So Here It Is - - -

A little while ago I didn't post for a few days as I was feeling very stressed and thoroughly shaken.

Now I can tell you the reason and that it's that Stephen will be made redundant from mid-January.

In 1986 he joined a solid Yorkshire company that treated its employees really well. However, over the years they were bought out several times, finally by a foreign company. To cut a long story short, they have decided to move all their IT back to Johnny Foreignerland.

Because they're not the company he originally worked for, they don't have any emotional investment in him: the fact that he's worked for the company in a crucial role for fourteen years and has not even had a day off sick in the past ten years just doesn't mean much to them.

So they're paying the statutory minimum redundancy pay which is a week's salary for every year he's worked there (but capped at much less than his actual pay) plus pay in lieu of notice.

Of course, he's not alone in being made redundant at the moment, but I'm not alone in thinking he's been treated very badly - I shan't bother you with the tedious details but we're very grateful to his old boss there who's been fighting his corner very hard!

He has applied for a couple of other jobs so we'll see what happens but it has been SUCH a stressful time. He's extremely skilled in his field and lots of people have said that they think he'll be fine.

I know that we've been fortunate: in the thirty years since Stephen graduated he has only worked for two companies and has never been out of work. However, that's partly because he's brilliant at what he does. Half Man Half Computer. Top Geek.

I can hear The Communist now - I know what he'd have said about the way some employers treat their workers!

Another thing that I haven't mentioned in this blog, as I have found it impossibly hard to get my head round it, is that Stephen's mother died this year and nobody in the family told us "We thought you'd know"! She lived in Norfolk, 250 miles away, so unless someone told us, we wouldn't know. I didn't find out she had died until after several failed attempts to contact her. We missed her funeral, of course. I find I'm still shaking my head in bewilderment whilst writing this.

So first that for Stephen, and now this.

We're going off to Tenby for Christmas with my mother and we're going to try and put it all to one side for a few days and have a good time. I am going to count my blessings, and there are plenty of them - I have a loving family, great friends, work that I love and we've had some wonderful holidays in the past few years too.

I hope that everyone reading this will have a wonderful Christmas, though I hope to be able to blog from Tenby whilst I'm there. Thank you for reading this blog - it means a lot to me that you do.