“I was brought up just after the 2nd world war; my parents were brought up during the Great Depression. I have been studying most of my life, and probably still would be if I was on the mainland. I love studying.
I had qualifications in civil engineering and side work as a draftsman for a number of years, building technician certificates, designing and supervising building work. Really, it wasn’t sort of satisfying me. I knew I lived in a more complex world than the one I was spending my life in. I decided to get a degree in social work, I wanted to find out what made people tick. I primarily did it because it contained the subjects I wanted to know about: sociology, philosophy, psychology and professional social work modules as well.
I think you know a lot more by the time you are seventy than you did when you were twenty but you still don’t know everything there is to know. When you’re twenty you think you know everything.
I am not afraid of the future. I don’t have that much of a future. People say, ‘but you could live to a hundred’ and I say, but that’s only thirty years. I have already lived seventy. Life is not long enough. There is a slight disappointment that maybe I haven’t done all the things I wanted to do, but hey… you kind of look back at your life and think ‘Geez, I’ve done a lot of things.’ I’m not even really afraid of dying, I am more afraid of ‘not living’.
But if I start to feel down, all I gotta do is think about my granddaughter. I can feel it—all my facial muscles soften and my blood pressure drops.”