jeff’s story

During Covid I missed the company. You become isolated. I was shielding as well, so I couldn’t go out.

“As soon as you retire from work, you think ‘what am I going to do now?’. I’d tried a few different things and then I saw an advert with Age UK Bolton for a keyboard assistant tutor. I do play keyboard and I quite like playing it, and so I came along – this is going back a few years now. There was a Wednesday group and a Friday group then, so I joined the Wednesday group and worked with a chap called Ron, and I helped him and that was great. And then they said, “Would you help on a Friday as well?” so I went on the Friday and after a while I became the tutor. So I was helping on the Wednesday and then I was a tutor on the Friday. Then Ron retired on the Wednesday, so I took over and did both sessions.

I used to teach apprentices, so it’s nice to see people develop a little bit. The people enjoy it and I enjoy it, I get a lot out of it. We have a lot of fun; we have a lot of laughs. And yeah, we just enjoy ourselves. It doesn’t matter how good you are or how bad you are, it doesn’t matter. It’s a matter of just enjoying yourself and everybody seems to get on well too.

During Covid-19 the place obviously closed down, but I kept in touch with one or two people from the groups. One of them said, “Do you think you could send me music out during Covid?” so I said, “Yeah, that’s not a problem.”  And then I said, “I think it might be useful for other people as well,” so I sent an email out and said, “Would you like to receive music?” and everybody thought it was a good idea. So every week I would send out a sheet of music for them to learn every week. I’ve got some of their emails here, so for example this one says: “Dear Jeff, the system sending music out works really well. We have been shielding in lockdown now for over a hundred days and I really look forward to your new challenge every Friday. I attempt every piece and practise every day. I appreciate your effort.  Keep the music coming.” So I sent it out every week and I got quite good feedback saying how much they enjoyed it, and I enjoyed sending it out too. And it kept me going. If you’re just sort of sat at home and you just want to play, well, what are you playing for? I mean you can enjoy it but when you’ve got a purpose and you think, well, every week, I’ve got to do this, it was good for me to have that focus – and to get some nice comments back was great.

When Covid relaxed a little bit, people came back to the groups because we’d kept in touch. I wonder if we’d not been in touch, would we have got back together again? Who knows? When restrictions started being lifted, we had to go in the hall because we were in the smaller room normally and it wasn’t suitable because we were too close, so we had all these shields around us, these plastic shields, everybody had around the keyboards. We had wipes because we needed to wipe the keyboards all the time. It was a bit difficult just setting it all up, but then that sort of relaxed after a while and then the shields came down. We had limited numbers after Covid, the numbers went down a bit, so we joined the groups and just do Friday now. We’ve got about eighteen, so it’s still a good turnout. I do think people generally are still struggling with trying to get back to normality. I think it’s taken its toll.

It’s been really good having everyone back together. The way it works is they have two pieces of music every week. I prepare those two pieces and play them so that they know what they sound like. So I learn them before I come, then I’ll play the first one, and then they all have the music, headphones on and then they just put their hand up if they want to know “How do you do this?” or “What happens here?”  And if I can answer, I will, and I’ll just play a bit for them. And then we have a cup of tea and then I give them another piece of music, I play that one for them and then they put their headphones on. It’s two hours in total.

During Covid I missed the company. You become isolated. I was shielding as well, so I couldn’t go out. We had to have all the food delivered, we couldn’t even go to the supermarket, and this was going on for months and months and months. So it was the social thing, I really did miss that, yeah. Everybody’s nice here and everybody respects one another. It’s always been nice here at Age UK, but I think it’s a bit more special now after Covid. When you finish work and retire, you don’t miss the work so much, but you miss that social side.”