Tomorrow

I leave the country in about 27 hours. Weirdly for the last few days the question I have been asked most often is 'Are you packed?'
No
No, I'm not. Nor do I have anywhere to live, I'm not entirely sure how long I have as a stop over in Dubai and I've not printed off my ticket yet and I'm not sure there's enough ink in the printer. However I am still utterly convinced it's all going to be OK. 
The goodbyes have been said, the hot air balloon ride cancelled for the second time (grrr) and now I just have to put a few things in a bag and go to Heathrow, knock myself out and wake up in Australia. Off I go....

In other news;  this is the front cover of my book. Nice isn't it? I am just checking the contents for the final time and then it will go on kindle. Reading your own work is strange. I am quite happy I'll be out of the country when it comes out. So yes. Next time I'll be writing this upside down. 

"Auntie Laura said the C word"

Inevitably as you get older your life changes and the majority of these changes won't be of your own volition, so you have to change and go with it. When you hit your late twenties/early thirties the biggest change will be the sudden influx of children in to your life. My opinion on children is the same as my opinion on adults - some I like, some are awful. Luckily my friends and family are really good at producing excellent children who, as long as you make it look vaguely like a game, are happy to run around and bring you things. There is however one thing I have had to change... my language. 
Well more specifically my swearing, no one is insisting I only speak to their children in Norse or anything. 
Given that I became an aunt for the first time at 23 you think I would have cracked it by now. I really, really haven't. It doesn't help that some of words I think are benign replacements are also off limits so I inadvertently correct myself by replacing the bad word with a worse one. However I have managed to curb the worst of my excesses and so can concentrate on teaching them bad stuff whilst using PG language (I spent a whole day teaching my nephew how to cheat at cards. We were only foiled by the fact that his hands were too small to hold all the cards he kept winning and so he kept dropping them and showing us all he'd been cheating). Then came lunch... 
There were nine of us to lunch. Myself, my parents, my brother and his wife and their four children. I am not sure how we got to this point but my Mother (who is not know for her filthy mouth, she once set herself on fire and said 'Oh shoot') told my Dad (under her breath) to 'eat your bloody sandwiches'. This passed by. Then a small boy (7) said 'bum' and was sent to the naughty step. A few minutes passed and he was told he could come back. But in a shock move he refused as 'No one had told Grandma off for her language'. Which was a fair point. 
Unfortunately at that point I used the word 'crap' to describe something (it would appear my family is a bunch of potty mouths). The only people who heard my were oldest nephew (8) and my niece (10) who I both managed to convince that they should over look it. This didn't work, and even more unfortunately this led to the description of 'Auntie Laura said the C word". 
Now there are many ways to not swear in front of children. Repeatedly bleating 'I said crap, I said crap, I didn't say the C word, I said crap'. Isn't it. 

What's the opposite of Narnia

I go to Sydney in under 3 weeks. 

And I have no plans. I have a whole heap of stuff to do before I actually get there but when there I just plan to write. I feel I should be more panicked than I am. I'm sure it'll all be fine. 
It occured to me yesterday that I am going to experience a sort of eternal summer this year. I haven't known a UK summer so consistently hot and sunny as this for years and when I arrive in Sydney they'll be heading in to Spring and then Summer. The main consequence of this is that my hair is going to be revolting. It's already an alarming blonde that looks like I've been at the sun-in (it's all natural - jealous?). Add that to a substandard hair cut and I look a bit like the 1990s Brad Willis. Except not so pretty. 

The good news is that this is going to help with the packing. No jumpers, no ugg boots, no hats, gloves, coats, scarves. There is however the distinct possibility that when I get off the plane in mid December back in London that I will simply die of shock. If I haven't already died on the plane already. 

I do not like flying. This is for legitimate reasons (FIRE! CATAPULT! ENGINE FAILURE). However I've now managed to add another ridiculous layer to it and have discovered that I am completely immune to valium. I was given it to fly last year and looked forward to a drug fuelled haze. I waited for it to kick in, waited and waited. I could have piloted the bloody plane. If I hadn't been having a weeping, shaking nervous breakdown that is. I thought perhaps I'd taken it when too worked up so did a controlled experiment in my living room one Friday evening. I was looking forward to channelling my inner Marianne Faithful - I ended up doing the crossword and loading the dishwasher. The dirty plates and cups didn't talk to me or anything. I was devastated. 

