Climbing Braeriach II June 21st 2018 (18) 25 1 31
It was after nearing the summit of Braeriach when I ran into a crowd of
maybe similarly aged people men and women who upon reaching the summit cairn
began to congratulate one another with one woman hugging a younger one and
starting to cry she was so overcome: with joy I learned later.
It transpired they were a group who had been walking together for 25 years...The husband of one of the ladies asked me to use his camera with a zoom lens of narrow angle of field fitted to take a pic of their group putting me to stand some distance away before another member asked me to take with his camera also, and then at last one of their group suggested they take a pic of me for which I posed whilst standing atop the summit cairn.
Then with the guy who first asked me to take a pic we got talking about óur business lives how it transpired we both worked in the Paper Industries but at opposite ends of the business, me in Research and Development Management, he engaged in the business of arranging the handover of the company he worked for from shareholders to the workforce but regrettably he said for it to survive very long thereafter...My mentioning how i came to move away from UK to Scandinavia prompting this last discussion.
Further down the mountain I caught up with the lady who had over-taken me on the ascent who was now deep in conversation with another guy from their party when something she said related to her husband who was still with the main party but who she said I had mentioned we had been talking about the paper industry. I didn't tarry long because it appeared they wished to return to what they had been discussing before I came upon them.
Later however to my surprise she caught up with me again, and this time she evidently wanted to chat... Then it transpired that she was a writer and by her own admission quite well known.
She told me how she and her husband had each been married before and how
they had brought their 5 children with them 3 for one and 2 for the other and
how now that they were all grown up there were some interesting differences
between the various members of this extended family… I told her about my move
to Finland when she expressed an interest in the fact that Finland was noted
for its excellent record on education. To this comment I said he my view the
Finnish educational system is not all that different to other advanced
countries but that in my view it is the way people bring their children up
which may well be why Finland enjoys such high regard. I then went on to give
her the example of one of our grandsons who has been brought up in Finland and
who this past year has taken up with a young lady from his own class since the
time they teamed up for the annual prom which involved learning old time
dances, thereby spending much time together, and who a year later they have
just taken their matriculation examinations, and left the school. The main
point I wished to stress was that during these proceedings no-one in either
family has interfered in any way but rather has treated the development as a
natural course of events.
This evidently resonated with my writer acquaintance because she went to
tell how one of the grandchildren in her extended family appears to be
traumatised aged 6 because the mother of the girl child is so controlling, to
the extent that the girl is now attending psychiatric therapy, at an age she
added when Finnish children have not begun their formal education…
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