Difficult being less mainstream? 17 7 19 (17) 25 2 17

Life’s preoccupations as of 17 7 15

Life’s preoccupation centres on how people at large, friends and relatives have come to regard one on the one hand and one’s perception of such phenomena on the other hand: like are we the people they truly think we are??

Now this may or may not appear self-evident to people but not to me because that life comprises so many other things like coming to terms with growing up, that is from the earliest beginnings, finding one’s way in the world, how to get food, get one’s nappy changed etc., these are the things which for a good part of one’s early life preoccupied one and so preoccupations with different aspects of life come and go at different times. When I told my youngest granddaughter, S, the one with the first class honours degree in creative writing, about these latest musings in our weekly on-line WeChat call, she just observed that one’s whole life is just going from one set of preoccupations to the next using the word “obsessions” which lent further weight to the idea…

After the earliest beginnings came the jungle of primary school mixing with, and trying to get on with a bunch of other kids: never something that came naturally to me as the baby of our family who felt one’s self rightly to be the centre of the universe, as I was for a time though this was about to change also with the imminent arrival of my kid sister, so a double whammy! hahaha.

Thereafter, going to work for a living and putting the primary and secondary education to use in order to get on with another set of preoccupations started an altogether new ball game… and fortunately for me finally ending up in a Technical School which restricted the teaching to practical subjects to things like woodwork, I was no good at, but then some subjects which I found easy enough to grasp though many of these didn’t hold sufficient interest, like practical drawing or metal workshop activities, like operating a lathe with a view to one day becoming a turner, or forging metal with a hammer and anvil after heating it in a furnace, to lead me into their respective career paths… 

My chosen career then when a decision had to be made was laboratory work wherein the subjects which interested me most for which I had a better than average grasp like mathematics physics and chemistry came to dominate my life’s career choices and life’s next set of preoccupations.

Then 52 years later retirement aged 68. Looking back now at a career which saw me work first in the paper industry followed by the wood pulp industry, that is the starting material for making paper, then the dyestuffs industry, again when pigments become raw materials too for making (coloured) paper, I established a pattern which lead ever upward on the ladder to a greater specialism on the one hand and greater responsibility in a diverse range of industries on the other. These included transparent cellulose film, cellophane or transparent paper, also produced from a type of wood pulp, together with acids and alkalis drawing on more knowledge from my chemistry studies, followed by more paper-making and pulping based on more exotic fibres such as Manila Hemp from either the Philippines or Ecuador, in the niche industry of Long-fibred paper-making. 

Finally then I was invited to join a fibrous casing company which also operated the same process for making viscose from the same wood pulps used to make cellophane on a base of long-fibre paper from one of the two world’s biggest producers one of which had employed me for the past 13 years as their Research and Development Manager. Now as Joint R and D Director with the guy I had known at least 10 years as my partner who said he was the one to recommend me for his job upon his imminent retirement.

It only occurs to me now what a cushion all these factors combined to produce in a society which protected me from a wider more real world… This is to say there was a uniqueness at play: taking a person with just those special skills as I had, without those special language skills which in my wife and elder son’s cases dictated they become people of letters and teachers of languages for example, first working and establishing himself in one industry during his first 5 years until he acquired all the skills to run a paper mill laboratory, before moving on to the pulp industry and acquiring an understanding of what goes into making the raw materials not only for paper-making but also for rayon fibre, transparent cellulose film, and fibrous casings manufacture…

So when at last I came to this country to accept their invitation to join them I came as an established expert. I then proceeded to give them things they couldn’t have dreamed of achieving without my specialist knowledge. A simple example was the lightest fibrous casing in the world. And why? Because I knew the boundaries of the paper-making processes as well as anyone and better than most, so was in an unique position to tell them 17 g/m2 wasn’t the lightest paper to come off a long-fibre paper machine but that the weight per square metre could be reduced down to maybe 10 or 12 or 13g/m2 if necessary…

Out of this departure gave me the wherewithal to found a new range of fibrous casings with in practice world patent rights, at least as far as the USA, EU and Japan with a few named countries in South America are concerned, to protect them and ensure I would go on working until I was 68 years of age. 

And now after being retired more than 5 years I am coming to terms with the real world at last: quite an interesting voyage of discovery..! Have a good day everyone as I hope you too are discovering who you really are? hahaha

Some of life's Preoccupations..? 17 7 19 (17) Re-posting this like many more of my old blogs but clearly not my first choice and perhaps because of a lack lustre former title? Never forgetting that if a blog doesn't have a sufficiently attractive title then it can easily be jumped over, lol
But the subject matter of the present blog is not so easily given a title when i endeavoured to create a highly specialised individual by virtue of just those attributes of chemistry physics and maths that founded the basis for his various career moves that enabled him to move from one culture into two new cultures, which despite an inordinate amount of new challenges presented by his foreign tongue with its collection of foreign politnesses, allowed him in the end or in the final analysis to prefail, and carry him a further 20 yrs of gainful employment into a cushioned retirement: when had he remained in his home country the powers that were in command were ready to make my hero redundant when he might well have retreated, with his £22 000 redundancy package, into alcoholism...hahaha An attempt to further highlight the nub of the problem this particular blog addresses?