So when I was at the doctors I asked if there was anything else I could take. I would like to stress I wasn't after methodone or anything. Just perhaps some non drowsy anti-histamenes. I was told 3 times that valium worked for everyone and I had taken it incorrectly as I had already been stressed (I told her the crossword story - I can only imagine she gets very worked up when it comes to word puzzles). I asked if there was anything, anything else I could take. She said "Deep breaths'.  I gave a haughty look at her degree certificate (it had a distinct whiff of clip art about it) and left. And then ordered sleeping tablets off the internet. 

Oh calm down - it's Tylenol. Which knocks me right out. And does a damn sight more than deep breaths. Although I have a real gift for always sitting near the bogs so maybe deep breaths would knock me out after all. 

I was going to...

I was going to start a new blog. It was going to run next to this blog and be more of a diary, travel journey thing. But I was immediately technologically flawed. The interface had changed and was quite frankly beyond me, I couldn't up load photos, it looked crap and so I have decided that one blog will do me! 

Now... the reason why I am starting a new blog (or not). 

If you had asked me on New Years Eve 2013/2014 what this year would hold I would have fairly confidently replied ‘More of the same’. I certainly wouldn’t have said that by July I would have jacked in a job that I loved, rented out my house (which I was also fairly attached to) and been about to head off for five months to a country I last visited eight years ago, where I know a few people and with under 4 weeks to go.. have nowhere to live. But here I am and hopefully I'll report here how it goes. Along with any other stuff I write about.

So why did I do it? I don’t know is the short answer. The longer answer makes slightly more sense. So January I was happy, I had a very good job in a lovely company and some of the best work colleagues you could ask for. I had (have) lovely friends, great family and was fine. But I was kind of hoping for change. The good kind. I had begun to feel that I wasn’t really living my own life. I had kind of slipped in to a supporting role. I was living in relation to other people rather than living my own life. Obviously we all have to do this to an extent but I felt I wanted to be the main player in my own life.

What I’ve really wanted to do for as long as I can remember is write. I’ve made some inroads over the years but never quite got there. Once again life got in the way. Life trundled on, I did nice things, I celebrated birthdays (34- bloody hell) but I still wanted for, prayed for (I’m Christian) change. I was bored. Not with anything in particular but with everything.  It became very clear that if you want change then you have to change things. But I didn’t really want to do that – where would I get a better job? What would I do with my house? How could I afford to live? There was nothing so wrong with my life that I needed to walk away from it.

Then May happened – this was the month from hell. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I’m not going to go in to details but when on the last day of May I found myself in tears again I knew that I had reached the point where I could walk away from everything. It wasn’t a knee jerk reaction to a bad couple of weeks, it wasn’t putting two fingers up, I think it was a way (in my mind God’s way) of getting me to a point where I could move on. I’d burned down the farm. Leaving work was hard, it’s difficult to explain why you’ve walked away from something you enjoyed, could do and liked! But it felt like the right decision. And things began to fall in to place. I rented my house out to someone I trusted, I got a really good deal on flights, my first novel is going on kindle in the next few weeks.

So here I am. A stunning bit of planning means I moved out of my house 6 weeks before I left the country, so I am free wheeling between various houses. I’m off to Australia in 4 weeks and we’ll see what happens. This may be the best or worst idea of my life but I think I am just going to see where it goes. I don’t really have much other choice.

 Oh and I've also started taking really crap amateur photography on my phone. 

Peaches

You will be shocked to hear that I didn’t know Peaches Geldof. We didn’t really move in the same circles. But I was shocked when my friend messaged me to tell me she had died. It was so out of the blue, so strange and it really seemed to resonate with people. Twenty something women just don’t drop dead out of the blue and so people took to social media and expressed their shock, their sadness. People expressed their sadness for her two boys, for her husband, for Bob Geldof. A family that had suffered so much already were going through it again. Then it came out that her death was linked to drug usage and the sympathy stopped.

