Dead or Alive!

I am very proud to have reached the great age of 72 without being dead.  I have escaped that fate with great ease and am developing a major 20 year plan – this blog being a part of it.

Ethnicity:

I believe I am 100% Scottish although I am planning on getting my DNA tested just to make sure no ancestor branched out in to uncharted territory.  I have (or had) red hair and a puritanical streak which argues with a tendency to be immoderate and wild.

Education:

None to speak of although, between the ages of five and seven I did have the marvellous Mrs Frew who came to our house to educate me and a few other young ladies from the neighbourhood.  By the time jump about time, break time and outside time had been factored in we totted up about two hours a day.   I loved Mrs Frew.  She wore big pink bloomers and was accompanied everywhere by a diabetic dachshund.

Real school was a disaster!  So was being dyslexic!

Life:

I finally gathered together some qualifications and became a teacher and mother and raced around dealing with the pains and pleasures of life happening to me. 

Crisis time:

Suddenly, I looked up one day and my last child had gone to university, my husband had long gone and I had five tidy bedrooms and a big hole in my heart.

Like all good middle-aged people I had me a mid-life crisis.  I dropped everything, and went to live in Guatemala where I worked with extremely disabled, abandoned teenage children in an orphanage/hospital.  I acquired a teacher called Zory and we battled through the subjunctive, played a million games of scrabble (she was champion of Central America) and she taught me all sorts of useful words such as “frying pan lid”.  We shared a birthday.

The Blog:

This blog is a bit of a time bomb in terms of style and content.  My first entries were Nicaragua 2012 and 2017.  I was fresh out of university having done a degree and Masters in Spanish and Latin American studies (graduated when I was 64) and I was still using a didactic teacher-y style of writing.  As you will see, I have gently slipped into more colloquial speak as I settle into my retirement and my reinvention of myself as the intrepid traveller.

Apart from the fun of sharing my adventures with my readers and the delight of writing it all down, I have a message for young and old – Get out there!  Don’t be afraid to be alone!

“Why do you bother?”  Someone asked me.  I bother because I’m not waiting to die, I’m dying to live.