Focus off Yachts onto..? 16 12 8 (10) 25 2 20

16 12 7

It was in 2012 I finally sold my small yacht after 19 years of sailing her here on the Baltic Sea: I had half-heartedly tried for the 2 years earlier but then I dropped the price and advised the would-be buyers there was much that needed to be done but that would be their responsibility. It worked out well because the two young guys who bought her became my friends and I got the odd few hours at sea sailing in her for the next few years just to renew the feel of her...

The following year I neither had to prepare her for sea in the spring nor lift her out and strip her down in the autumn and so I began a new life returning to climbing Scotland's Munro hills as my main focus: spending much of May and part of June there and in the autumn returning for the odd week or two in September just to retain something of my higher level of fitness and in the years since then I have climbed 62 of the 104 I had left...

Many other things have changed on the back of this perhaps. In 2012 I had a good following for my pic parade on MySpace and an accompanying blog I used to write there, in much the same way as here now on BlogSpot, but requiring much more time somehow so that when the administrators pulled the blog 2013 6 12 I decided little by little to walk away from the whole business of posting pics for people I wasn't otherwise in touch with... I walked away from it 3 years ago yesterday but because as each day went buy people continued to make daily visits I broke my silence after a week to say I was through with it...

The following year I got some belated feedback on F-book for my activities on MySpace but too late to suggest there was something to salvage from those kind of activities whilst meanwhile I got to writing for an anonymous audience here on BlogSpot which I began to enjoy more and more...

So with each new year I would re-visit Scotland in springtime and then later in the year when I would get to meet real people once again: befriending some of the them on Face-b maybe, and exchanging odd snippets of conversation with them, but all the time keeping my focus of where my true life was really at...

As time went buy I have come to realise that as one gets older making new friends is no longer the easy thing it was in one’s youth when I have become more appreciative perhaps of the support I feel from my family and longer-term friends… A new activity I have tentatively started is to post the odd pics on Instagram because I have some close family members: my 4 grandchildren for example who they themselves post pics there, but only in a kind of haphazard way without ever “liking” anything what other people post, unless I really wish to comment and then I do it with a personal note to the person responsible for the particular post…  

It's like if I am going to interact with people today it has to be a two-way thing. This blog i write sometimes demands a two-way response so then I may shoot a copy of it off to our family biographer, my eldest son S, who might respond with odd comments like "Very good, send more!" But he knows anyway that when I pop my clogs he’ll get the key to where it is located and then he can decide whether to read my whole catalogue and maybe pass a few of them on to other members of our family or simply trash them: in that case I don’t want to know…

At other times I may send a copy of the blog in a “Word” document to someone I met on my travels and when I have done this in the past two years each time I have had positive feedback and on more than one occasion a request for where I put it on the internet. So far however I have resisted the temptation to disclose to people where I put it because it would detract from my desire to have two-way communication on the one hand and also perhaps more importantly it would inhibit me in what I write about…

And then some of my readers of my blog have devised ways to communicate to me the notion that what I write they appreciate reading and from time to time return to see what my latest blogs are all about: in the past I have alluded to this so don’t need to labour the one just the noo..!? hahaha

During my many years in industry starting at the bottom of the ladder running errands to the canteen at brew times with the orders for toasted sandwiches, and such, for the older guys in the Lab I started work in, which in turns in a manner of speaking took me to the top of the tree, I did it for much of the time with good focus. Now that I have been retired these past 8 years I am getting my focus sorted out once more for the new life I have been writing about… Have a good day everyone as I hope you too have your focus sorted..? 

Getting one's focus sorted out 16 12 8: when up until the end of 2019 I got my count of remaining Munro hills down to 10 to 12 from 382 in Scotland and switched to climbing hills of a comparable size in Northern Finland and Arctic Norway deterred as i was to risk getting Covid 19 by continuing to use aircraft as a mode of transport...