Yay, it is Friday once again, which can only mean one thing – Fandango’s Friday Flashback. Fandango uses these opportunities to reblog one of his posts from this day in a previous year, just to let his current readers see what he was up to back then. I feel like I am walking along a path of recovery, so the idea is useful for me too because it indicates how far I’ve come.

I couldn’t find a compelling entry to repost today, so I just thought I’d share a post that I wrote a year ago about some of the charity work I do.

Early on after the stroke, I realised that one of my goals had to be to get myself busy once again. I started volunteering for the Stroke Association, then a few months afterwards, I decided I could take on a little more, for Age UK. My original thought was that there might be some clients in my village, within walking distance of home, who I could help, but nothing ever materialised. I helped out at a couple of one-off activities, but largely remained dormant. It was not until the summer of 2018 that somebody had the bright idea of asking me to become a telephone befriender. It meant getting the bus into their office in Salisbury to make the calls, but by that time, I was mobile enough to commit to making the journey each week.

And so I became a telephone befriender. I have a list of around ten clients, and each week I give each of them a call, one by one. That’s it. The subject matter is absolutely anything, usually centering just on what we’ve been up to the last week.

At Age UK’s office, I usually see a couple of other volunteers, just really to say Hi. There are also anything up to four paid organisers. But I work in a back room, and close the door so as not to disturbe anyone. The upshot is that I hardly see other volunteers for any length of time. And, the faces I do see out front are the same each week.

So when Age UK organise a mince pie and coffee at christmastime for their volunteers, it is a good opportunity to meet some of the others. It’s a shame I couldn’t make it this year, which was yesterday, but this is my experience from last year.