Midlife Lately – the twists and turns

And for a while after this my camera roll is empty. I caught up with friends at the weekends while Mal was working on the roof. I went over to Nicky’s for a barbecue on her birthday and watched her in her grandma role. You’ll remember her son Toby, our middle one’s best friend, getting married three years ago at the tender age of 22. Well they now have a little daughter who is eighteen months old and full of character. Both Nicky and I were flummoxed by the arrival of a girl at first, having known nothing other than boys, but Nicky’s getting there now.

Of course it means our lives are currently on different paths. She is very home-based with her growing and settling family around her whereas we’re away a lot and our boys’ worlds are expanding too. And this is what happens to friendships in midlife isn’t it? I find a lot of them are diverging – which doesn’t mean lessening – but they’re not as parallel as they were.

So let’s talk about the boys. We’ve hardly seen the eldest because he’s been away so much this year. He spent a fortnight living and working in Dubai, getting to know his girlfriend’s parents who live there and his company also has an office out there. He was back briefly and then headed off to the US to oversee the Adidas campaign for the FIFA World Cup. He’s been having the time of his life, travelling between cities, going to matches, meeting and working with the global players that Adidas sponsors, which of course includes some of the biggest footballing names in the world.

To our particular (and perhaps more low-scale) delight, he was sitting right behind our beloved Dan Burn from Newcastle United as he went on for England in the semi-final (not that it did much good. Wasn’t that sad?).

I so often wish I could go back to the eight year-old sports mad boy that he was and just whisper in his ear that this is what he’d be doing. I could write a whole series of posts on the places he’s been, the people he’s met and the opportunities he’s had over the last few weeks. I often worry about the long, long hours that he works but his company told him that this was his reward for the dedication they’ve seen over the last few years. It’s good to know that they see it.

The middle one has settled back in very quickly after his year away. He’s working at our local garden centre while going through the selection process for what could (fingers and everything else crossed) be a good career. I’m sure you’ve read about the graduate jobs disaster in the news, it’s just so hard for them at the moment and I suspect quite a few of you are living with the fallout from it too. For us, the good thing is that he’s back at home happily. I worried that it would be a huge anticlimax after a year of living in Spain but I’ve realised that fundamentally he’s a home bird.

I remember a few years ago finding myself sitting next to a reader called Jan on a flight to Turkey (are you still here Jan, I wonder?). Our boys were mid-teens then but her daughters were older and she told me that just a couple of days earlier, her 20-something had said she couldn’t bear to be left at home so could she come along with her mum and dad. She described her as a ‘cleaver’ which I didn’t quite understand at the time – but I do now.

Anyway I’m quite happy to have a son who cleaves and spends time with us so contentedly… although I can see that Mal’s opinion on that will differ!

Last week the youngest completed his PGCE so he is now a qualified teacher heading into his ECT years. You’ll remember that he’s done in-school training which involves four days a week in the classroom and then one day at a teacher training centre. For his first term he was based at a very well-run school in an upmarket area and then he transferred to a really tough school on the edge of Blackpool for the last two.

Like his brother, he’s decided to stay local for now and so when it came to interview stage for his first proper teaching post, he had the choice of two schools. One is a highly sought-after school in a beautiful part of Cumbria that parents move heaven and earth to get their children into. The other is the most challenging school in our local city. Which has he chosen? Yep, you’ve guessed it, the challenging one.

He’s found that he really enjoys working with the children from problematic backgrounds because he feels he can make a difference. And this school has a young and determined new headteacher that he really clicked with so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. There weren’t enough hours for him to teach languages full-time so he’s now a teacher of French, Spanish, Art and PE. As with his biggest brother, if I could have told him at the age of eight that it’s what he would be doing, it would have ticked off every one of his favourite subjects.

I’m pleased he’s picking up art again. I remember a few of you saying he should have chosen that direction when he was torn between that and languages after doing so well in his Art A Level, despite having to complete his ‘beauty in unexpected places ‘ project during lockdown (he was delightedly wrapping his work up here because his school had bought these canvases for permanent display). However I’m hoping that this new twist in his path perhaps proves the old Scottish saying that ‘what’s meant for you, won’t go by you’.

I’m still a bit surprised that he’s teaching, I’d always imagined him using his languages and analytical brain at somewhere like GCHQ but, as he said to me recently, it’s a good job he didn’t follow that path because most of it has gone over to AI now.

We’d already left for Newcastle when he headed out for his post-grad celebration dinner last Friday but I’d begged him to get a nice photo in his dinner suit. This is what I got in return. And the mess and the trainers show you the reality of my life now they’re both at home again!