Not drowning, waving

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When I was a young adult, nervous about leaving my home (my house, my town, my friends) and moving to university, my mum said, ‘You can always come back.’ She spoke the words to me, but it wasn’t me she was really talking to. There was never any doubt that I would leave. I was heartbroken at leaving my boyfriend. But my parents wanted me to go. I wanted to go. It had never even been a conversation, it was a known. I would leave

(Quick aside: I would have stayed if I’d been able to get a hairdressing apprenticeship. I had a deep and secret wish to be a hairdresser, to join that glamorous world, to be introduced to the mysteries of face shapes and hair types. To stand behind someone, catch her eye in the mirror as I held her hair in the tips of my fingers and say, ‘And who did your hair last time?’ All of these things and more. I know it doesn’t fit with who I am, but I would deeply, dearly love to be a hairdresser.)

But no, it wasn’t me my mum was talking to. When my mum said, ‘You can always come back,’ she was talking about my friends, the ones who had decided not to leave. They made those decisions for many reasons. They didn’t get the grades for the courses they wanted, they didn’t have the money, they didn’t have their parents’ support. Of course for some of them, it wasn’t a decision. They didn’t want to go, didn’t think about it, it didn’t cross their minds. A woman who had found her place in the world but always wondered what else she might have been, what else she might have seen, I think she wanted everyone to leave and find the things she hadn’t found. Here’s a thing I think my mum had never considered: they were happy where they were.

That stayed with me all my life. You can always come back. I used it as a line in my first novel*. And on the night we decided that we would make the move to Abu Dhabi I said it with a conviction that, at the time, was real. If it doesn’t work, I said to the mister, We can always come back. When I said that, I didn’t think it wouldn’t work. I had always seen myself as adventurous. I had always wanted to live more places. I had always wanted to show my children the expanses of the world.

Two mistakes. I didn’t know it wouldn’t work. I didn’t know my mum was wrong.

My mum said lots of wonderful things, gave lots of great advice. But she was wrong about this. I mean, she was right, of course. You can pack up your stuff, get back in the car and go back. You can find out a place doesn’t work for you and you can turn around, go back to the place that works better for you (even if better is really only less worse). But Heraclitus said it better, You can’t jump in the same river twice.

I know you can’t compare my mother’s pragmatism with Heraclitus’ philosophy, but he’s more right than she is. My mother’s solution will help you to solve the immediate physical disharmony. When you go back, you will once again be able to find your place from A to B. The colour of the sky in that patch of afternoon between ‘anything is possible’ and ‘it’s too late’ will be the right shade of blue. The moisture in the air (or lack of) will prick your skin. The songs the birds sing will be the perfect pitch.

But all the things that you bring back will be changed.

When I left Adelaide I was a mother of young children who couldn’t tie their shoes. I had ambitions, and although I had not articulated them, they were, as we say, realistic and achievable. I took the strength of my marriage for granted. I lived a life that was true to myself and the things I believed in. I knew who I was, what I wanted, what I was doing next. I knew the kind of mother I wanted to be, the wife, the daughter, the friend. Then I moved to Abu Dhabi and none of those things were true. Or at least they changed, shifted, became less true.

I didn’t go back. I stayed. Bit by bit, piece by piece, put myself together again. And here I am. Mended. Happy. Here.

And now, it’s time to change again. There are many reasons, but mainly it’s because the Floppy Adolescent can tie his shoes and needs something beyond the world we live in. What opened up his younger world is now restricting. To help him get to where he needs to be, I need to go back. Perhaps not physically, but mentally.

That’s why I’m standing here on the bank. Looking in at the river. It is crystal clear, but even without dipping in my toes, I know that it is cold. The rocks on the bottom are smooth and round, but they will be hard beneath my feet. It looks calm, but I will need to swim hard only to stay still. My skin will prick.

The birdsong, when I hear it, will be pitch perfect.

Jumping in.

*Yes, I’m totally calling it my first novel now to distinguish it from second, but now I’ve decided that manuscript I’ve just finished is going to become a novel and sometime soon. I’m going to get that done. But I’m not sure where the full top should go there.

Anniversary

It’s seven years today since my dad died. On the seventh anniversary of my mother’s death, Dad rang me – he rang me on each one of her anniversaries and her birthdays. I remember saying, on her seventh anniversary, ‘It feels different this year.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. And it does feel different, because it is. The loss is deep instead of raw. Life has gone on. At seven years, it’s a new stage of things.

