Turn back the clock to your best 5 years…

If you could turn the clock back, which five years would you be happy to live again?

Would it be childhood, or teenage years, when you were free of responsibility? When you could just play and sleep in on weekends?

Or would it be the years when you knew a bit more, the twenties or thirties? Usually if you have children it’s a frantic time, but they are at that delightful stage when they still think Mum is wonderful, the centre of their world. Doesn’t last long, does it? (Not like when they grow up, and they think she is just dumb.)

How about the later years when the worst is over, and you reach the calmer waters after forty?

I didn’t really enjoy the angst of teenage years and then I was married at nineteen. Whisked off in a flash of smoke, to New Zealand, with my new husband.

My thirties were happy, but frantically busy, as I juggled a job, helping my husband, caring for children and assorted pets, then nursing my mother in law who came to stay with us. I seemed to cook non -stop, as I made bread and cakes every weekend. The boys were quite a handful, and daughter was in the throes of teenage rebellion. Yes I would need strong drugs to relive that time.

By my fifties we were struggling as we adjusted to a new life in Australia we came here in 1987, we had by then, had to deal with my parents becoming more fragile too. My father died just before we left England and my mother sadly, only had six weeks in her new country with us, when she also died suddenly.

No if I could choose, my best time would be my early forties,. The best time in so many ways, the children were in their late teens, and making their way in the world, my husband had a successful business. We were actually financially more stable than we had ever been, (or have been since) We could go to Paris or Menorca for holidays, we lived in the centre of Historic Bath, a beautiful city.

I worked part time for a big department store in a fashion shop, and had terrific discounts on things I bought, we had great friends we had known for years and a good social life. It was a charmed few years, nothing lasts, life changes, but if you could take me back to the early 1980’s I could deal with that.