Covid causing travel hesitancy

Some of my friends and family have decided to head off overseas (Covid be damned), and I’m just a tad jealous. Despite making plans to visit family in New Zealand in February next year, our last international adventures are now more than a decade ago. Anecdotes and photos have faded, alas. It’s probably ‘normal’ for avid travellers to do less of it as they age, for financial and health reasons. In addition, as illustrated in…

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Spreading the word about U3A

One of the positives in retirement is that it allows one to volunteer with valuable community organisations like U3A. It’s not that uncommon to meet people who have never heard of the University of the Third Age (U3A), an international organisation with broad aims of helping educate and entertain its 450,000 members, who are now in their ‘Third Age’ of life. U3A originated in France in 1973 as an extramural university activity. This was significantly…

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Sport as opium of the masses

YouTube video – Ash comes back from 5-1 down On Sunday night, as Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev drew level at two games each in the first set, we decided that tennis as a spectator sport was intrinsically boring to watch. We adjourned to the dining room table to resume the great summer scrabble tournament. Earlier that day while vacuuming, I had found an F lurking beside a leg of the dining room chair. Now…

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The original FOMM travel articles

Just thinking about how much we love to travel (re: last week’s mention of Japan), got me thinking about how much we are missing being able to scratch our itchy feet. We are not the only ones. When it comes to having family or close friends living overseas, not being able to visit is particularly hard. We all know someone who has not yet met their new grandchild (in London or New York). We appeased…

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