I’ve been tossing up whether or not to write about Dad today. I sometimes feel that I talk about my parents and their deaths too much. I worry that people think that I let those events define me. That people (that you) are thinking, Can’t you move on already? Goodness me, we get it.

Clare Bowditch sings it perfectly in The Thing About Grief, “It gets kind of boring for the people who don’t yet know.”

It’s true that when I talk about my parents I am talking about dead people. But I don’t talk about them because they’re dead. I talk about them because they are my parents and because they are a part of my life.

Part of my relationship with my dad is that I miss him.

Sometimes I miss him with a pang. Like when the Floppy Adolescent glides through the loungeroom on his skateboard balancing a cat on his shoulder and I think of my dad walking around our house with our stumpy-tailed cat on his shoulder. Or when Cricket Boy comes loudly to the defence of test cricket, ‘But it’s so exciting! The game can change with any ball!’

Sometimes I miss his steady hand. Like last year when we had An Incident with the Floppy Adolescent and the mister and I walked around the compound talking it through. ‘I wish we could talk to my dad,’ I said. ‘He would tell us it’s all okay. He would say, “You’re on the right track, you’ll see it through.”‘

Sometimes I miss him because what are we without the people who know us best? There is no one else who can say, ‘Bloody hell, you sound so much like Vivienne,’ with such meaning.

And sometimes I simply miss sitting at the table with him, the newspapers spread around, wine half-drunk, coffee gone cold, food, always more food and the conversation going in endless circles.

I miss his energy and I miss his love.

But there’s much more to our relationship than a simple wish that he were here. I don’t know exactly how to explain those things. There’s a lot of the same things that there would be if he were alive. Some months ago, I came far too close to making a spectacularly, enormously awful decision. But I knew I wouldn’t do it because I would have to answer Dad. He doesn’t let me get away with being dishonest to myself. I send him emails and texts in my mind, the details of my days that I would have shared. I look at his photograph and I tell him bits and pieces. But there’s more to it than that. Something deeper. He’s just here, living with me. Every single day. That’s the best explanation I can give.

Lucky us, we had a good and a solid and a straightforward relationship so there wasn’t much in the way of deathbed revelations, but there were two things he talked about that stay with me.

Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry with people who love you and don’t be angry with yourself. Forgive people if they hurt you and forgive yourself. I have managed to let go of most of my anger and my life is better for it. I still do an excellent line in churn and guilt, self-recrimination and flagellation though. I don’t think Dad would be surprised by that.

The other thing he said: Keep writing.

Do you know the stupidest I’ve ever done and no, I will never forgive myself for it? Not showing Dad the draft of my first novel before it was published. How dumb was that? I don’t even know why I didn’t let him read it. Scared I guess. By the time I had the courage Dad didn’t have the concentration. Really dumb.

But I almost did an even dumber thing. I almost stopped writing altogether. I have no idea of why it took me so much effort to write a second manuscript. I love writing. I feel good about myself when I’m writing and rubbish when I’m not. Whatever the reason it was really freaking hard getting it to the place that it’s in now. But I did it. I got it written. Even if it never gets published, even if you never read it, I wrote it and I feel good about that. I hadn’t realised until I started writing again how unbalanced my relationship with Dad had become. It wasn’t quite that I was letting him down but there’s definitely a sense now that I can look him in the eye again.

I don’t know where I’m going with this really. I don’t have some stunning insight to share or a life-changing observation.

I think I just wanted to talk about my dad.

Thank you for listening.

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This is Denis with the Floppy Adolescent a few weeks before the Floppy Adolescent had his surgery.

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This is Denis with Cricket Boy at the Adelaide Oval. Cricket Boy’s first test match.

Statistics

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So I finished the undergraduate portion of my studies and then I took a bit of a break because the university I was studying with didn’t offer honours by distance, only on campus. I had thought they might offer it last year, but they didn’t so I sort of more or less moved on from the idea of doing much more study. I could have gone to another university but that involves getting your pieces of paper stamped by an official of some kind which involves first getting your pieces of paper and I don’t know, everything that’s already complicated gets a bit more complicated when you’re living overseas and although I’m mentally pretty strong these days there’s nothing like running around (in real life and virtually) trying to get the right pieces of paper signed by the right people to put that strength to the test (and find it lacking).

Then they shifted to online delivery this year and I thought I may as well enrol because I still had my original goals plus a few others in mind and because it seemed a bit of a waste to have come this far and not go any further.