It wasn’t that her death stopped being sad; it was more that people didn’t think that she was now deserving of sympathy. Then the other comments started: how her death was selfish, how could a mother do that to her children? But the manner of her death doesn’t make it less sad, or tragic or a waste. If anything it makes it sadder; she didn’t get the help she needed and her death was preventable.

I think the problem was this: now Peaches was a mother she was no longer allowed to be human. It was no longer just about her. She had responsibilities.  In short – her children should have saved her from addiction.

No pressure kids.

Now first let’s deal with the obvious. Children are many things but they are not a cure for addiction. If they were then rehabs would go out of business, methodone wouldn’t exist. There would be no AA meetings. People would simply go to the doctor and be handed a small child. Cured. Well women would be cured. Men would probably stick to the conventional methods as they are not completely defined by their reproductive ability. Addiction is an illness not a choice. She didn’t love heroin more than her children, she probably hated heroin, loathed it and it’s role in her life but she was overwhelmed by addiction and she happened to have children.

Motherhood is not a super power. It’s a state. Any problems that were there before are more than likely going to be there afterwards – with less sleep. Motherhood doesn’t make you untouchable. If you had a gammy leg and a short temper before, then chances are you will afterwards. Horrifically self righteous before? Add a child and well… I’ll see you in a few years. The point is that the child may spur you on to want to be a better person, give you a reason to change yourself, make you want to be a role model but somethings are just overwhelming and innate.

Peaches didn’t fail her children. She was failed. We boxed her in to a corner where she wasn’t allowed to have faults. It didn’t help that she gave many interviews where she pretty much said that motherhood had saved her and her life was perfect (addicts lie – who knew) but we all went along with it. What would have happened if she’d told the truth? That she was struggling? That she was out of her depth and having two small people totally relying on her wasn’t pulling her through her demons? Let’s face it – we would have thought that she didn’t love her kids enough.

Which is bollocks. Of course she loved them. She loved them so much that she lived furtively and perhaps didn’t get the help that she needed for fear that they would be taken away from her. If she had been allowed to be openly flawed perhaps things would have been different. Perhaps if we had looked as her as human first? It was a lack of love that killed Peaches but her love for kids was never in doubt. 

Kindling

Well the resolution to write more didn't last long. Is it any defence that January is an appalling month and I didn't get paid till the end of the month so I haven't actually done anything? No I suppose not. I've got a few more rejections for the book so that's confidence boosting, perhaps I shouldn't have written it in crayon and included a word search. You live and learn. 

I am going to my brother's tonight and I go with some trepidation. We were there twice over the Christmas period and each time a chair was destroyed fairly dramatically. I am wondering if I'll go for the hat trick tonight. The first occasion was during lunch. A small child was told off for wriggling and made to swap chairs. It soon became clear why he was wriggling, the catch had come loose on the fold away stool, the result of which was to send my sister in law chin first in to the table. She was fine but seeing someone suddenly plummet to the ground like they're on a ducking stool is quite distracting. 

The second incident was on Boxing Day when my mum lent out of rocking chair to get something and just carried on going, accompanied by the sound of wood breaking. It turns out the chair had broken before and had been mended with copydex or something similar.  After the second incident we all became enormously fond of sitting on the floor. 

I have never broken a chair but I've destroyed my fair share of furniture. When attempting to switch wardrobes I utterly over estimated how much is achievable in a night and by the fourth trip to my parents my brother and I had lost the plot and turned in to the Chuckle Brothers. We dropped a many section in the middle of the road (fortunately there was no traffic) and I got to the point, which I get to so quickly, of telling people to leave it and go home and I'll sort it in the morning. Thankfully I was ignored and some sort of order was restored. Something similar happened with the magically growing bookcase. A set of shelves (all in one piece) that had got in to my bedroom but when I tried to get it out was too big for the door way. My idea was to smash it with an axe but I was over ruled and sent to stand in the bathroom whilst they did mysterious things. I think it went over the bannisters. 

