RETIRED SENIOR MEMBERS’ ASSOCIATION

Libby Jared

riday 10th June 2022 was a red letter day for Retired Senior Members (RSMs), the day that those who live locally were finally able to resume our term-time monthly coffee mornings in College. The coffee had clearly been brewing for quite some time since the last coffee morning on Friday 21st February 2020, a date when the word pandemic was only just reaching our vocabulary, but we are grateful for the utmost care College went to to keep everyone, including RSMs, safe and well. One year later than planned, we were able to officially welcome Lord Simon Woolley at our first coffee meeting of the academic year, even though it was with impeccable timing that, having somehow evaded Covid all this time, I succumbed to it three days earlier and my emailed words of welcome were delivered on my behalf.

Although there appeared to be little or no change in the Pandemic during the last academic year in terms of in-person meetings, Pandemic life has not been without its technological changes –even for RSMs. We have steadily increased our personal expertise participating in a range of online events including a talk (with screen sharing and power point displays), several committee meetings and having mastered two purely on-line events we embraced a hybrid format for our most recent on-line AGM.

But without our coffee mornings to look forward to, what have RSMs being doing with themselves? The key is probably in the word

F‘retired’ – we are left to return to the playground to amuse ourselves leaving others to continue the ‘day job’. Recent Newsletters may provide some of the answers; the idea supplied by the title of one printed this year: “So what gets you out of bed in the morning?” For its author it is being a guide at the Cambridge Botanic Garden but equally applying the same question to other articles provides a range of answers (space dictates from one Newsletter only) to those authors too which in turn makes it possible to portray and encapsulate the very being of RSMs. Here goes.

For some (Knowledge Quartet, 5Voices Project) it is continuing their research interests into ‘retirement’, still reaching an academic audience and still influencing practising teachers, or taking Homerton Graduands to India during their summer vacation to be involved in an innovative project there. Perhaps unsurprising for retired historians, it is their never ending interest in Homerton’s history: one investigating the building in 1889–91 of a new Dining Hall (nothing changes) for Cavendish College, another providing unstinting work both in the Homerton Archives and The Heritage Project. Others use leisure time gained in retirement to pursue their own interests, increasing a wealth of artistic skills or embracing different forms of knowledge beyond their professional subjects, although the mathematicians continue with more solving of hard problems collaboratively. No wonder we are always asking how did we ever find the time to work.

But paramount to all our interests is that we never lose our love of all things Homertonian n

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