How To Be A Good Mother or Father: Here's The Secret: Just Do Your Best

There's a lot of tension in Britain these days about parenting. I'm not talking about the kind of parents who never should have had children, who see them as a nusiance and maltreat them. Social workers have to deal with some of those families and who'd envy them their task?

But lots of capable, well-meaning and loving parents seem to be made neurotic about raising their children - perhaps by the media and constant reports about what's 'best' for children.

Parents' worries seem to be mostly about education, health and safety. That's understandable. If you can believe any of what you read in the papers then, in lots of areas of Britain, school discipline seems to have broken down so that learning is no longer the priority. Pupils bent on causing trouble can do it easily, safe in the knowledge that teachers don't have any real sanctions to deal with them. To someone of my age, the sight of teachers being hauled into court or losing their jobs for some minor infraction, after decades of devoted teaching and on the say-so of a child still - obviously - wet behind the ears is a travesty. Have a look at what I wrote recently about school discipline when I was at school in the 1930s. I'm not saying bring back Mrs Roscoe's leather strap or Miss Gillett's cane (my teachers in Lancashire) but there has to be a balance between rigid control and chaos in classrooms. Otherwise none of the children will learn.

Their children's health will always trouble parents. But there seem to be lots more health problems to worry about now than there were when I was a child or when I raised my kids in the 50's and 60's. Lots more allergies and lots more psychological problems. On the other hand, parents now have access to health care and medicines that I, and my parents before me, could never have imagined.

And safety. When my kids were small, living in rural Surrey, they'd vanish with their pals on spring or summer days - Just William style - and I wouldn't see them till they called in for a glass of water or at teatime. They roamed about in woods picking wild strawberries, tried to catch sticklebacks in streams, played on a wood lorry left in a sort of lumber yard - who knows what they got up to. During their whole youth there was only one time that a man molested a local child. And we had an elderly neighbour who'd grab the girls and try to kiss them in a rather revolting way. Everyone just saw him as a pest. The girls, like other village kids, used to take a shortcut through his garden and I'd say "Don't let him get hold of you." If he did, they'd wriggle away and come home saying "Ughhh, ughhh, he tried to kiss me." They instinctively didn't go past him if they were on their own.
But my kids were lucky. Growing up in rural south east England back then wasn't like growing up in a grim industrial town or 'inner city'. Children did play free, outside, unsupervised, and were generally happier for it is my bet.

Still, parents have always faced worries in bringing up their children and it would be wrong for today's parents to imagine they face more difficulty than other generations. Think of this. I remember during the war that kids were hastily billetted all over the place, out of the cities that were being bombed, separated from their mums and dads for who knew how long, shoved into households where they knew no-one and were not necessarily welcome guests. One day when I was about 11 (it must have been about 1940) I remember a woman - a total stranger - came to our door and absolutely begged my mother to take her little granddaughter in because the Germans were bombing Liverpool. I still remember the woman's tragic expression and pleading. I learnt that the family were Jews though I didn't really know what jewish meant. We did take the little girl in, for several weeks - she had beautiful black hair and pale blue eyes and was called Sylvia. (We found out very soon that the beautiful black hair was full of lice. Mum had us kids and dad - and a Catholic Polish airman billetted in our house with his wife and baby because of the war - all out in the little back garden washing our heads with a soap called Derbac. It was the sole product available for head lice in those days.)

Just like children have their fears about the monster under the bed or in the cupboard, parents have their fears that their child will get ill or run over or be snatched away. But the thing is, life isn't always under our control. In the 1930s and 1940s people had far less control of their lives, health, education and safety than we do now. Imagine packing your child off to school every day with a gas mask, as my mother did for years, fearing a bomb or gas attack would mean you'd never see each other again. The best a lot of parents in Lancashire where I grew up in the 1930s and 40s could hope for, for their children, was that they'd learn to read - and find work in a mill or a factory when they left school at 13 or so.

As we all steadily got more control since the second world war, people seem to worry about any risk. That'll just ruin your life. And will probably make your kids neurotic too!

