college for a bit and got a couple of degrees. I have never used the first one – Archaeology and History are fascinating but their real world applications are pretty minimal unless you want to actually work in the field – and in between that, I learned to copy- or audio-type at seventy words a minute whilst simultaneously holding a conversation about a completely different subject. That’s the most useful skill I have ever learned. And thinking about it, fantastic preparation for parenthood.
After a bit of time copy-typing and regretting my college choice, I fell in to a graduate degree in Geographical Information Systems, which was in its infancy then. Now, you can do an undergraduate course and specialise really early on, but then – the mid nineties – you could only go the postgraduate route. It seemed like a really good way to combine my interest in both the past and computers. Afterwards, I toyed with the idea of a doctorate, but in the end, I’d had enough of the ivory tower of academia and wanted to be back in the real world. Retrospectively, this may have been a mistake, but I was in my mid twenties and had a certain amount of judgemental arrogance. Instead, I went to work for a well known UK telecoms company and used the time to discover I really, really hated the corporate world and that the money for nice shoes, whilst lovely, wasn’t more important than my sanity.
I ended up quitting and teaching various levels of IT and office skills in an adult education setting. I loved it. My favourite class, ever, was made up of Hilda, Ada, Muriel and Betty. They had come to my ‘Computers For The Terrified’ class on a Friday afternoon as a change from their usual crochet sessions. Their average age was eighty and they were hilarious.
“Remind me how to save the file again, dear. I’m so sorry. I used to be able to remember things, but it’s all gone now.”
“I can’t get used to this mouse, Ally. My granddaughter has given me her old lapthing and it hasn’t got a mouse, it’s got a trackpad.”
“I’m so sorry dear. I have no idea how this came up on my internet search. I really wasn’t looking for naked men. It won’t get you in trouble with the centre, will it, that he’s got that big erection?”.
At the same time, I was extracting myself from a relationship where my partner thought it was acceptable behaviour to throw me over the sofa. I eventually moved out and found myself a little house deeper in the Welsh valley I lived in – South Wales is a bit like Narnia, in that further up and further in is the way to go to uncover all the glories. The house was ten feet and one inch wide, with a garden a hundred feet long. I borrowed the money to renovate it from my father and did it up myself. I swore off relationships completely.
And then of course, OH turned up. I considered dating him simply because the house I had bought had no duck pond and I knew that my adolescent dream couldn’t come true whilst I was still there.
Twenty years later … I have had the duck pond. I have had the remote house. I have even had the string of lovers, a long time ago. But never all at once. And I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever you start off wanting – astronaut, scientist, writer, duck-keeper, Madame Bovary – you are pretty lucky if you hit that happy streak straight away. I think you’re more likely to find your groove by the process of elimination.