Stunned!!

I had some 'news' recently, provided to me by someone who I admire for their consideration and care. When you hear the news that may seem an odd thing to say but you may understand and those of you who know me well will understand why I say that.

Those of you who read here regularly will recall my unceremonious dispatch from what was a very important relationship in my life about eighteen months ago and the subsequent car wreck my life became. I won't link it here again, it's consigned to history now and I won't name he who committed the deed because that is perhaps unfair but if you know you know.

So...this 'news', bear in mind here that at the time I would have given anything to have had him ask me to marry him....well 'Mr I will never get married I don't believe in the concept and it would be hypocritical, no way, no how, not ever' is getting married or has already got married!!

I don't know too many specifics and I don't want too.

At the 'point of impact' (an email while sat in a coffee shop) you could have knocked me down with a feather, in fact worse than that, I reacted rather badly by spontaneously saying out loud "F*cker" - hopefully not too many overheard!

For a minute or two I didn't really know which way was up and I will admit the 'ouch factor' was very evident, I was pretty much stunned but I quickly recovered my composure and got something of a grip. The reason I say I have nothing but admiration for the person who took the decision to tell me something so difficult is because for me it has finally drawn a hard line under the whole sorry business and reiterates much that I have come to understand about the guy involved and what I believed as opposed to the reality . People change I know but others are just not as honest as one would like to think.

I would like to be a big enough person to wish him hasppiness but I'm not sure I am, I do however hope he has finally and honestly found what he is looking for, if only to avoid someone else going through what I did....I was not the first by a long chalk. Some relationships just aren't meant to be perhaps and I apparently wasn't 'the one' but he had some p[retty heavy duty history where any kind of commitment was concerned and maybe I just should have known better from the start.

Hey ho.....

ooopssss....

.....sorry, was that a whole week just gone by without a single post? Hmmmm I think so!

Oooppssss!

Um, what can I say, I am being particularly crap here lately but I am having way too good a time and I just can't seem to find the time for this blogging thing too often right now.

My mother is currently away for a few days with my sister, work is pretty manic and well, the new guy 'thing' is going good as they say. I barely seem to make it online at all at the moment, let alone long enough to blog, or moreover to read blogs.

I have emails coming out of my ears waiting for a response, a head full of things I want to write here and all manner of other stuff I really should get too but hey....life's too short!

Please don't abandon me though, I'm getting myself sorted into a new routine and I will be back up to speed any day now.

Really! ;)

I have been remiss....and busy!

Ha, so my promises to return to some kind of 'normality' and blog more frequently seem to have come thus far to nothing.

This time I appear to have surpassed myself...it's a whole week since my last post which I think is probably a record bad blogger incident for me. I really don't know if I have missed an entire week anytime before now!

Life just keeps on getting in the way but for a change it's a very nice bit of life, in fact more than nice! Dates four, five and six with 'N' were on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this last weekend, cinema, dinner, walks and much talking and drinking of coffee have filled my weekend and I have loved every minute of it. (And hopefully he has too!)

It is just so good to feel something normal and nice again, to feel like not everything in life is crap and to notice myself smiling stupidly still when faced with the less pleasant aspects of my life right now. Things just don't seem so bad and maybe, just maybe, my faith in the male of the species is being a little restored at last!

Yes, I'm still scared witless that it will all go the way of hell.... and this fledgling relationship is not without it's difficulties (is anything I wonder), he too is stuck caring for an elderly mother with no apparent route of escape, but somehow things work out if the are supposed too and I'm gonna keep telling myself that and make a damned good attempt at positivity. ;)

Dead!

My apologies for the starkness of title of this post but it's significant.

Among all the hoo-ha of the last eighteen months my mind has been so full of just dealing with the situations I found myself in and trying to cope with them that in a strange way I didn't really have time to think. I'm not sure if that's entirely a bad thing, I suspect in fact it's the reverse and that had I been able to mull over the minutiae to a greater degree it would only have hindered my ability to get on with the matters in hand.