I remember taking my second child back to Washington DC in 1956. She'd been born in England and was 7 months old. (My husband, Gerry, was stationed in Washington in the Royal Air Force after serving in the RAF throughout the war.) A bunch of us went down from Washington one day to see American friends in Philadelphia. They were middle-aged, Steve and Babs Rotay, and had already raised their family. At lunch, I was slightly horrified to see my husband and Steve gaily improvise a baby chair at the table for my chubby, blonde, little baby. They plonked her in a huge 'carver' chair and strapped her in with a couple of Steve's leather belts. And gave her a chicken leg. I didn't like to say anything - the others were all a lot older than me and not long ago they'd beaten the Nazis - but I kept a bit of an eye on her. She had a whale of a time. She was in the thick of things - chatter, laughter, beer, whisky, smoke and all. She had a huge smile on her face and chortled her way through the afternoon.

I think what I'm saying is keep an eye on your kids but don't get neurotic. Whatever you do as a parent there will be events over which you have no control. In my case, I brought my 2 girls up both in the same way. One has had - so far, touch wood - pretty excellent health, the other has had illness after illness, including Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion (in 1984 I think it was) after the birth of her son, and skin melanoma. There will always be things you cannot protect your children from. And you worry about them even when they're in their 50s!

After raising two girls, having a hand in raising three grandchildren, and now having a great-grandson, here's my advice about having and raising children if anyone's interested:

Love them to bits.
Do your best for them.
Treat them equally. (They'll see that you treat them equally even when they put on a whiney voice and say "It's not fair...".)
And don't worry if you make mistakes. They'll forgive you.

Free university education? Not in the early 21st century - and not in the early 20th century either.

 Last week I watched the student protests and the attack on Millbank Tower in London. Most of the students seemed to be protesting peacefully but of course there'll always be some who get out of control. I felt sorry for some of the coppers getting hit and cut, and the student who chucked a fire extinguisher off the tower certainly wasn't doing anything progressive. Experience suggests that most of the students smashing windows and breaking things will turn into ordinary middle-aged people with kids and mortgages even though they don't imagine at the moment that they will.

I haven't followed the latest ins and outs of education policy but I know the coalition government is planning to raise university fees and students are demonstrating for free higher education. My daughters both benefited from free university education and I was delighted they had an opportunity that few teenagers got in my day.

They went to university in the 70s though - in those days Britain didn't have a trillion pound budget deficit.

Back in the 30s, when I started school in Lancashire, the opportunity of free university education was still a long way off.

I started school at 5 years old, in 1934, at Joseph's infant school in Wesham. It was a Roman Catholic school, obviously. Most schools were religious and funded by the various religions. My best friend, Betty, went to the local Church of England school. At Joseph's, we sat on long benches to be taught by the only teacher, Mrs Roscoe, who was my mother's cousin. She was a middle-aged married woman with grey hair who wore shapeless cardigans and skirts. To maintain order and discipline she had a leather strap, 2 inches thick, and you got whacked if you stepped out of line. I remember little boys in the class coming back to the benches with their eyes smarting after she'd strapped their hands in punishment. Poor little things!

Unthinkable in today's schools, the strap did help the teacher keep order back then. None of us objected to it. It was just the way discipline was maintained. You didn't question the teacher or the school and parents accepted teachers' authority too.

When I was about 8 I left Joseph's and went to the Roman Catholic school in Westby. The teacher here, Miss Gillett, was another of my mother's cousins. Miss Gillett was an aging spinster who used a thin cane to keep order. No wonder, because she had about 30 of us kids aged between 8 and 14 and quite a few were farm boys who would have preferred to be anywhere but in a schoolroom.

There were no set lessons and we didn't know what we'd be studying from day to day. Miss Gillett would simply come in each day and say: "Today we'll do arithmetic" or "Today we'll do English." The farm boys regularly got caned for not paying attention or for being a bit cheeky. From time to time - I can't remember exactly why; we probably sniggered at something - all of us had to line up and Miss Gillett caned all of us. I remember getting caned, that little whip hitting my hand.

There were only 2 classrooms in the school. Up to 8 years old, children were taught by Mrs Martin . She wore a motheaten fur coat and thought she was rather wonderful. In our classroom, with children aged 8 to 14 all mixed up, it was sometimes a bit chaotic. I can't remember really learning anything at either school but somewhere along the way, someone - Miss Gillett I suppose - taught me to read.