What it was that made me think I could study full-time and work full-time I do not know, but there was a pretty miserable month there at the beginning of the year until I did the sensible thing and withdrew from a couple of units leaving myself with the thesis (because I’d done so much work on it by then it was silly to withdraw from that) and the statistics unit because hahahahahahahahahahahaha I may as well get it over with.

Holy moly. That unit pushed me to the brink of insanity like few other things have done. The world of numbers, it’s not my natural habitat, but I’d pushed my way through the earlier stats units to do not too badly and had, in a strange way, enjoyed pushing my brain to places it hadn’t previously been. But something had changed. First it was a few years since I’d done the first stats units so I had to go back and remember everything I’d forgotten (which wasn’t quite everything I’d learned, but close enough). Second because I was at work from 7.30 – 4.30 every day plus driving time I had to get up early and stay up late to do things like listening to lectures and working through tutorial questions. Now, I do like getting up in the morning and padding about in the silence, but it’s hard to set your alarm with enthusiasm for simple regression and the analysis of covariance. And not to mention trying to load SPSS and sorry you don’t have the right operating system and etcetera etcetera etcereraagghhhh.

With every spare moment spent working on statistics – something I don’t like and get neither enrichment nor enjoyment from – I felt like my life was completely off-track. And this at a time when I had thought I really had got my shit together. Instead of striding with efficient speed from one task to the next as I had imagined I would do, I was back to standing in the middle of the kitchen, sobbing. I felt so stupid – not just because I couldn’t do the statistics, but also for being a grown-up, middle-aged woman, sitting at her desk with a hangover (easily come by when you’re living on six hours’ sleep) and working on an overdue assignment. All of the decisions which had once seemed sensible and focused now seemed as unfocused and as scattered as ever. I’m supposed to be in control of my life by now! I would rage at the mister. Everyone else knows what they’re doing and where they’re going and look at me. I’ve still got no idea.

I logged in to the enrolment page every day telling myself to quit, just quit. But I was past the withdraw without penalty date and I can’t quit, because when I was in first year university I withdrew from French after the withdraw without penalty date. I told my parents I was withdrawing, but I didn’t mention ‘past the without penalty’ bit. My mother was a beautiful, elegant woman. She was whip-smart and wise. But my goodness she was fierce and this is the conversation that followed when she saw my results for that year:

‘What’s with that French result?’
‘I told you I was withdrawing.’
‘You didn’t tell me it meant that you would fail.’
Silence from me (because I could see the fierceness rising) until my mother said: ‘This family will fail, but we will fail with dignity and with pride.’
You see? There’s no way I could really withdraw. I mean, she’s been dead for more than twenty years but those words still live.

So I kept plugging away. In truth, I couldn’t really work out what was the problem. I’d studied before. I knew that it would come to an end. The mister reminded me that I had said it was going to be hard in May and June. I didn’t know why I was getting quite so worked up. But worked up I was and when I rang the exam venue to confirm the exam time my voice was shaking and I burst into tears when I got off the phone. It seemed to be something of an over-reaction even for my over-thinking mind.

It wasn’t until I got to the exam venue and the frigid air of its air-conditioner, and the cloying lemon scent of the open bathroom door hit me that I got it. The last time I was sitting in this room it had been only an hour since I’d discharged myself from hospital where I’d ended up after a straightforward miscarriage went a teensy bit pear-shaped so if you added everything up, multiplied it by a sandstorm and divided it by completely-exhausted-because-of-getting-up-at-four-am you’ve got…well, you’ve got tears in the exam room. But there’s the thing. Once you realise there’s a reason and it’s not random insanity, everything looks a bit less foggy and feels a bit less muddy.

So I went into the exam room and goodness knows how but I did extraordinarily well in the exam which, in combination with the okay result I got for my assignment gave me a not bad distinction in the end. Which isn’t the high distinction I’m aiming for, but it was much closer to a high distinction than it was to a credit so I’ll be able to make those couple of marks up with the other units. And now I’m back working on my thesis which is a qualitative methodology and words and that’s much more solid ground for me and I’m not sobbing in the kitchen anymore, and actually I feel like I’ve got my shit together and I know where I’m going and how to get there. Plus dignity and pride.

Resigned

I finished my job last week. Like, you know, not going back kind of finished. I’ve been working in libraries again, this time at a school. The end of the school year came and I decided that I would, well, ‘resign’ makes it sound much more dramatic than it really is, but I suppose that’s what I did. Anyway, the upshot is that I don’t have a job.

