perspectives

Innit funny how only blogging every three months can help you see so clearly your changing perspectives?

I'm not sure anyone will read this anymore. I've not been working for my readers! Maybe I don't mind. It's mainly for myself that I want to take this moment to reflect and it's no coincidence I'm on a train. Feels like old times.

Where am I at? Well, literally, just trawling up through middle England. I've departed Bristol Parkway and am passing through green fields: incredibly green, even in the fading twilight. I've just taken a phone call about a disaster at work. Work is generally fulfilling but still full of challenges. My trouble is I'm a perfectionist and want to get everything right at once, and please everybody, and that's impossible.

Which leads me onto my relationship, but now I'm there I find I'm not sure there is that much I want to say right now. I don't want to ill wish it, neither do I want to hope for something that maybe can't be. It's hovering there at the moment, a fragile thing, a petal ready to drop but hoping for a miracle. I think what strangely has transpired is that I've realised either way I'm not running back to London: my home is in Devon right now, for better or worse, I love this countryside and though my roots are tentative, pale and spindly, they're growing. Which is not to say I'll never leave, but if there is a next step it may well not be back to the big smoke.

I think the sensation of growing older - and more mature - I had last time I posted became concrete as I hit 30 with no grief for time passed but rather a sense of fitness. I wimped out of my party at half past midnight and went home knowing that I may still be young, comparatively, but my real youth is behind me. I honestly don't mind. I don't think, anymore, that marriage and children may be right round the corner, and I do hope I get there before it's too late, but other than that, I'm ok right here right now, how things are. Life isn't easy but it's good.

happy new year

Was it really only in September when I last posted? It seems like years ago. I came back to answer the traditional questions but, half way through and really bored, I decided that wasn't a good omen.

However, 2008 does feel like it's been a significant year and it's definitely been interesting. There have been events, minor and major, like moving down to Plymouth, meeting the person who is now my significant other (for want of a better phrase), nearly writing off my car. More than that though my last year in my twenties has felt like a time of transition. I'm nearer feeling grown up than I was, and that's partly do to with meeting someone and a world of possibility of marriage and family being opened up that was increasingly feeling barred to me, at least for the moment. It's probably also to do with seeing so many other people get married, or pregnant, or have babies. Most of all though I hope it's about having moved down here and surviving pretty much on my own, and building a life. I've done it before, in pieces, but doing it all at once was quite scary.

I've met lots of new people too, mostly good I think. People who, for the most part, are not from London and perhaps have a different perspective on things. I've realised the city is not everything: it sounds stupid to say it but until this year I was convinced that I'd spend the rest of my life in London and could never live anywhere else. I'm still not totally sure I'll survive but I might end up having to give it a go.

There are also the people who have stayed with me, friends who have made the effort to come down and visit, my best friend who calls me pretty much every week, my family who are always there to go home to and feel secure with. I've appreciated them all so much. How did that happen? How did that lonely, suspicious, quiet, too sensitive child end up being a confident, talkative, friendly adult?

And of course the major relationship of my life so far, eclipsing all those which have gone before, finally erasing old habits from my subconscious. Until this year, when the vague character of "boyfriend" appeared in my dreams, he had the face and shape of my eight years ago ex. This holiday I found out that one of my ex-boyfriends is going to be a father and the other has just got engaged. It was delivered in sensitive hushed tones but I've barely thought about it since.

I can't say it hasn't been a challenge, and it continues to be. I wonder whether some people really do find relationships easy, or whether some are just less bothered by the problems, or feel they can't talk about it? I think it would be true to say it's the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life. I hope I manage to succeed. I think it's worth it. But perhaps that has been part of the growing up, too. I don't want to let go of my romantic ideals but you can't let them ruin something good.

What do I want out of next year? I don't know. My life is in the balance at the moment. I think I might know a bit more about what's going to happen to me by then. He'd like to live off the land, self sufficient and sustainable, have a family, grow fruit trees. I'm not quite sure what I want right now or whether I can make that work for me. Either it will all go hideously wrong and I'll run back home to London with mixed feelings of relief and bitter disappointment, or I'll probably be settling here for better or for worse, definitely poorer in ready cash but with the prospect of an honest life. Hopefully I'll have achieved a measure of calm and contentment, whatever happens.

Happy New Year!

absent without leave

So, I've not been around much lately, and it's a bit different to the previous occasions when I've gone a bit quiet. They've only been temporary but this time I've been away falling for someone and as I've said before, it feels as though it's tolling a death knell to my poor blog, my faithful friend through single times.

It's difficult to put my finger on exactly what it is. Partly that I don't want to lie to him, but I don't really want him to read it either and so it's only really ok not to mention it if I'm not writing it anymore. I could tell him and not invite him to read it, and sometime I probably will, but again then it would feel somehow wrong to be updating it. However that's not all it's about, because I don't really think he'd want to read it anyway. Past is past and he's happy to let it stay that way for the most part.

Mainly I think it's because he should be my confidant now, and that's what this blog has been, I think, more than anything else. It's where I've shared things, things I tell other people and things I don't, things I just want to blabber on about, things which are less moderated for their audience and more honest. It's been a good outlet and I've appreciated the people I've met through it, people whose blogs I still read, and so whose company, in a way, I still enjoy. He is very much of the real world though, and that's what he and our relationship are both about. Reality, honesty, goodness and, I hope, true ... well, we haven't said it to each other yet.