One term when I was about 10, Miss Gillett kept me separate from the other pupils for a couple of weeks. She took me to a cupboard where there was a set of encyclopedias and told me to sit and read them. I had no idea why, but I dipped in and out of them a bit in between looking out to see what the other children were doing. Day after day I sat and leafed through the various volumes reading snippets of information.

I had some form with encyclopedias as it happened because some time before this a salesman had come to our door at home and persuaded my father to buy 6 (or was it 10?) volumes of a series called Arthur Mees' Children's Encyclopedias. The volumes had elegant dark blue binding and looked very appealing to me. I had it in mind from the start that they were fairly precious because my father had to pay 6 pounds and 10 shillings, which he could only afford to do in installments.

Anyway, at the end of the 2 weeks in the cupboard with these volumes I was taken to the nearby town of Kirkham and told I was to sit an exam. It was a scholarship to the Catholic convent - Layton Hill - in Blackpool.

Miss Gillett told me no-one had ever got a scholarship to the convent from Westby school and I was the only pupil being entered for it. She didn't say why she'd picked me.

I vaguely remember there were questions which required Yes/No answers and some which were problem solving types. After the exam I went home and forgot about it altogether until Miss Gillett told us one day that the scholarship results had been announced in the Lancashire Daily Post, that I'd won a scholarship and would be going to Layton Hill Convent and that all the pupils were getting a one day holiday off school to celebrate.

The other pupils were delighted to get a day's holiday but I was terrified. I wouldn't know anyone at the convent and I'd have to get a bus to Blackpool and back every day.

It seems strange, looking back, that there was a war on and we lived in daily fear of the Nazi bombers - listening every time we heard a plane because even kids could tell the difference between 'our' planes and theirs - and yet we kids were worrying about normal things like going to a new school or cheering because of a day off school. Some things never change.

Through my school years it seemed perfectly normal to have air raid drills where we went into the little shelter and put our gas masks on. We carried gas masks everywhere we went, not just to school, and even the littlest kids knew how to fit them. Only if we were playing near our homes did we leave our gas masks inside. Gas wasn't used in the second world war though as far as I'm aware. The fear of gas, and distribution of gas masks, was really a hangover from the First World War when so many men were gassed in the trenches. I was only caught in one incendiary bomb attack which I'll describe some other time. We were out in the back garden and heard a plane and all looked up, listening as usual for the noise telling us it was 'one of ours.' It wasn't, the noise was a German plane and suddenly there were flames coming up all over the place, all around us.

But as I say, children - like adults - have their own mundane worries even in wartime and when that summer ended and I went off to my new school I was still in a state of terror. With hundreds of girls, Layton Hill seemed huge after my little school at Westby. I now had to wear a school uniform, which I wasn't used to. There were around 30 girls in each class. I could sense that this school was going to be different from the 'education' I'd known before.

But I not only settled in quickly, I loved it. I found I loved learning and everything we were taught seemed fascinating after the rather unstructured and informal education I'd had up till then. After the first year we were all to be streamed into A and Alpha classes. The brighter girls would do Latin; the less academic would do domestic science. I quite liked cookery and wanted to be in that stream but I was placed in the Latin stream.

Had I not won the scholarship to the convent, I would have had to go to the local state school which didn't have a good reputation. My parents could never have afforded to pay for my education. As it was, they had to pay for hockey sticks and boots, tennis racquets and other sports gear and it was all expensive. The scholarship paid my fees and travel to and from school and, I think, my uniform. But both my mother and father seemed to know education was valuable though they weren't educated themselves. My father had left school at 12, which was common in those days, and I guess my mother left around the same age. Dad earned 5 pounds a week at about this time, working for a local market gardener who had a nursery. My cousins mostly worked in the local biscuit factory and my mother had been a weaver in the cotton mill. I would have had to do the same if I'd had to leave school earlier.

At 17, I got my School Certificate. This meant I'd passed exams in Latin, English Grammar, English Literature, French, Art, Science, Religious Knowledge and Maths. If you didn't pass English Grammar you couldn't get your School Certificate, even if you passed all the other exams.

The big question for me now was What next? In those days, most people from poor or modest backgrounds had only a dim idea about universities. I know that I liked the thought of going to a university but didn't know anything about them. I knew my father could never pay for me to go and wasn't sure if there was a new scholarship I could try to get.

