Category: life stuff (Page 22 of 28)

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight

30/10/2009 / Ellie

To the 9-to-5. The day job (members of the audience heave a collective sigh of relief – all two of them).

Today’s my last day at work. After just shy of 21 years, a twinge of sadness is to be expected – you can’t work with people for that length of time and not develop some kind of friendship – but what’s really blown me sideways is the number of customers who’ve rung up, emailed, or sent embarrassingly large bouquets of flowers.

They’re either going to miss me an awful lot, or they’re really, really pleased to see the back of me.

Whatever happened to the heroes?

24/10/2009 / Ellie

The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ’em like that any more.