A friend of mine made me chuckle recently he is having to move to Spain on his retirement and was complaining about all the forms he is having to fill in to move The forms are customs forms and of course they have only come in since Brexit, but apparently he voted for Brexit! So he has been hoist by his own petard.
Meanwhile however, the success of the vaccination programme compared with what is happening in Europe does seem to show going "our own way" has its pluses, though of course we could have done that within the EU, but the vaccination programme on the mainland is not filling the EU with glory.
Meanwhile in the UK I work on but as per usual battle with the powers that be. I cannot get my extra bit of pension because I have not filled in my forms correctly, despite having gone through things with Teachers Pensions before filling in the form and despite having told them the missing information. But nor could I get new forms because TP think I already have my pension etc etc. I just slightly miss the profile for a standard teacher's life,because I worked for the college, then left and did other teaching and then came back again before being sacked!, and yet the chaos this seems to cause automated systems and humans alike is just full of stupid and annoying grief. heaven knows how the system would cope if I had a more complex work career. I also cannot get a whopping extra £90 a year from another small pension and that is because I do not know how to answer their questions, but this whole debacle makes me regret having cashed in my GLC pension, that would have been worth a bob or two by now if I had kept it but at the time I was a student again and needed the money or thought I did and that I would have plenty of time to build up another pension afterwards. But that period out of work had a big impact on my future career and I did not find well paid work with a pension for over 14 years afterwards and then even when I became a teacher, because of my health issues I was part time for much of my teaching career.
I think all of us make choices and have no idea what the implications will be - careers not followed, courses done or not done loved ones left or lost, homes vacated etc I was awake at 3 am last night and listened to some interesting programmes on the World Service, one commenting that too much choice and we will often freeze when it comes to decision making. - that is definitely me when it comes to housing. And the other on the impact of working extended hours and its impact on our mental health. Made me feel that some of the deep anxieties I have felt and the shame I have felt re not being good enough because I cannot maintain a 60 hour a week schedule really has been as much about the conditions of work as about me as a person and whilst I knew this when I raised my concerns at work because I was doing too much, it did not stop me from feeling inadequate, when really it was the way my employer was behaving that was the issue - at least according to the expert who has researched this topic.
In the past though choices came and went often very painfully and yet somehow in the flow of it all one felt one was trying to get somewhere. Now at 66 I still do not know where that place was or is or whether it exists at all, but in the past there was the feeling that there was the time to find out, now more and more the worry is that one will die before finding out. Yet I am according to Mooji here already.
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