As it happened, the problem of finding a scholarship never arose. My parents explained to me that now I had my School Certificate I'd need to leave the convent, find a job, and bring some money into the house. They could no longer afford to feed and clothe me without me contributing something each week.

This was just a matter-of-fact reality and I accepted it without question. I knew we were stretched financially as my father was buying our terraced house in Wesham in some sort of mortgage arrangement. I don't know how it worked. He didn't even have a bank account. But once a month we went to a solicitor's house in Kirkham and handed over an envelope with the payment in it in cash.

I had no idea how I'd find a job or what sort of job I should - or even could - look for but an opportunity presented itself almost straight away. The convent secretary was one of the nuns, Mother Clara. She explained that the convent was admitting more pupils and she would need an assistant to help her. If I would stay on at the school - now as assistant secretary - she would teach me shorthand and typing and I'd get a small wage. I was happy to agree. It was a strange first job. Still a teenager, I was now working at the school where my luckier school friends were still studying in the sixth form. I wasn't allowed in the staff room until my second year in the job. And I was learning to be a school secretary. So I was halfway between staff and pupil really.

I remember showing Mother Clara a letter one day that had been sent from an African country. I forget which one all these years later. It was from the parents of a girl called Rosette Solomon. Out of the blue, they announced that they had dispatched their daughter to England and she would shortly arrive at the convent as a boarder. I can't remember how payment was made but Rosette duly arrived at Layton Hill in Blackpool. She attracted quite a bit of interest from the staff and pupils as she was the first black child many of us had ever seen!

How Colours Fade As You Get Older

Now I'm in my 80s, my daughters often tell me, when I'm ready to go out, that my make-up needs a bit of attention. I put too much eyebrow pencil on and too much lipstick. The eyebrow pencil, when it's too heavy, makes me 'look like a clown.' Daughters will always be honest with you about your appearance. The lipstick may be all right, but a bit too heavy.

They'll take some of the eyebrow pencil off and maybe some of my foundation. I don't blend it well enough apparently. It feels funny when they tidy up my make-up. I used to wipe ice-cream and chocolate off their faces when they were little. Now they'll wipe make-up off mine. The roles are reversed.

What I've explained to them is that as you get older your sight often gets weaker and you see colours less vividly. They may see the make-up is too heavy but when I peer in the mirror I see faint lines where I put the eyebrow pencil. And where they see bright red or coral lipstick, I see faint colour.

I don't like the idea that my make-up looks odd though so I'm happy for them to adjust it when they're around.

On the other hand they both compliment me a lot on my skin. Even though I drink quite a bit of wine and have done for years, my skin is clear and I have relatively few wrinkles. My forehead in particular is unwrinkled - my daughters say I must use botox, which of course I don't! But I think your skin is largely determined by your genes and I must be lucky there. I don't have an awful lot of faith in skin creams. I use Oreal products quite a lot but I notice that they always have something new out. The newest thing I bought from them is an under-eye cream that comes with a little vibrating mechanism. You put the cream on and use the vibrating thing to massage it into your skin. But it seems obvious to me that if the skincare companies keep producing new creams for your eyes or face or hands then they haven't produced creams that really work. One year they say "This is the cream you need for puffy eyes" or dry skin or age spots. If it really was though, they wouldn't produce a new one the year after.

Fear of Getting Older? It's The Indignities That Are Most Worrying

In September and November 2010 I lost two old friends. One was in his nineties and died unexpectedly after a stomach operation. (Or at least, as unexpectedly as possible after ninety.) The other was, like me, in her eighties. A very dear friend for many years, she fell and hit her head one day and died just a few days afterwards.

When people die suddenly, even if they're old, it's a shock. In my experience though, people start looking for ways to feel better about the loss. "He'd had a good life" they say. Or "at least she didn't get ill and suffer for years." And there's certainly something to be said for that outlook.

I have another old and dear friend who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. She's a year older than me and started losing her faculties about two years ago. At first she would simply repeat an anecdote. The moment she recounted it, she'd say it again. It was clear she had no idea she'd just told me the same story. It was a shock when it started. What on earth was happening to her? She'd always been so bright. After that she began to lose her memory for lots of things and muddle dates and times up. If I invited her round for a drink or to dinner, she might turn up on the wrong day, or call to ask me to remind her when she should be coming round.