I'm not going to tempt fate by writing "The End" at the end of this post, life isn't like that. It's about the process not the end result, as we say in arts education, and it's still very early days after all. All the same, he may well just be the one I want to sit next to in the nursing home when I'm a hundred. I also hope I get to see quite a lot of him along the way. I've always felt lucky, but never quite as lucky as this.

moving on

I'm moving house again. It's only just around the corner, not hundreds of miles, and yet despite the fact that I think it's a good move (my landlord is off travelling and it's a good excuse for me to move into a cosier house with just one other girl), it's bringing back the emotions of the last time I did this. Right now it's making me feel sad, and anxious, and unsettled. Just like anyone, I don't like change, though I force myself to deal with it.

However, having said that, today has been a good day and so I'm not worried that I'll feel like this for long. I had my cards read today and regardless of whether you believe or not in fate or superstition or the powers of the mind, or know that personal interpretation has a lot to do with all of these things, what they apparently had to say felt true and made me remember all the good things about myself. I'll try and remember what I was told.


The reader was a Romany guy who learnt the art of Tarot reading from his grandmother, and said he's unusual for being a male who can read the cards.

STRENGTH, the card which symbolises my past, apparently means that I am generally grounded and happy and confident in who I am. Apparently it can often go with a tendency to get caught up in my own head and panic, but I have to remember I have this strength. He told me a good way of doing this was to go barefooted and literally feel the ground beneath my feet.

Whilst STRENGTH is a good card, apparently THE FOOL is a very good card. The middle card is about where I am right now. I'm struggling to remember this but it was something along the lines of stepping forward into the positive but unknown. The Fool is normally depicted with his eyes closed or blindfolded and with a dog yapping at his heels encouraging him on. This is about taking on a risk or adventure.

The WHEEL OF FORTUNE, my future, is the best card I could have drawn, he told me, and that the sequence in its entirety was a textbook "positive" draw. Everything is there in place for my future, all laid out, and all positive; the world is at my feet and the possibilities are boundless. He said this may include a "King" - a man, but a protective one.

more things to do before you die?

For my birthday (yes, belatedly, it's a mutual tradition) one of my friends gave me 101 Things To Do Before You Die. Totally coincidentally as she does not read this blog (as far as I know, anyway) and bought it for me a while before I wrote the last post.

I have to say I wasn't very impressed. Partly because it's really boring filling in the forms and I think would take all the fun out of doing anything exciting, but also because it's full of things I'll be very unlikely to (Save Someone's Life, Have Enough Money to Do All the Things On This List, Meet Someone With Your Name (trust me, not going to happen)), never want to (Be Part of a Threesome, Run a Marathon, Do a Runner From a Fancy Restaurant) or may not have much control over whether I (Reach 100 Years of Age, Continue Your Gene Pool) achieve. I think to be honest, too, I got a bit jealous when she'd done things I hadn't!

Some of the best bits are the lists - of books to read, films to watch, tall buildings to visit - which are achievable and have some really good and surprising choices like Asterix and Good Omens. But the really good ones are very achievable goals, and I think any really useful list like this should be full of things that you might not do in the normal course of life but really should - but not silly things like shouting "drinks are on me" - I mean, yeah, transiently cool but necessary for a worthwhile life?

8 things to do before you die

Taken from Shauna over at Dietgirl - one I just couldn't resist. Despite still thinking about not blogging anymore (I just can't help myself) and despite 9.21 when you're dressed in merely a towel and supposed to be into work by 10am if not before being a really bad time to have even got the computer out let alone write a blog post. So these are hasty and by no means comprehensive!

Eight things I'd like to do before kicking the bucket.

1. Tour the far north of Scotland in a campervan
2. Develop or run something work-related for myself. I'm such a passive, un-entrepreneurial type, I'd love to challenge myself to do this some day. I think I'd want to do it with someone else, a friend who was a bit more creative than me, but it'd be brilliant. It could involve buying a theatre, that's a rash idea which occured to me the other day
   
3. Disappear for several months in a sailing boat (accompanied by a male, preferably)
   
4. Go to India and South America
5. Grow a vegetable or fruit. I've got herbs now, and I'm never going to be a gardening fanatic, but I would love to grow at least a small tomato or strawberry at some stage
6. Own my own house
7. Write a book. Maybe when I'm old like Mary Wesley
8. Go off on a mad travel across several continents again, avoiding air travel whereever possible, like I did after university. I quite fancy doing the trans-Siberian in spring time from Moscow across to Beijing or Vladivostock, the opposite to how I did it before.

Right. I must get dressed and go to work!

trying to persuade me to wear a helmet

Many people have. This might not come high in the effectiveness stakes.



I've not totally disappeared, by the way. I went on a hilarious hen weekend, then a great holiday culminating in an unusual wedding, had a very romantic day and night in and near Bath on the way home, waved "me lover" (said in a Devonian accent) off for over three weeks and have been working like a very hard working headless chicken ever since I set foot in the office again last Tuesday, as well as giving up alcohol for the rest of August (to avoid drowning my sorrows). The work definitely has its rewards but I'm feeling quite sober in more than one way at the moment.

So, I'm just not feeling the blogging at the moment, for want of a more elegant way of describing it, even though I'm still reading them a bit. So for now, just sharing the helmet hilarity.