‘Boarding school syndrome’ was the title of an insightful article from the UK ‘Guardian’, sent to me by my London-based sister last year. It got me thinking, or more accurately remembering things I’ve tried to erase from my memory.
Greetings all social workers. As many old hands in the Department will know, I was a social worker in the Masterton office for many years, which is why I leapt at the chance to transfer to a head office frenzy team, pumping out policy.
Sometime, somewhere, you wake up to life. You are going along in life and then either gradually or very suddenly the axis on which life was moving completely changes.
So you’re at the kitchen bench and acting like a 16 year old – though you know that was half a century ago. You plonk a heavy pot almost playfully and… misjudge. Its rim heads with relentless accuracy to the one part of your foot not covered by slippers.
It’s autumn so it’s timely to let a weathered leaf from the season of our life drift into the summer of another’s – in this case New Plymouth Mayor, Neil Holdom.
Some time ago he described baby boomers as ‘ the most selfish generation’. And then on Facebook and presumably a few other places, he apologised. His j’accuse was similar to comments by any of the critics of boomers, some so young they could pass for the grandchildren of the first boomer cohort.
We recently set up a food rescue service at Nelson Environment Centre and called it Kai Rescue. Rescue is the operative word because since we began five weeks ago we’ve rescued 5.8 tonnes of perfectly edible food – and that’s just from two of the seven Nelson supermarkets and a couple of one-off food producers.