Then she began to talk about her mother and father, long dead, as if they were still alive. She started to mislay and lose things and she'd say: "Oh that's my mother -she's taken my make-up again." I'd gently explain that her mother had been dead for a long time and she'd seem a bit shocked but then carry on with what she was doing.

Alzheimer's is obviously a progressive disease and though I didn't know much about it before, I saw it changing her behaviour and getting worse. She had always taken great care of her appearance but started to neglect it without seeming to realise that she hadn't washed her hair or hadn't put her lipstick on.  She got progressively confused, frustrated and tearful about everyday things and sometimes I'd call round and find her crying. Once, she invited me to tea and put a plate of bread and paté on the table - but it wasn't  paté, it was cat food. Now, although that may sound funny it wasn't because she was unaware of what she'd done and couldn't understand what the problem was when I explained it to her.

I also worried a bit about her beloved cat as I wasn't sure she was remembering to feed it regularly.

Eventually she had 'carers' who came in twice a day. There are all sorts of common sense things, apparently,  that English carers can't do these days. They told me they couldn't wash her hair or do her make-up or change her sheets. For over five months - I think they said six months in total - they didn't change her sheets. I think that's scandalous. They were paid a fortune but the excuse was that they didn't have "the right" to go into her bedroom and change the sheets unless she asked them to. Something like that anyway. Common sense should tell the authorities that if you have a woman in her 80s with Alzheimers people sent to help, and paid to help, should take charge, take responsibility, and change the bedclothes.

She began to look progressively dishevelled and no wonder. I used to drive her down to the hairdresser before I had to give up driving, so at least her hair was washed and cut.

Eventually she had a few episodes where she was found wandering in Stoke Park or in Guildford and she had a few falls and after spending time in hospital she was put in a home in Wimbledon. In her lucid moments she told me, often, that she didn't want to leave her home and go into a 'care' home. But in the end she had no choice.

For many people my age I think that's the sort of thing we least want to experience. Toppling over and dying or having a heart attack and dying, are not pleasant thoughts but most of the people I know, of my age, tend to agree the worst thing would be going into a home and declining slowly as you get towards ninety. We enjoy living independently and we don't want to give that up. We may not talk about it very often, especially not to younger people, but we do fear needing someone to spoon food into our mouths, help us to the bathroom or wash us.

Personally I do think a bit about dying - I talked to my younger daughter about this the other week - but there's no use worrying about it. At 81, I may have another 10 years for all I know. For me, the most important thing would not be the number of years I have left but the quality of them. It's not so much the end of life that would worry me, more the thought of indignities I might face as I get nearer 90.

Still, I've had a pretty good old age so far and I was watching David Attenborough the other day in his new TV series on the origins of life on earth. He was born in 1926 and is three years older than me. He was jumping around filming in Australia, Canada and Switzerland. He didn't seem to have any problems scaling rocks or clambering about pointing out fossils on the seashore. That's what I call a good and healthy old age and as he's older than me, it makes me think I've got more active years to come.

Heavy Drinking and the Over 80s

I think there's a lot of panicking these days about certain habits. People aren't meant to go out in the sun for fear of skin cancer. Aren't meant to smoke for fear of lung cancer. Aren't meant to drink much for fear of high blood pressure or heart disease or liver disease.

For all I know it's all very good advice. But I have to say, particularly with regard to drinking, that I seem to know an awful lot of people my age and older who drink like fish and are still in pretty good condition.

I have a book somewhere in which Churchill wrote that he drank at every meal and on all occasions in between. He smoked cigars too, almost all the time. Obviously, he wasn't a man who believed the saying "All things in moderation". He had a couple of strokes, it's true, but he lived to be 91. I saw him (and photographed him) in Washington DC after the war and he seemed pretty hale and hearty.

I can almost say the same for my partner? boyfriend? - I never know how to refer to him - who drinks at least 4 pints of beer a day and is nearly 86. He's not hale and hearty perhaps but he's perfectly on the ball, lives entirely independently, follows the news avidly, and motor racing, has a social life and sees his daughter and grandchildren every week.

