Forum Members' 7 Up

[lenfield]

The latest series of '7 Up' has made me wonder what other forum members were doing at seven year intervals in their lives. This is what I was doing:

7 - I was a happy child at a very good school on the Welsh Borders.

14 - I was now at an extremely unpleasant school in the Midlands full of nutters and freaks. The pupils weren't much better. I stopped being rather prim and proper and started to follow the punk movement. It would have a detrimental affect on the rest of my life.

21 - I was an anti-capitalist hanging around with scummy people. I had also developed serious psychological problems as a result of cannabis abuse.

28 - I had been through the higher education system and obtained an Honours and a Master's degree. I was having difficulty finding a decent job because of my unconventional career path and poor A' level grades.

35 - I had quite a well paid job working as a C++ programmer.

42 - I had been made redundant and was struggling to find another job because my programming skills were semi-obsolete. I eventually found a firm that was still using 1980's technology. Unfortunately they were paying the same wage that I had been on 10 years earlier.

49 - I started working from home because my mother had Alzheimer's.

56 - I took early retirement. It came as a shock to my employers, they seemed to think that they were doing me a big favour giving me a job. I was the one who was doing them a big favour working for the extremely low wages that they paid. I was barely on the minimum wage once I had factored in my traveling time and expenses.

 

[Drago]

7 - happy at primary school in Shetland. My grandad had beaten up the father of the lad who'd been bullying me at school, and the bullying had stopped suddenly. Funny that! Was finally enjoying my school years.

14 - less happy at a secondary school in central England after having been removed from prep school for threatening to burn it down. Was fundamentally a good boy but big for my age and teetering on the brink of becoming a bit of a handful.

21 - left the Army on an exemplary discharge, joined Thames Valley Dibble.

28 - married, not terribly happily.

35 - divorced, now engaged to a much younger model, now with Northants plod after having taken 6 months out BGing in the US.

42 - recovering from 2nd round of surgery after being assaulted on duty. On the plus side the lad that did probably wont ever become a father after the way I dropped him.

49 - prematurely retired, a bit rudderless, stressed and depressed. Not a good time for me psychologically and I probably wasnt good company.

56 - had moved house again, had come to terms with being retired, parish councillor and writer of pompous letters to the Guardian.

 

[HLaB]

7 - School was still Fun and Games at a primary School in Rosyth.

14 - School was more serious study, surprisingly I was good at it at that point when I hadn't been at primary, Im now at a secondary in Dunfermline. Serious enough to trigger an epileptic fit a few years later.

21 - I was at Napier Uni and everything was going well until dramatic weight loss (Pancreatitis) and the epilepsy returned (it turned out that I shouldn't have been on epilepsy tablets which after the dramatic weight loss caused me to have a fit.

28 - I was working in Dublin and finally enjoying life again off the tablets (I could have partied there forever but I grew up at 30). In that period my cycling as a mode of transport (commuting) started and a few years later it was leisure too.

35 - I had been working closer to home in Edinburgh (Commuting and leisure cycling got augmented by joining a club. Stable I thought. That was about to change due to the recession and I went back to Uni to do a Masters Degree.

42 - Working further from home again because of that recession previously; driving up the A1 and cycling the last 17-7miles (depending where I parked to Newark on Trent. Unknowingly I was potentially dying of cancer that was diagnosed a year and a bit later.

49 - Had beaten cancer and doing a much more satisfying job and had just moved into a nice new house.

56 - I tell you in 5 years time but things are going ok at the moment 🤞