I hope you’re all having a good 2025 so far (well, it has only been a few hours!). Your writing prompt this week is
FAVOURITE 2024 MOMENTS
As we welcome another new year in, we often look back over the past 12 months. There will have been good times and bad times, but let’s focus on the positive. What happy memories will you take into 2025?
You don’t have to share your work, but I always enjoy seeing what you come up with if the prompt gives you inspiration. Here is the work you shared on the last prompt PLANS.
Sincere plans are made,
Then life comes in with gusto . . .
Need to start over.
Plans? I don’t have any except for paying bills, I can’t think ahead, I don’t know what’s going to happen so I just go with the flow. As long as I have food and warmth I will survive I guess.
Not wishing to be pessimistic, but 2024 has not been a good year for us, nor was 2023.
As things are going, 2025 does not hold a lot of hope for a lot of people, and making plans may seem futile. Hubby and I learned a long time ago not to plan anything as it ALWAYS went belly up.
In 2007, we’d planned to purchase a property with the aim of opening up a B&B. It didn’t pan out as the property we ended up buying was completely wrong by design, the only thing going for it was being on a main road. Even then, it was too close to the road so pretty noisy, and don’t get me started on the jets!
In previous years, we’d been invited to join my uncle and his family for a camping holiday. That would have been OK had we’d been able to pitch our own tent, not share their caravan where they snored and their two dogs snored, so we ended up sleeping in the car. With no free pitches available on site, we moved on after just one night, going back to the site we’d already left and being able to pitch where we’d been.
When we applied for fostering, Hubby was in the perfect job, working for a school, so care during school holidays would not be an issue. We wanted to foster teenagers long term with a view to adopt, but our assigned social worker was obsessed with us having babies or toddlers short term. I was expected to give up my job to care for them even though I was the main wage earner. My expertise with foster care from my previous relationship was teenagers, but the social worker was not having it and it was babies or nothing. Hubby got her coat.
I took early retirement in 2007, believing I would become of State Pensionable Age at 60 and planned accordingly. I am one of the WASPI women, as the retirement age was changed to 65 to be in line with men, and then later 66, so I didn’t qualify until 2022. This meant the little pension pot I had to last me until 2016 now had to stretch to cover a further 6 years. We managed, with no state handouts, as the Bank gave me an additional £50pm in my works pension, which I didn’t have to repay, until I was 66.
Saying that, when things have not gone according to plan doesn’t mean it has been a disaster (well apart from the jets). We are both good at thinking outside the box and making the most of the cards we’ve been dealt. We own our property outright, don’t owe a penny to a soul, and are keeping on top of the energy and food crises. I’m a good money manager, and have adopted the stance that if I think it’s too expensive, we either buy less or don’t buy it at all.
Just when we were beginning to relax and enjoy our retirement, we had a change of government in July, and as pensioners, we are in their line of fire as they are making a mockery of all our sacrifices to get to retirement with no money worries.
My biggest goal in 2025 is to lose some weight, and get fitter!
I’m going to do this by dieting not officially, but I’ll be more mindful of the food I put into my mouth. I’m also going to exercise more, mainly by walking, I have a treadmill, so my plans are to walk on it daily.
I also am hoping to get my blood sugars under control, because, they’ve gotten rather high in the last few months.
I’m hoping to stay out of the hospital, and hoping that my overall mental health will be stable.
I mean, I can’t really predict that. But it is my hope that I can stay as stable and as well as I possibly can be.
I’m also hoping to do a lot of deep trauma work in therapy. We did a lot this year, but I’m hoping that next year we can go even deeper.
I’d like to set myself a reading challenge, so I think I’ll do that on January 1st. I’d like to read 100 books in 2025.
I’m hoping that by my birthday in mid April, that I’ll have dropped about 2 stone, and that I’ll be much fitter.
The best laid plans…
It is the last day of a horrible year, I am not sure yet how I want to usher it out. Grab the year by the belt and back of the collar and throw it out the door? Sounds good. But this is about plans.
When my husband was alive and feeling good, we were dreamers. Our plans were unusual. One plan after my retirement was for us to buy a big old boat with a cuddy cabin and do the Great Loop, or at least half of it. The Great Loop is a system of waterways that begins in the Great Lakes, goes up to Canada, out to the Atlantic intracoastal waterways, the Gulf, then up the Mississippi and other rivers to complete the loop. My husband’s ancestors lived in Newfoundland and were great sailors and fishermen. His father owned a sailboat company in Oakland, CA. Water was in his blood, and he wanted to have an adventure on the water.
My husband also wanted to ride his motorcycle across the country again. He had already done this once with Jason and some of their friends. But he had a bike with a sidecar, and wanted to take me. He assured me that we would take our time and he would make me comfortable. It would have been an arduous, but great adventure.
But our plans for a big adventure were never carried out. Oh, we had small trips and a few visits to California to see his family. But Billy was in and out of the hospital so much, getting treatments and seeing doctors that we couldn’t be away for long. Over our last 5 years together, we never took advantage of the remissions, either. I thought he was healed and we had all the time in the world. I never understood that the type of cancer he had always comes back. It always comes back.
What will the New Year hold? I know I will take my memories and grief with me as I navigate the days ahead. I will also take the strength God has given me and my faith. Perhaps I can start building a new life, too. My sister sent me a Christmas card and she wrote: “My wish for you is that the year of 2025 will be a time that you will find a calling on your life and a purpose that God has for you.” Wow. I believe that my plan for the new year is to try and make my sister’s wish come true.
God bless you in the New Year and may all your plans come to fruition.
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Esther Chilton 
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