Sunday, 8th February, 2026
My records show that this week in 2009 – 17 years ago when I was just 57 years old and living in Yorkshire while working in Lancashire – we were suffering with incredibly heavy snow which shut the school for a week and even the M62 for a while. During this week I was diagnosed with a heart murmur (Atrial Fibrillation) which I had never heard of and, unbeknown to us, we were just 2 months away from Retirement.
Even so, we were preparing to spend Easter in our Greek island home and I was about to buy a revolutionary new digital Book Reader for my wife. It was her first of many Kindles and they are central to her reading all these years on. So many things have changed but that is one that hasn’t.
It was a time of turmoil in our lives. We had just gone through what turned out to be our last Ofsted. We had contracted a firm to replace every single window and external door in our 3-storey house over the coming month. Suddenly, my lovely Mother-in-Law was taken into hospital again after a fall.
All that going on in a few weeks of one’s life is a test and one that we came through strongly but I clearly recall the inner strength it demanded. Last week I was writing of the Past, Present, Future approach to the understanding of Life. I found this record of my times in 1968. I was still at school and playing Rugby in the Staffordshire Championships. This newspaper report above was in my Mother’s records. It was a time when I was aware I was suffering from a flutter in my heart beat but thought it was just over exertion. It could have killed me any time over the ensuing 40 years.
To think that, over the past 17 years, of the people who have died, of the houses I have sold and bought and of the total transformation in my life moving from North to South.You know, there are still people working in the latest iteration of my school who were there when we left. Yesterday, I was wishing a lad happy birthday who I appointed as an IT technician 20 years ago. Now, he is Leader of the Digital Curriculum Team with a group of teachers under him. He’s still only 44. If I can manage 17 more years, I will be 91. That’s not too much to ask. Is it?