I think I might have retired from libraries. I’m not sure, but it feels that way at the moment. (future employers, please don’t read that last sentence, okay? Obviously when I tell you yours is the job of my dreams I mean it. Okay?).

There were all sorts of reasons that I decided to leave the job, but in the end they all boiled down to the same thing: my heart wasn’t in it. I mean, I liked it – much of it I loved – and I did a good job and I put myself into it and I was sad to be leaving it.

But at the same time there were other things I wanted to be doing that weren’t getting done. My novel for one thing. And other writing things I want to do. I can’t write them until I finish the novel manuscript. My study. I’ve got a thesis due at the end of October and I don’t see the point of going back to study at my stage if I’m not going to do it properly. There was all of the stuff about being the kind of parent I want to be. The Floppy Adolescent will be leaving home soon and I want to spend more time with him because it’s true that adolescents are unpredictable beasts, but they are also spontaneous and fun and make jokes that only adolescents make. Friends. I like to be a good friend. I like to spend time with my friends and I like them to be able to ask me for things if they need them. And then in this strange limbo-life that all expats lead to a greater or lesser extent the house as a whole was missing the flexibility of my freelancing life, and that’s going to become more and more of a thing as the Floppy Adolescent moves ever-closer to Young Adulthood.

It was odd, because for so long I’d been convinced that going back to work in a traditional work-way – with a desk and colleagues and a daily start and end time and a regular salary – was going to help me find my equilibrium. That being able to answer that question, ‘What do you do?’ with a definite answer rather than, ‘Oh, well, I don’t know, I don’t do anything much’ would help me to feel that I had a place in the world. Somewhere to go and someone to be when I got there.

For a while having a job did do that. It was good to be part of something bigger than myself and to spend less time in my own head. Plus, matching kids with books is a pretty nice way to spend a day. But I could tell that if I’d stayed it would start being counterproductive to my (constant) search for equilibrium. That I would start to hate getting up in the morning and would be consumed by all of the things that I couldn’t do while I was going to work. And I wouldn’t be doing a good job then. I wouldn’t do a bad job – I’m an earnest, eldest child and I’m nothing if not conscientious. But I’d always have half a mind on something else. It would be a churn.

I do know how fortunate I am to be able to make this decision. I’m fortunate that my partner earns enough for the four of us not only to live on, but also to be able to make choices like this. More fortunate still, I married a man who means it when he says he values me and that he believes writing a novel that may or may not be published is a good way for a person to spend her time. I know how lucky I am.

For a few days it seemed like maybe I’d made the right decision in that ‘this was meant to be’ kind of way because it looked like I might have one of my best freelancing clients back. One door closes another one opens. I don’t know why I still let myself believe that kind of stuff because that door closed almost as soon as it opened and for one reason and another it didn’t work out. So I’m freaking out a bit about no income in the immediate future. As much as I reconciled myself to the financial disparities in our incomes a long time ago, I’m bothered that I’m making no financial contribution at all, plus however much I tell myself not to be worried by it, the lack of financial autonomy plagues me.

But overall I know that I’m on the right path. Somehow or other the strands of everything will be woven together. Oh, look, a cheesy life’s big tapestry metaphor to end.

Food

If I tell you that I have a personal trainer who comes to my house twice a week, it will sound extremely expat lady I’m sure. But since last September I’ve been working full time, studying full time (which became part time during the semester) and trying to finish my novel, and the personal training route became the only way I was going to get any exercise done. I couldn’t get to classes, and as my gym routines became old and stale I could feel my trips to the gym becoming less and less strenuous as my self-discipline and motivation dwindled. And that’s it’s own self-feeding spiral, isn’t it?

I need to exercise. It’s not only that I live a reasonably sedentary working life and the car culture I live in doesn’t promote much incidental exercise. It’s also that ever since we arrived, exercise has been one of the cornerstones of maintaining my mental health.

So I got a trainer, planning to revamp my strength training routines, get some new ideas and hopefully get myself back on the self-training track.

One of the things he tried to do was assess my food and nutrition. Okay, I thought, this will be good. I will lose those five kilos I put on my ‘to do’ list every single year. I downloaded the fitness app that everyone uses (I’ve forgotten what it’s called, and if that’s not foreshadowing I don’t know what is). And I started logging my food. Not right away, but after a week or so I started. And it was fun, like any of those things are. Looking at the pretty pie charts and bar graphs. But I never really got into it.

