Myself - I Needed To Be Needed

Larking About

Following my retirement from a career in IT in 2019, a training opportunity to be a bricklayer seemingly beckoned. The video below demonstrates the union of a hopeless apprentice with a dreadful instructor 😀

Poetry

The 2020 and 2021 COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in the cessation of in-person meetings at the Beth Johnson Foundation for the elderly charity where I was a volunteer IT buddy. BJF came up with the idea of using Zoom sessions for keeping people in touch. One of the initiatives was to have poetry sessions, where individuals were tasked with writing poems, which were then presented by individuals on the Zoom calls.

Quizmaster

I devised a basic quiz framework (bunch of ideas) which I use at care homes for elderly folk.

Furthermore, during the 2020 / 2021 Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns I set initial letter challenge quiz questions for the folk in my street. By way of example, for the question “8 L on an O”, the correct answer would be “8 Legs on an Octopus.”

UK TV

I put together a listing of what I considered priceless clips of UK TV shows and coverage of world events, which I presented to the residents at my mother’s care home.

Camp Scatico: 1993

Shortly after I’d finished university at twenty-three years of age, I spent the summer at a children’s summer camp in New York State, USA. I kept daily diary of my time at Camp Scatico.

I transcribed letters exchanged between myself and my mother while I was at camp. I have also scanned an endearing letter from the Camp Scatico director (Irwin Fleischner), which he sent to me a couple of months after camp had finished.