Living in a residential care home offers many benefits, the obvious being the support and the care, the friendships and laughter but we have discovered that a world of opportunity has opened to us, opportunities to get involved with community events, to taste new and exciting foods, enjoy a good wine with dinner without having to worry about driving home and best of all, to learn new skills. I’ve mentioned before that the pandemic has almost forced us to learn how to use technology, we are all now a dab hand with the iPad, speaking to friends and shopping online.

Spurred on by our apparent ability to learn we have embarked on a whole programme of advancement and our latest endeavour is to master a new language and the obvious choice for us was French. Faversham is only 69 miles away from Calais, so we are practically neighbours.

I have never thought much about learning French, it always seemed like a lot of work and when you are young there are so many other things to be doing but now that I have time on my hands, I find myself eager to learn.

We are starting slowly, learning basic words and phrases, polishing up on our verbs and laying the foundations. Some of us already know some French; Rosemary is very proficient and is helping us to learn how to form paragraphs, it’s wonderful to hear her chatting away in French and she is very happy that she will soon have friends who can converse with her in French, although it may be a while before we are up to her standard.

The team are learning with us, this leads to some friendly competition with us wanting to prove ourselves against the younger generation, we have the upper hand because whilst they are working, we have plenty of spare time to revise and research.

I am throwing myself into this and am looking forward to being a bilingual technology expert by the end of the year.