Most of my other friends, some younger, some older than me, drink regularly too. I can't see the point of worrying too much about it at my age. I like white wine and I like a drink with lunch sometimes and a few glasses with dinner, always. On my 80th birthday I had a party and around 30 of us drank champagne all evening. Friends returning to Guildford from holiday in France brought two cases and others bought champagne along too.  It was a lovely evening and the champagne went very well with all the food my younger daughter prepared.

My two daughters sometimes say they're worried about drinking - we all like wine - but I tell them that I've been drinking for 60 years and so far haven't come to much harm. Back in the 1950s, we all drank cocktails and martinis all the time. The girls' father was stationed in Washington DC with the Royal Air Force so we lived there for some years and the RAF lifestyle in America after the war was all about partying and drinking! I have a lot of photos of those days and in every one of them the girls' father has a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In his case, sadly, the cigarettes did get him and he died in 1968, in his late fifties. However, he loved drinking and smoking and wouldn't have wanted to give up even if we'd had all the constant rather nagging health advice we get these days.

In the 60s, back in England, in Surrey, we drank sherry and gin (and babycham? - can hardly remember babycham but I think my elder daughter sometimes drank it as a teenager). And later on, in the 70s I suppose, once people really started going on holiday to France and Italy, Malta and Spain, we all started drinking wine.

Two male friends of mine died during 2010. They were both over 90 and both liked a drink. I'm sure health advisers would tut tut and say it's best to avoid drinking more than whatever is the medically preferred weekly limit. Perhaps they're right. But presumably there are lots of factors dictating what will and won't harm us because otherwise probably none of us would live to be 80 or 90. I had two brushes with cancer in my 60s (bladder cancer) and I haven't smoked since. The surgeon told me he's never had a patient with bladder cancer who hadn't smoked. But since I like a glass of wine, or several, and I've already lived to be 81 and a bit, I'll take my chances with alcohol and keep on drinking. I won't go as far as Churchill did and drink on every possible occasion but I'll stick to my glass of wine with lunch and a couple of glasses with dinner.

Disabled Children Born in the 1920s - My Baby Brother's Fate

I was born in 1929 and was brought up as an only child. But I wasn't the only child my parents had. A few years before I was born, my mother gave birth to a little boy.

My brother was born at home in Kirkham in Lancashire, just as I would be. But whereas I was healthy, he was not. He was a very sick baby. My father told me years later that he had a hole in his back - a sort of wound that was unhealed. Although I can't be sure, I think he must have had spina bifida.

I don't know what the treatment is these days for a baby with spina bifida. It's not a condition I know much about. But in those days, it was often thought best that a very sick or disabled baby was left to die. Or - who knows - even "helped" to die. I think that is what happened with my brother. My father told me many years later that our doctor said just after the birth that the baby would only live for about a week. Obviously it was terribly upsetting for my parents. Their first child...

My father arranged straight away to have his son christened. We were catholics and in those days we believed without even really thinking about it that an unchristened baby who died would go to limbo and spend eternity there. (What a terrible thing for a religion to tell parents facing the death of a child.) Anyway, my brother was christened. The priest came to the house for the baptism and the sick baby was given the name William.

Each day that week William lay in his cradle and each evening my father administered a medicine to him. He was told by the doctor to fetch the medicine from the chemist each evening. When my father eventually talked about the death of my brother, when I was an adult, he told me that the doctor had never explained what the medicine was or what it was for but my dad noticed that each evening after he had the medicine, William was worse. At the end of the week, he died.

My father told me that it hadn't even occurred to him to question the doctor's orders - in those days the doctor, like the priest, was a bit like God - you didn't question them and you certainly didn't challenge them. It didn't even cross your mind. However, looking back, my father said he'd often - naturally - thought about his sick baby boy and had concluded that, whatever the doctor had ordered, it had probably killed William.

He could never know for sure and I will never know. My mother had died by the time my father talked to me about this. I don't know if he had ever shared his opinion with her. Probably not. She was ill most of her adult life with pernicious anaemia and he probably would have thought she wasn't strong enough to talk about losing the baby.

My dad was of course a man of his time and when he talked about William and his death he talked about it simply and objectively. He just said that he thought the doctor had probably told him to administer a 'medicine' that had killed the baby. He didn't say he thought that was terrible, or for the best, or anything else - just that he thought that was what had happened. I'll never know if he was inwardly angry at the doctor or calmly accepting that a medical judgement had been made or even reassured by the belief that William had been spared a long life of pain and disability.