‘How’s your diet been?’ he would ask each time he came to the house.
‘Okay,’ I’d say and shrug.
‘You haven’t been filling it in, have you?’
‘Mostly.’
‘Have you stopped having the school lunches yet?’
‘Not really. They’re kind of delicious.’

After a few weeks of this he said to me one day, ‘Right, if you haven’t got on top of it by next week, I’ll put you on the paleo diet.’
‘Okay, but I won’t do it.’
‘You’ve got one week.’
‘But I’m telling you quite honestly that I won’t do it.’

And so I went on. I still ate the school lunches. Partly because they were kind of delicious and partly because it was a way of spending time with the children – the year twos love it when the librarian comes to the dining hall and they love to bring me a glass of water and to help me find the perfect banana. And although I tried to change my less-than-nutritious breakfast of two slices of toast with vegemite, a thirty-year habit is hard to change. Plus, I love it. I did stop drinking wine every night, but apart from that not much changed.

After more and more sessions of my increasingly apparent lack of interest he’s stopped asking and I’d tell you how long since I last filled in my fitness tracker but I really couldn’t be bothered going to find it. And now we just concentrate on the weights on the bar and he’s also trying to convince me I should do more sprints which yeah, nah, gah!

The other morning, when I was in the shower, I realised what a very big deal this actually is. I must be happy with my diet (used in the broadest sense of the word to mean what I actually eat rather than what I am limiting myself to eat) and possibly even with my body just the way they are. I do have a tendency to procrastinate, but if I really want to do something I usually find a way of getting it done. Like, if I wanted to care about my food that way I would have tracked it.

I have always wanted to be happy with these things. And I actually did stop going to a particular person’s classes because he kept insisting that the primary reason people exercise is so that they look better naked. I argued that no I didn’t, but I did assume that I was arguing more out of principle than out of an actual belief I actually held. But this is the first time I realised that I really am exercising simply because it’s good for my heart and for my brain. And if I think about it, I don’t remember the last time I stood in front of the mirror and thought, ‘oh, god, my legs.’ My legs haven’t changed – they’ve been more or less this shape and size and for twenty years – so it must be my mind. Pretty pleased with that.

fancy dinner without the lads

We are going out for dinner, the mister and I because the lads are not here and because we both start late at work because the country is on Ramadan hours. We choose a place that’s in the hotel that’s over the bridge and around the corner from where we live.

The Ramadan cannon to mark the end of the fast has sounded. We aren’t fasting, but I always wait for the cannon before I begin my evening meal. It seems the right thing to do.

There is one taxi at the taxi stand. It was a risk to walk the humid walk to the stand and not order one to the door because at this time of the night many taxi drivers are at the mosque to pray and to break their fast for the day. Our driver is eating when we knock on the window of his car. Something wrapped in paper, he has a plastic bag on his lap which he is leaning in to. He slugs down a drink before he pushes it all back into his bag and we drive.

His taxi is air-conditioner cold.

The streets are quiet. I have been driving out on the highway at Iftar time and been all alone. You could, as they say, fire a cannon and not hit anyone.

The hotel, usually alive with locals and tourists and expats alike, is subdued. The cafes are restaurants are curtained and the stalls of the souq are all closed, covered in cloths and boards. Only the Starbucks has taken down its partition.

The Japanese restaurant looks closed, but there is a woman at the podium outside and she opens the door and takes us inside. Last time we were here, the lights were blue, the music was loud, the tables were full. Tonight, the lights are bright, there is no music and when we arrive the restaurant’s custom doubles.

We choose a table by the window. The curtains, which hide the food from fasting Muslims during the day, are still closed.

‘Can we open the curtains now?’ We ask the waiter.
‘No, sir, because we are serving alcohol, that’s why.’

A group of young (very young) men come in and sit at the table in the middle of the restaurant. Attracted by the Sunday night buffet, but apart from that I wonder who they are. They aren’t teachers. And at this time of year they surely aren’t a visiting rugby team. Oil and gas? They have the upper body for it. They eat sushi and drink beer.

The young couple at the table next to us begin to smoke.

I order a martini and the mister orders mojito. The martini is pink, the mojito is weak. More people arrive and we feel less alone but still we order, we eat, we leave.

As we walk out of the air conditioned hotel and into the humid air, my glasses fog and I have to stand for a moment so that I don’t fall down the stairs.

Unaccompanied

We tootled up to Dubai at 10 pm on Saturday night to drop the lads off at the airport. They’re catching the plane back to Adelaide for a stay with their granny before I join them later in August. They’re flying as unaccompanied minors. I wanted to take a photograph but The Floppy Teen was stroppy and wouldn’t let me. So here’s one I prepared earlier.

