My First Job in London

For those who do not know it, I became a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant in 2005. It is fortuitous that I did because I would be slinging burgers at minimum wage somewhere if I had stayed in the environmental field. My environmental experience is useless here because it is so United States specific.

My experience as a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant allowed me to get a job as an activities organiser at Cherrycroft Care Home in Peckham. Peckham is on the wrong side of the Thames: it has a very New Bedford feel to it. It looks like it may have been posh at one time, and we are always running into interesting facts about its past. The buildings and parks are residual clues of its rich past, but it is definitely not posh now.

Cherrycroft specialises in dementia care. I started in September 2007. A woman with an incredible passion for what she is doing is managing the home. She is one of those people alive with Spirit. I also worked with a very caring young man who was my activities assistant. And the residents were incredible. And the staff was like a United Nations assembly. I could write on for days about the experiences I had there.

Despite all of the positive things at Cherrycroft, there were many signs that this was not the place I was supposed to be. I am just not ready to do this job yet. I need more clinical experience first. So, I went part time in January 2008 to start my second job (subject of a future post) and left in March 2008 to start my third (more to come on this later).

I have lots of pictures, but most of them I cannot post due to confidentiality concerns…. All I can really show you is the front door.

Winter in London

We almost missed it. If I had not looked out the window at precisely the right moment, we would have never known that London had a winter. There it is folks, snow in London. It lasted about five minutes on the morning of 24 March 2008. If we capture any more London winter on camera, you will see it here...

First Visitors to London

Here are our first two visitors to London pictured at Trafalgar Square. They were most impressed by the Underground and Bus services. The visit included a very full itinerary: tea at The Orangery of Kensington Palace, a tour of Whole Foods London, a tour of University College London, a bus tour of London, (a side trip to Tesco with Dad), a west end show (The 39 Steps), a Lenten sung Eucharist at Westminster Abbey, shopping (at Harrods, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Whittard and others), and meals together at our favourite restaurants as well as a few in our flat. They are recommending comfortable footwear for future visitors, as London is a walking city.

Shakespeare

Before I even start this Shakespeare page, I am not the Shakespeare scholar of this duo so please take that into account. Here are some pictures of the currently existing Globe Theatre (version 3). The first picture is from the Millennium Bridge, affectionately known as the wobbly bridge. Apparently, when it was first built, it swayed so much that it gave its

passengers quite an uncomfortable sensation… However (sadly), it has been reinforced and it feels very sturdy now.



The next picture is a closer up shot. And then there are some interior shots taken from the stage, including one of the ceiling (the heavens). You may notice a certain Shakespeare scholar in several of the shots. The stage shots are her work… She has been to the Globe without me on several occasions. Research, I am told…

My encounters with Shakespeare and the globe have been comparatively few. The first was Macbeth on 21 September 2007 starring Patrick Stewart. He received rave reviews and I enjoyed the show immensely (although I prefer a more self-doubting portrayal in my Macbeth, but that is me and my untrained unstudied opinion). My next encounter was at the Globe Education Centre, which has a small indoor theatre. It was two boys’ companies performing two John Marston (a contemporary of Shakespeare) plays. According to my resident Shakespeare scholar, there was a genre of boys’ (as opposed to men’s) company plays at the time. The boys’ performance was incredible. I think there is a certain abandonment when boys engage in risk taking behaviour that is that adds a vitality to the performance that you don’t get with adults. Anyway, that has been it for me so far.