I suspect, because it was back in the 1920s, that he may simply have thought that's how life was and that was the professional decision taken by the doctor. It makes me shiver though to think that my kind dad may have spent that week trustingly giving 'medicine' to his sick baby son in the hope it would improve his condition, if in fact it was killing him.

Computers for the Over 80s - Internet, Google, Adsense, Facebook

Because I'm elderly - 81 and nearly 2 months as I write - I'm not brilliant with computers. I saw an article in a paper the other day that made me laugh. It was an article titled something like "Silver Surfers" and it was about people over 50 using the internet. For heaven's sake. My daughters are both over 50 and I wouldn't call them silver surfers. I don't think either of them has a grey hair. They're young!

Even I'm not a silver surfer - what a patronising phrase. I colour my hair. (Only a bit, with washout colour, not with peroxide or anything. I left that behind in the '50s.)

Anyway. I use the internet and I have a PC in my home study and I use the internet at both my daughters' houses too, when I'm visiting. At the start, before I'd ever used a computer, my daughters bought me a PC and I went on a short course in Guildford to learn how to use Word and email and look around the internet. I didn't do anything very adventurous; the idea was just to use email mostly to stay in contact with family members. At first I had no idea that if you had a query or question or wanted information on any topic under the sun you could just key it ito Google and get hundreds of results. My two daughters, son-in-law and grandson gradually showed me all the different things I could do.

I'm still fairly basic in what I do with the PC and the internet though. There's a lot I don't understand and a limit to what I want to learn. Facebook, for example, holds no interest for me whatsoever. All the Word commands frustrate me a bit too. Sometimes the text becomes small all of a sudden and I have no idea which key I pressed or how to make the text larger. And the other day I got something up on the screen that I couldn't understand and a message appeared beside it saying "What's this?" I was baffled. How would I know what it was? How would I answer the question even if I knew the answer? One of my granddaughters explained later that it wasn't asking me what the thing was - rather I should have clicked on the icon to get more information. A lot of computer "thinking" is lost on me. There are lots of websites that I can't find my way around too. I fly several times a year as one of my daughters lives in France, but she always books my flights. I haven't used the Flybe website myself to buy a ticket. I'm worried about giving bank details online.

My daughters helped me start this blog after one of them asked me lots of questions about my childhood. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. I knew perfectly well what blogs were because they're referred to everywhere now - on the BBC, in the papers - but I had no idea I could just write one. They helped me start this and helped me register me for Adsense, explaining that you get paid for blogs if people read them. I'll believe it when I see it.

All this is in order to say that although I'm not very good with computers I had a pretty good IT idea the other day. I was in a pub in Shere, in Surrey, the White Horse - and got talking to two elderly men who it turned out were from Lancashire, like me. When they were young, they had friends who went to school in Kirkham. We didn't talk for very long but I guess if we'd gone through a list of names we would have known some people in common.

So I wonder if Google or some internet company couldn't make a sort of IT Contact Board or Message Board in a mobile phone where you'd note lots of people you know, and so would other people, and you'd get signals when someone was nearby who knew people in common. It could be quite interesting. Imagine if you're young and you get a signal that someone in the same cafe or train as you knows your boss. The Message Board would indicate the people around you and which person you had the "match" with. You'd chat and perhaps find out information on your boss from someone who used to work for him.  Or from his daughter. Or ex-wife! Or imagine you get a signal and find that someone knows your daughter or friend or neighbour. It could be a god way of extending social and work networks. It could also be dangerous of course. Imagine your daughter finds out that a brassy blonde in the bar where she's sitting has listed her husband as one of her contacts...

It could also be used as a proper Message Board. Say a train is cancelled you could put out a message saying you could give three people a lift to the West End of London, for example. Their phones would tell them where you were, so they could approach you. Or if you were outside a concert with a spare ticket, you could signal that to everyone too.

This is the only computing idea I've ever had and I expect someone will tell me that all that is already possible with some mobile phone or other, or iPod or Google phone. Never mind. I think it's not a bad idea and it just goes to show that even at my age, if you learn something new, like internet use, it'll get you thinking and give you new ideas. Even if someone else has had them first.