A Day in my home and office

Written by a 54 year old Self Employed male from North Kent on the 4th of September 2010.

We live in North Kent in a little hamlet, which consists of only ten houses. Farms and open fields surround us. It is very pleasant...a far cry from my earlier life when I lived in central London. I took retirement from my job after thirty years and I now work from home, so I do not follow a normal working week pattern. But then I never really did, as I worked a shift pattern. Now in effect, every day I could be working. What I tend to do, is devote slots of time to my work and social life. Today has been one such day.

I am presenting to my local history group in a couple of weeks time, and have to prepare a Powerpoint presentation. However, at 04:00 this morning my mind suddenly came up with a good phrase that I wanted to get down on the presentation.

And so, I got up without waking my wife and went down into the study, where I commenced working on the presentation. I find early morning a very stimulating time for me to work. I continued for about an hour on the computer and then opened up The Mail On-Line to digest the news. Reading the news this way has almost become a ritual, as I hardly ever buy a newspaper. I am now a member of Facebook, so I opened that up after reading the newspaper. It has become the mechanism for a lot of clubs and societies I belong to communicate about new meetings. It also allows me to keep in touch with my family members who live in New Zealand and our friends in Spain - we own a property out there and have quite a few friends living out there permanently. It is good to keep in touch, and doesn’t make the world such a big place! My wife came downstairs and was rather sleepy, but commenced to open up her computer. We are a two-computer household, as she also works from home. Soon after that, I came over sleepy and returned to bed where I slept through until 09:00.

On getting up for a second time, we made breakfast...not your normal fare. We had 'fried rice', salmon steaks and an egg. We both like spicy food, although my wife would eat curry for breakfast, dinner and tea...if I let her. Immediately afterwards we played a game of cards - 'skip-bo' and she won.

My wife then put a hopi-candle into my ears to assist in clearing a build-up of wax. It’s very relaxing and seems to work.

Washing the dishes is by Dish Washer these days, which makes life easy. Then it was back to the study to answer the numerous e-mails I now receive daily. They were a mixture of work and social. I am an officer in the Territorial Army and have been asked to work on an exercise next week. As my work pattern is so flexible, I will be away for two days in the west country...I will be in a barracks so will not be out in the field. I will have to man an Ops Room (Operations Room) over a 24-hour period to facilitate the exercise. Anyway, I had to confirm my attendance and print off the joining instructions. All takes time, now either tomorrow or Monday I will have to gather all of my kit and uniform in preparation.

Then I worked on work for an Institute I am the Secretary for, which included telephone calls, answering e-mails and scanning in documents. This is an unpaid post that really sucks into my free time.

We both work on the computer quite a lot, what ever did we do before computers? As a young boy in the early 1960's, my mother would write letters and communicate with her mother (my Nan) who lived thirty miles or so away by a weekly telephone call. They would both go to a pay phone box and one or the other would make a call. Then putting money into the slots they would chat…oh remembering the strange odours contained from within the telephone box...possibly people having had a pee in there. Now I never use a pay phone, as I have a mobile phone. There are so many ways of communicating it’s frightening. On that subject, I had yet another text from the National Health Service (NHS) Appointments Line…I have had three cancellations and have had to go on-line to re-book and appointment for a nasal complaint. However, they have telephoned me twice, written via the post three times and have now text me to confirm my new appointment next week. This new NHS booking system seems to be wasting money… We are off to a 25th Wedding Anniversary celebration this evening. So will have to sign off.