My birthday was last week. I am 68.

I've been thinking off and on last week about getting to this point. The point itself is satisfactory. I'd make few changes in the present: have my children live in the same city I do and have a couple of finished novels published rather than sitting in the back of my computer. One might happen, the other probably not.

I'd also like to lose thirty pounds and have the arthritis under control, but those are less matters of wishing than doing. More exercise plus fewer calories would work well enough.

The present is not at all what I expected. My earliest day dreams about the future involved having a house a mile long and a mile wide with furniture filled with air that floated up the ceiling and had ropes attached to pull it down. It made vacuuming very simple.

When I was eighteen, I wanted to travel and read many books. I also wanted to write them, but, at the time, thought writers were different kinds of people - not like me. I thought the same thing about university people. Universities were shining beacons on a hill, full of the wise who were only interested in expanding human knowledge. A PhD was a medal of honor. I was wrong on all counts.

I was much nicer at eighteen than I am at sixty eight. I did travel and read a lot of books, and both were/are as satisfactory as I expected. Universities, on the other hand, are not very pleasant places to work. PhD's show a basic level of intelligence and the willingness to jump through hoops. University lecturers are like people in insurance companies; some, very nice, honest, fascinated by what they do.  They'd work in their field without a salary. Others are pompous prats.

When I was twenty-eight, I was teaching in special education, working with the hearing impaired at Montreal Oral School for the Deaf. This is without a doubt the best place I've ever worked. Staff respected each other and respected their students. My ex-husband insisted on moving to Calgary. If I'd stayed in Montreal, I would probably have retired from MOSD with  a good pension.

I remember visiting my older half-sister while I was teaching at MOSD. I talked on and on about the job and how much I liked what I was doing. She said, "It's good you like the work since it's low status and low pay."

I was hurt and surprised. Typically lower middle class, I thought teaching was a high status occupation. (The children of the lower middle class disproportionately enter the teaching and security professions; i.e., we become cops and primary school teachers.) My older half sister was/is a mathematician; her class of origin was a little different than mine.

At thirty-eight, I was doing field work in Pakistan. Children and new husband came with... It influenced the children. My daughter majored in comparative lit, specializing in Hindi, at the University of California at Berkeley. My son is an anthropologist who has done field work in Pakistan.

I did my fieldwork in Lahore. Lahore has been called the "Paris of the East". Like Paris, it's a beautiful city and a center of writing, art, dance... It's got some good universities. The subsequent years have not been good to Lahore or Pakistan.

I remember talking to a friend about Iran. "Nothing like Iran could ever happen here," he said. "For us, maulvis are like servants, people that work in the mosque. Nobody does what they say."

He was wrong. And he was right. Pakistan didn't get the Ayatollas; it got the Wahabis from Saudi and that's probably worse. In elections, Pakistanis have never voted in double digits for a religious party. They are not religious fanatics. I would never describe it as a tolerant society, but it always was a rational one, with more pragmatic tolerance than could be expected from rhetoric.

We worked in a lower income, new community on the outskirts of Lahore. A house in one block had prostitutes. The general attitude was that these women had to support their children, what else could they do? (Very true - ways of earning money for women are limited. There's professional jobs - doctor, lawyer - and the segregation of the sexes opens a lot of these up for women. Then there are factory jobs or working as a servant. A girl might work in a factory a few years before marriage to save up for her dowery - it's not a living wage.)

The community dealt with the house of prostitution by discussion. The women asked their clients to come and leave more quietly, to disrupt the neighborhood less.

I was living in Canterbury when I was forty eight. My husband had a permanent job at the University of Kent. We were lucky: one of the two of us had a real job. I picked hops, picked potatoes (worst job I ever had) worked typing in an insurance company and ended up taking one, two and three year research and teaching appointments at different universities in England. I fell in love with Manchester and the Northwest.

At some point around this time, I went to an American Anthropological Association meeting. I met an old friend there. Now she had two Fulbright Hayes Dissertation Abroad awards. (I only had one.) She went from university to university, one year appointments, saving every cent, coming to the AAA meetings to get another one year appointment. Such appointments do not pay moving expenses. Everything she owned would go in the back of an old  car, and she'd drive to the next job. (A temp is a temp; type or teach, doesn't matter. Now this really is low status, low pay work.)

She was staying in the local YWCA to save money. We had the special slice of pizza plus salad $3.99 special. She wrapped the pizza in the paper napkin and put it in her purse for dinner.

We caught up on what happened to our cohort. My husband was the only one with a permanent, tenured position. The rest were doing what she was - one year appointments, going from job to job. There are two things to remember here: She was very well qualified, with publications, teaching experience and some prestigious grants in the background. Second, these one year appointments were not simply to replace someone doing fieldwork. In general, there was a long term need for another teacher. Getting lecturers as temps was much cheaper than hiring a new member of staff.

That's when I decided universities were no better as employers than insurance companies.

At fifty-eight, I was considering early retirement. I was tired of going from university to university, doing the academic equivalent of filing in my teaching. I like teaching, but a different topic every year is hard work and makes getting a publication record difficult. Looking back, I explored a lot more areas of anthropology than I would have. I wrote some papers I'm proud of. I never turned out something just for the CV. It was an interesting experience. Most of the time, it was also pleasant and fun.

I still think, in teaching anthropology, that what I did was valuable. I introduced students to another way of understanding themselves and the world around them. Almost none of them became professional anthropologists, but their minds were better furnished. That, rather than career development, is the purpose of a university education.

I'd always wanted to write fiction. It seemed about time to do so. So that's what I'm doing at sixty-eight.

The Future: it's depressing. It's not depressing for personal reasons. My son and son-in-law have reasonably secure jobs. My grandchildren are clever and will be all right. It's very unlikely that any of us will be sleeping under a bridge living out of a stolen grocery shopping cart. (Not impossible, but unlikely.)

It's really not good enough to live a personally pleasant life in a world where there are large numbers of desperate people living very unpleasant lives. Poets express it better than social scientists: "No man is an island..."

To sum up: the present is pleasant, the past was interesting and the future appears dreadful.

It will, dreadful or not, be an interesting next ten years. But I'd much rather say "Oh silly me, to be so wrong," than "I told you so."

Do ostriches really hide their heads in the sand? Metaphorically, it sounds reasonable - they look across the plains with their high necks and see unavoidable disaster coming. Hide from it. Denial. Giraffes, with equally far vision, flee. It's probably better to imitate the giraffe even though a panic stricken giraffe might break a leg. On the other hand, what if the ostrich really is right and whatever is coming is unavoidable?

I talked to a friend a few days ago. Like me, a political junkie, addicted to assorted liberal causes. She confessed since the Con-Dems came into office she couldn’t bear to watch the news. I feel the same way. Jon Snow has been abandoned and I ignore most of the Guardian.

I much prefer happy endings, and shall now retire to read and write fiction.