TWITTERING ON

BY ANGELA KELLY

The real value of grandparents

WHAT value on grandparents in 2021? Are we still useful and relevant in this age of Love Island and Tik Tok?

I only ask because it was interesting to see that Meghan Markle’s father, Thomas, is reported to be considering going to court in order to be able to see his grandchildren Archie and Lilibet.

I don’t want to go too deeply into personalities here. The Sussexes generally make me rather annoyed and disappointed and I don’t know what kind of father Thomas was.

What I do know is the value of grandparents today and what they can mean to busy young parents and children who may not have many family members nearby. Grandparents have often got the time and willingness to spend on both caring for their grandchildren and being the patient listening ear that youngsters need. They have experience of life generally, and particularly of bringing up their own children, and have learned from the mistakes that we all make as parents. Grandparents offer children a second, different view of adults. Sometimes, one that is gentler and kinder partly because we’re not full-time carers or disciplinarians and we can always give them back! This allows a special kind of freedom of loving and enjoyment of life with grandchildren that busy parents can’t always provide. Grandparents can supplement that caring basis in the home and take it in different directions.

So I hope – for the sake of Archie and Lilibet and, oddly, for the sake of the Sussexes themselves – that they can all resolve this in some way and allow the generations to get to know each other better.

It’s what can ultimately make real families.

Going through trying times

IF there’s one life-lesson that should be passed through the generations it’s that simple saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” We seem to have moved away from that kind of “stick-at-ability” and often give up when faced with the first real hurdle in many things we’re doing today. One person to show just how this can work brilliantly positively for us, though, is inventor James Dyson. Talking about his life and inventions in a national newspaper recently, James recalled how it took 5,126 attempts before he successfully created his famous cyclone Hoover-type machine. That took out four years of his life - and probably most of his temper - but he got there. As he points out: “Folklore depicts invention as a flash of brilliance. That eureka moment. But it rarely is, I’m afraid. It is more about failure than ultimate success.”

He beavered away in his workshop every day, building cyclones, testing them for their effectiveness in collecting dust. Fortunately for James, he had a very supportive wife who believed in him and allowed him to put their home and home-life at risk to develop his dream.

But if you look at crucial inventions all through history, they come at the price of consistent, dogged determination – and often health and wealth.

There’s no doubting that Alexander Graham Bell didn’t just suddenly discover the telephone one day. It was the result of years of hard work. Or that Marie Curie happened on the power of radium by chance. Everything important since the advent of the wheel has been achieved by someone – or a group of someones – being prepared to put in the hard yards and keep going with an idea until it worked.

It’s true that during that time there will also have been thousands for whom effort didn’t ultimately pay off. But the main thing is that they had a dream and they tried and didn’t just chuck in the towel when things got a bit tough. It would be unfair and unjust to say that there aren’t success stories today because of course there are. It’s just that this determination to succeed, to reach a goal, isn’t always given the kudos it deserves.

We might acknowledge the achievement in creating a clever idea and making it work but we seldom pay homage to the huge amounts of time and energy it took to reach that point. In fact, having “stick-at-ability” isn’t necessarily something that’s admired in people today. We praise the flexibility and vision of people prepared to move on from projects to something else if it doesn’t pan out.

Granted, life doesn’t work out all the time but James Dyson’s kind of stoicism offers much to be admired. Fortunately for him, it’s also made his fortune.

Waste not want not!

IT’S a shocking fact that the average UK family wastes £730 a year on uneaten food – especially when nearly eight million people don’t get enough to eat. As domestic users, we throw away about 18 per cent of the food we buy, 85 per cent of it is perishable and 70 per cent of it still edible. I only know these figures because I saw an article by the excellent Great British Bake-Off judge and food expert Prue Leith who was bemoaning the amount of food we waste every day. She was harking back to World War Two and reminding us all that during the war you could go to jail for wasting food. She still thinks it’s a crime now and she’s right. I don’t know how scrupulous you are about chucking out food but I’m ridiculous about sell-by dates and reach for the bin at the first sign of imagined mould. Prue recalled that one of her earliest memories was of her mother’s stricken face during WW2 when the family’s precious egg ration (five for a family of five) smashed on the hall’s tiled floor after the bag gave way. “We scooped them up and ate them anyway. Scrambled,” stated Prue. “To waste them would have been a sin.”

She advocates more realistic shopping, more frugality and a realistic approach to the freezer as well as using up leftovers. It really is a matter of commonsense and a way to conserve the world’s resources.