Old Dogs Can Be Taught New Tricks

This post is slightly out of chronological order in relation to it’s predecessors. I have rearranged ‘Beyond 1984’ to combine all the posts onto a single page. Apologies if it seems slightly ‘off kilter’.

My maxim: I aspire to write, but tend to dream (Verbs can be rearranged according to opinion)

Aspirations are one thing, actually doing is another, and I’m in the process currently of enhancing my rather limited writing skills. I realised soon after starting to write creatively, that I needed to improve…fast.

I therefore recently resumed my education after a break of more than thirty years. I’m studying with the Open University, and finding it a real pleasure to be taught by excellent tutors, who are passionate and committed.

Some people, on finding out what I’m doing, say, ‘why bother at your age?’ I usually answer politely, that I can see their point and that they’re probably right, but I’m enjoying it, and that’s justification in itself.

I actually completed my first OU course in 1978 when I was working as an engineer, a career I hated. My initial course was technology based, which I also disliked, but stuck at it and passed anyway. I gave up after a couple of years because even though I wanted to enhance my career prospects, I found the work difficult. Basically, it didn’t interest me. It was just like being at school again, except that this time the tutors were at least interested in what they were teaching.

I’m kicking myself now, because of my failure to realise that what I should have done is to study arts based subjects instead of technology. It was obvious really, but I believe that I was still deluded from the brainwashing I received at school. I attended an establishment called a Technical School, that existed solely to produce builders and engineers. How I ended up there is a mystery to me still, for I never had any inclination toward technology or the sciences. ‘Beyond 1984’ is not the place to go into the minutiae of what happened back then, but it’s enough to say that I abandoned my education at fifteen years of age, and left school with no qualifications whatsoever.

Now I’m intent on putting that right, and undoing the damage of a misguided system that undoubtedly ruined the lives of many others, too.

I’ll record my educational progress in this blog, along with updates on how my writing is going. Hopefully, someone might find it worth reading.

Ian