However my most spectacular incident was with a bed. I was living in Sydney and had recently moved flats. I had assembled my bed and it didn't look quite right. I realised that I had put the sides on upside down. So instead of the slats resting in a deep well they were instead balanced on a ledge of around a millimetre. I couldn't be arsed to sort it out so I heaved the mattress on top and made the bed. It worked quite well for a few months. Then one night I got in quite early in the morning and crept in so as not to wake my flatmate. That is until I got to my bedroom and for reasons unknown decided to leap from the door way in to my bed. The slats fell off their narrow home and fell in the middle taking the mattress, bedding and me with it. Once again lethargy took over and I slept in the rubble. The next morning my flatmate helped me to pull the mattress out and I slept on the floor for longer than I care to admit until I sorted the mess out. 

It is worth noting that my flatmate didn't wake up during the leap and the recurring sort out. But on the day he moved in he went to the bathroom, locked the door and fell asleep on the toilet until morning. I was probably quite safe to go to bed the normal way

Will you bother?

Well I completely failed to do much of anything except work towards the end of last year. Let alone update the blog. I suppose a new years resolution of sorts is to write more. Without sounding too horendously wanky I am happier when I write. Therefore it makes sense to do more of it. I've started writing a second novel. I'm not really too sure where I am going with it but it's nice to get stuff down on paper. And it's always nice to have a good excuse to go to Paperchase. I think actually Paperchase is becoming a serious addiction - I went to a drawer the other day to get some writing paper to write my thank you letters for Christmas presents and discovered a whole pack of note paper I have absolutely no recollection of buying. Therefore the only logical conclusion is that I went in to some form of trance when I was in there. Which I can well believe. 

2012 was, for me, a good year. By comparison to 2011 (which was a pile of utter dog shit) it was practically a golden age. Therefore I reach the New Year without really wanting to or needing to make any resolutions, I'd just like some more of the same and to keep on trucking. However I would like to change some things about other people, although I doubt resolutions work like that. The main thing that needs to change is that when people come to your house in the run up to Christmas and they see that you have put decorations up they don't say 'Oh you are good, I'm not sure I'd bother if I were on my own'. 

Firstly; calling someone good just sounds astonishingly patronising and manages to make you feel about 5. Secondly; calling someone good for performing a fairly basic traditional ritual is a bit odd. Thirdly; how many people have to live in your house before actions become worthwhile? If I live on my own is having pictures on the wall 'good' or should I not bother as they are only for my benefit? Should I have carpet? Or should I not enjoy Christmas as I really should be living in a ditch as to live like everyone else isn't worth the bother? If actions and behaviours have no audience is it worth doing them? 

There is I suppose, the belief that Christmas is really 'for the children'. But whilst it is true that children are probably the most excited about the season and seeing them excited is sweet but are they truly the only ones that matter? We live in a child centric society, they don't really do badly the rest of the year (although there are obvious exceptions).  It's my belief that when people say 'Christmas is for children really' then they are talking about gifts and perhaps in that respect it is true. Few adults are genuinely excited about their presents, pleased and touched to have been thought of but not desperately, can't sleep excited. Kids are and that in itself is lovely to watch. But as you get older Christmas becomes more about the day, the meal (Man, I love eating), the games and the company. In this way Christmas is for everyone and should be about people who don't have that the rest of the year. The elderly, the vulnerable, those unable to do the Christmas that society expects. For many, particularly the isolated (I'd like to stress this is not me, I just can't think of a better way to phrase it!) it's seeing the pleasure of others, especially children, that makes the day. Therefore to assume a festival is just for one section of society does us all a disservice because it excludes and if anything Christmas is an inclusive holiday. 

Personally I 'bother' with Christmas decorations because I like them. Until about 27th December when I am itching to get them down and hoover the corner of the room that's been inaccessible for so long. Pre-Christmas the decorations are a sign of preparation and building excitement. Post Christmas you can't help thinking, as you sit on the sofa; 'Why the hell is there a tree in the corner of the room?'