Daily Prompt: From You to you – Into another dimension

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Write a letter to your 14-year-old self. Tomorrow, write a letter to yourself in 20 years.

Me sitting on stone

I do not think I will bother to sit down and write myself a letter. Fats Waller even wrote a song about it, “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter and make believe it came from you”.

At the age of 14 I really had other things to do than read letters. I probably was about 14 years old in this picture, dressed in the latest Marks and Spencer fashion blouse, known as a scarf blouse. I was quite proud of that blouse as I picked it out myself. You might think how lovely and slim she is, but I remember that holiday well at the Isle of Wight in England with mum and dad and my aunt, uncle and cousins. I had shortly before recovered from an attack of scarlet fever. The skin on my hands and feet had just finished peeling, something like a banana skin, after going through a bout of very high fever and probably the fresh sea air did help me on my way to recovery.

We often spent our holidays on the Isle of Wight. It was a couple of hours train journey from London to arrive at the coast, a place called Lymington where we caught the ferry over the Solent to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, an island South of the english coast. We usually stayed at a holiday camp and had our own apartment, my uncle’s family staying in the apartment next to ours. The time was spent on walks on the Tennyson Downs which was along the cliff tops. It seems that the english poet Lord Tennyson lived for 40 years near the downs. Wikipedia tells me the poet used to walk on the downs almost every day, saying that the air was worth “sixpence a pint”, even cheaper than a glass of beer. As it was an island there was beach everywhere and I managed to get my colour back in the sun. In the evening the holiday place had entertainment in the bar.

Dear me, carry on regardless, you did it your way would be about the only words I could tell myself. My head was full of Beatles songs, Carnaby Sreet fashion in London and Mary Quant who was the fashion designer of the time. I think that Vidal Sasoon hairstyles were approaching and the Rolling Stones were appearing in the Marquis club in London.

I was heading for my GCE exams at school which took place two years later. My week-end entertainment mainly circled around Saturday afternoons when I attended a local football match, (the game with the round ball) either at West Ham United or Leyton Orient, although I am not really sure of the time when all this happened. At the age of 68, when you reflect on the past, things get a little mixed up with their order.

And now to write a letter to myself in 20 years. Huh? At the age of 88 I probably am thinking about downloading the free Windows 20 programme. This morning I took the plunge and told my computer to go ahead and give me Windows 10 with all the bells and whistles. I checked yesterday and discovered how I could remove the tiley surface, which reminded me of a primary school picture book. Windows 10 clapped their hands and sent me a mail to say I was now in the waiting list. It might take a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, even a month, but eventually I would get my free download/upload. I would just have to take my place in the queue. So in 20 years, at the age of 88, I will definitely have Windows 10 and will be planning for Windows 20. I am sure Windows 20 will be just a chip implant in my brain, if my brain is still functioning. Otherwise I am sure they could slip the chip in next to my pacemaker which I will probably have in 20 years. Yes. windows 20 will throb constantly on my computer.

I was actually not going to do this prompt, as I found it so stupid, but you see perseverance is everything. You just have to understand the meaning of life and the daily prompt and everything will be OK.

Daily Prompt: From You to You – Into another dimension

19 thoughts on “Daily Prompt: From You to you – Into another dimension”

  3. First of all, that young woman has legs to die for. And the rest of her ain’t so bad either!

    I wrote about computers today because I totally can’t connect with a me that I can barely remember. 14? Really? Then … 88? Uh, no, thank you. Assuming I’m alive in 20 years, I can’t imagine I’d want to hear from me.

    I haven’t decided what to do about Windows 10. I’m still uncertain whether or not it’s ready for ME, much less if I’m ready for it. And since there’s a queue anyway, waiting seems like the perfect answer. I’ll wait. Everything in my computing world is working very well. Why mess with success?

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    • I wish I still had those legs to die for, although at the time of the photos I had lost a few kilos in weight.
      The only thing I really do on my Windows computer is my photos and I have now discovered that I have so much room I could store thousands of photos on it, as well as the extra drives, so I have nothing to lose. It will need patience to upload windows 10 as everyone wants it and I have only now joined the queue. I really like my windows 7 and I am wondering how the Windows 10 built in photo programme is. I only really need it to reduce the photos by 50%.

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  5. The long legged lady had a style and she had her own fashion sense. The scarf blouse was a rage once upon a time. Twenty years is a long time but you made it so interesting to read the long story. You were so fit and lean as a young girl. I could not connect to this one and wrote something.

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  6. https://youtu.be/8ZZRAU3DeOo I hate to be a pedant but Fats didn’t write “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down”, it is one of the few hits he had which he didn’t write. I skipped this prompt as I really don’t want to recall being 14… it nearly killed me the first time!
    Interesting recollections of Carnaby Street, it was an aspiration of my mother to visit it, she is a few years your junior and hails from Withensea in Yorkshire (her dad looks a bit like Wally Batty, I said her dad as opposed to Granddad because he died in 1959, 24 years before I was born).

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    • Thanks for the information. I was always under the impression that Fats wrote everything he recorded according to my dad, but there you see. I can see you are a real expert on this. This is one of the prompts that I did not write the first time round, so probably I was also not inspired. Carnaby Street is still there, but of course no longer as it was. I think something called China Town is next to it.

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  8. Oh what a nice trip down memory lane. I too can remember holidays on the Isle of Wight and also made a few visits to Upton Park even though I grew up encouraged to be a Spurs supporter. It’s all change there now (Upton Park) and causing more than a few feathers to be ruffled. My son had a season ticket for the Orient last year but now he’s married that has gone. Although he still goes with his mates when he can.

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    • My dad was a West Ham supporter, born in Stratford, and my schoolfriend’s father was an Orient supporter, so we split the saturdays between the two teams, yes those were the days some time end of the fifties beginning of the sixties. I visited the Boleyn ground a couple of years ago, but I have heard they will be moving to the Olympic stadium. My No. 2 son even watched West Ham play at a local ground in Switzerland in the watchmakers cup. I think he was the only Swiss amongst the WHU supporters who were all staying on the Swiss border in france, because the hotels in Switzerland were too expensive apparently. I loved the IOW. I would love to go back one day.

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      • Yes West Ham will be moving to the Olympic stadium – it’s a subject for discussion at the moment as to how good the deal is, i.e. how much West Ham are paying compared to how much the taxpayer is paying.

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