Not much of it was good, most of you who read here regularly already know the timeline, my being unceremoniously ditched by the guy I thought at the time was the love of my life wrong!, the diagnosis of my fathers terminal cancer just when we thought he had beaten it, the death then of a close friend from cancer and lastly the death exactly a week later of my father.

The whole period was madness, I remember it really as a blur of trying to organise, administer and control umpteen medications, constant hospital visits and procedures, trying to keep everyone 'afloat' and positive, trying to make what time my Dad had left as tolerable as possible for him and of a constant underlying feeling of panic that I wouldn't cope and the obvious sadness that ultimately, whatever we did, the outcome was not going to be good.

I just never had time to think and no sooner had the inevitable happened and my Dad had turned up his toes than I was catapulted into another difficult situation, taking care of my mother and dealing with the fallout.... but today was different.

Today, and I have no idea why it was today, I was driving my white van merrily along the road when seemingly like a bolt from the blue, with tremendous and almost physical force it hit me; my dad is dead, like really dead, like never coming back, absolutely dead and gone. I can remember his face as clear as day, I can hear his voice in my head easily but I won't ever see him again, never, not ever, he really is completely and utterly dead.

Forever. Fin. The End.

I use the stark language that I do because that's how it feels, in my face, real, stark, tangible at last. I don't quite know what I feel about it right now, at the moment it hit me I felt a sadness like I don't ever remember before but it was strangely brief and I'm glad I felt it, it felt real and accepting and has somehow allowed me to suddenly remember in detail things I think I had tried not to think about and buried away.

There is so much stuff, lots of it right now appears to be centered around his last few months of life, but not necessarily sad stuff, just stuff, stuff about the time I spent nursing him and some of the amusing (if sometimes gross) things that happened despite the circumstances, about how that time bought us closer and how we could laugh however desperate the situation became.

I suspect in the near future I may regale you with some of those tales, it's cathartic for me and some are worth sharing for various reasons... but mostly I feel that maybe the real me, who I battened down for so long with such alacrity to enable me to cope with the here and now, is finally emerging again with the acceptance, however difficult, that it's really all over.

My dad is dead. It's real. I have to cope now without him because he's gone and I'm not......

....and he would be as miffed as bloody hell with me if I didn't!

I am almost....

....afraid to even type this post for fear of putting my usual hex, or some other heinous infliction, on the situation but as one who has always maintained she isn't superstitious, I shall be brave and continue!

The man, you knew before I even began of course that was going to be the subject of this post didn't you?!

So, the man, let's just call him 'N' for now, is positively lovely and surprisingly he appears to think the same of me, he's open, honest, upfront and doesn't play games, so far it has been way too simple, there have been no traumas, no let downs, nothing suspicious and none of the usual crap and bother that seem to have been the norm where the men I have dated recently have been concerned.

Friday, date number 2, we went out for dinner, a balmy summers evening sat on the restaurant terrace, eating and drinking and chatting like we had known one another for for much longer than a few weeks, followed by a moonlit walk...... we didn't want the evening to end!

Sunday, date number 3, a walk along the Thames at Marlow hand in hand, laughing and talking and larking around (that is not a euphemism) like a pair of kids, a drink in a lovely bar and then hours just talking.....We didn't want the evening to end!

What more can I say? Maybe that I seem to have a ridiculously stupid grin plastered on my face most of the time and life feels a whole lot better suddenly, even the tough stuff doesn't seem quite so tough right now :)

What else can I say, I am scared bloody witless, I like this feeling, I really like this man and I don't want things to go their usual way of late....straight to hell.

This time it matters.

Fingers crossed please if you would.

A date and a donkey!

The date on Sunday evening......

The guy was lovely, I had a lovely time, he was good company, funny, attentive without being suffocating, polite and best of all didn't adopt the octopus approach that so many of my recent disasters dates have. I felt completely at ease, we chatted and joked and laughed easily and when it was time to go home I didn't want the evening to end...and neither did he! There was only one tiny fly in the ointment but I won't go into that right now.

