We're back home from Flamborough now. Clint took two hours and fifteen minutes to bring us back to our door. It was a lovely break from normality and had been fantastic to reacquaint myself with Flamborough Head after many years of absence. The local people talk just like me so the experience felt rather like going home.
Yesterday evening we were about to walk out to "The North Star" for our three course evening meal when I heard a man calling my name, "Neil! Neil!"
The barn had been converted into six accommodation units which are all named after birds. We were in "Nightingale" but the voice was calling from the door of "Lapwing". It belonged to a stocky man with bright blue eyes, silver hair and a silver beard. I simply did not recognise him and I told him so with an apology attached.
Turns out his name was Grant and he had been the "senior learning mentor" in the secondary school I retired from fourteen years ago now. I had not thought of him in all that time but I remember him as a good man who did his best to support troubled schoolchildren and the learning process in general.
He wasn't a teacher. He had arrived at my old school via youth work and was part of a nationwide movement to fill gaps in education with mentoring support. It was a kind of job creation scheme. I suppose it was also a fashion because before mentoring arrived on the scene, schools were just about subject teachers and their charges - the pupils.
As I say, Shirley and I were going for dinner but Grant seemed genuinely happy to see me. He crammed the next few minutes with talk that was all about my old school and the people who had worked there. It was not a subject I was enthused about.
I would have preferred to talk to him about Flamborough, football and the three little dogs that he had brought with him on holiday. The work life he was referring to is way behind me and I am just not interested in it any more. Tittle tattle and making mountains out of molehills. It has taken me a long time to bury those bones.
This morning we packed up early and left North Moor Farm without bumping into Grant again. I guess that some people love to meet up with old work colleagues and reflect on old times but this is not in my nature. I am not saying that I am right but my instinctive desire for distance is just a facet of who I am and I can't help it.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/wtg5cjC