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That’s last year’s. So that’s two years in a row they’ve been packed off to Australia on their own and in this life, anything you do for two years feels like the foundation for a routine.

I felt enormously proud of them last year. I mean, it’s sort of no big deal. You take them to the Unaccompanied Minors Lounge, the people behind the counter put the minors’ passports and documentation in plastic folders and then, when the time comes to leave, they take them through the fast track lanes of immigration. The minors make the long, boring trip, get off at the other end and get taken through the fast track lanes of immigration and customs before they’re deposited with the people we’ve authorised to collect them.

The lads took it all in their stride this year, just as they did last. I guess I would have preferred it if they’d looked back – even a glance – to give one final wave to those of us standing behind the rope at the ‘Passengers Only Beyond This Point’ point. But more I was struck by the idea that I’d made children who could do this thing. Travel half way around the world with just each other. It’s so very far from the life that the mister and I had as children. And yet, it’s exactly the same. Visiting your granny at school holiday time, thinking not even one bit of the parents you’ve left behind.

I wanted to tell you more about it, but the time has flown and I need to get off to work. And pressing publish, that’s how blogs stay alive.

A piece of string

I’m trying to finish my novel. By which I more specifically mean I’m trying to find the point where I say, ‘It’s finished.’

It’s taken me a long time, hasn’t it? Six years, nearly seven, since my first was published and not much done between then and now. I need to finish writing something sometime soon. Something that gets published. Something that people read. Otherwise I’m not really a writer anymore, more someone who has written.

I’ve done a lot of things to try to make sure this manuscript gets finished. I stayed in Abu Dhabi for two weeks at Christmas time while the mister and the lads went back to Australia. I got a lot done then, but I didn’t get it finished. I get up at 4.30 a couple of mornings each week to squeeze some time in before I go to work. I get a lot done that way too, but it doesn’t get it finished.

I keep thinking, ‘Two weeks. If I give it two good weeks I will get it finished.’ And I do that and then I realise that there are two more weeks to get it to the next stage and the next and then the next. I know the onion analogy gets a lot of airplay when people are talking about writing. But it’s not peeling an onion, it’s making one, like adding the layers one by one.

This time I think there really are only two more weeks. The framework is strong now and I can’t move any of it. I look through this draft now and I see the places where I need to put in more of this sub-plot, make that storyline stronger, strengthen this paragraph with a bit of detail.

It’s closer than it’s ever been. Two more weeks and it will be there.

But I remember back when the mister and I still thought that we would finish the boat we had started building. ‘Tell everyone six months,’ our boatbuilding teacher told us. ‘It’s close and far away at the same time.’

I wonder what tricks that piece of advice is playing with my subconscious because all my two weeks turn into another six months. And I need to finish. If I keep doing this two weeks thing my thoughts will start getting stale. I’ll never start anything new. And this will never get published.

So I’m drawing a line. I’m going to do a proofread, then I’m sending it off to my agent. It’s time for the next stage to begin.

I went walking

So my beloved and I were out walking and while we were walking we were chatting about this and that and mostly our chat was my list, ordered alphabetically, of Things That Could Go Wrong as I venture into unknown waters this week. And I was particularly keen to seek his opinion on one of those items as it is something about which he knows more than I, so I detailed my fear, ending with, ‘…but I’m being silly, aren’t I, that won’t happen will it?’

To which he replied, ‘It could, and in fact…’

At which point I stopped walking and said, ‘Yeah, nah, here’s the part where you snort and say, goodness no, what, how did you even manage to think that. No way, I know this is Abu Dhabi, but nah, you’ll be right.’

And he said, ‘Well, I just want to prepare you for the worst that could happen.’

There is a silence.

And then I’m like, ‘WTF BELOVED SINCE WHEN DID I NEED YOUR HELP PREPARING FOR THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN MY GOD IF WE ARE TALKING WORST CASE SCENARIOS YOUR IMAGINATION CAN GET FROM THE FRONT DOOR TO THE CAR WHEREAS MINE…HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN ME LET’S START THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN, SHALL WE, AND GO BACK TO OUR CLEARLY DEFINED MARITAL ROLES.’
And he’s like, ‘Yes, let’s go home and I’ll pour you a glass of wine.’

(disclosure, this is just lifted from my facebook updates, but I’m desperate to get my blog going again, and it’s silly to give facebook everything)