This is the guy I met through the strange coincidental circumstances I blogged here. I don't know of course how things will work out but I do know I had a great evening, that we have every intention of hooking up again this week and that it kinda can't come quick enough for me!

But woaahhh.....don't anyone go buying a hat just yet please. I am trying these days to do this stuff one day at a time and not look any further forward than that, he's a lovely man, we had a lovely evening and we will do it again, further than that I have no idea and it kinda suits me right now to feel like that.

Life is way too complicated right now for me to complicate it any further unnecessarily so I'm going with the flow this time and what will be will be.

Oh...and I got to see Shrek 4 too! Did I ever mention I am particularly fond of Donkey? :)

What's been keeping me?

You may well ask, given that my blogging has been pretty much non existent of late!

Life really is what's been keeping me from here and whilst I know there are those that will say that's a good thing (and maybe it is to some degree) much of it hasn't been so good in actuality and I kinda miss blogging regularly. I've done it for so long now it's part of me and it's odd to be so absent. Hey ho, needs must as they say, I have little choice in the matter.

In the main it has been work and taking care of my mother that have taken over my life, the former I enjoy, in fact I love being back at work but the threat of redundancy looms already, wouldn't you know it! That said, recent sad circumstances mean that perhaps that threat is slightly less, at least for the time being so I have my fingers crossed thought I wish the possibility wasn't for such sad reasons.

My mum, well it wouldn't be appropriate for me to put too much detail here, she is a very private lady but there have been times when I thought I really couldn't cope any longer or that in my efforts to cope, my own physical and mental health would suffer. Well they have, I have raised blood pressure for the first time in my life and a raised heart rate but I am finding and learning new coping strategies and one way or another I will find a way.

It seems odd now and perhaps selfish but when I was nursing my dad, somehow I envisaged that once the inevitable had happened I would be able to start re-building my life and things would get less stressful. How wrong was I?! Nursing him through the horrors of cancer were, in comparison to what I am dealing with now, relatively straightforward. Yes it was harrowing, yes, it was sad and yes I knew that at the end of it there was the loss and upheaval but regardless of all that it wasn't as difficult by a long chalk, as I am finding this current set of circumstances.

But, I plod on. Mostly I feel completely trapped but I try to keep the faith and tell myself that somehow I will escape and that nothing lasts forever.


On happier, or at least less serious, things;

I appear to have got myself embroiled in a man situation that I'm a little unsure of, time will tell I suppose but right now I'm feeling a little antsy about it all....however, we have a date on Sunday so all will become evident soon.

I have recently also been contacted again, out of the blue, by a guy I saw just once a few months ago but it didn't get any further at that point. I would tell you more but as I recall he has this URL so for now....shhhhhh ;)

And lastly, my very stupid decision to give the stalker a second chance finally seems be resolved and all contact has ceased. Phew!

I think that's about it, my current life in a nutshell (or a blog post)....not exactly hunkydory to say the least but when things finally improve ( and they will, I have to believe they will) at least this last eighteen months will have taught me, if nothing else, to really appreciate the better times!

Oh...and just in case whoever is in charge of dishing out the better times is listening, I'm ready, I can handle some good bits now, really, honestly, I can! ;)

Pedestrians crossing

So, there I am this morning beetling around a large industrial estate in my white van when suddenly i am forced to pull up hard behind a Porche that has apparently stopped without warning and is showing hazard warning lights.

At first there was no obvious reason for this slightly odd behaviour and I was marginally miffed as to what he was up too.... but a few moments later all became apparent as mum and her offspring appeared from in front of the vehicle, apparently all en-route for someplace else.

Her choice of crossing was perhaps not her wisest move but all made it to the other side of the road intact :)


(Apologies for image quality, click to enlarge, photography by phone whilst trying to manoeuvre is not the best way to get a decent shot!)