Fifteen years ago, or even five years ago, Friday night drinks would have been something altogether different to what Friday night drinks are now. Fifteen years ago, it was Karen Millen suits, heels and drinks in an All Bar One with the team from work, wondering if what my dad called “the current applicant” would show up and make a fool of me or leave me standing. Either way, the night would usually end in tears.
These days, life couldn’t be any different. And this blog post it my trying to express gratitude for it. I’m in my PJ’s, ruining a very nice white wine, by drinking it out of a mug, and with lemonade mixed into it!! And I’m sat in the darkness, watching these two candles burning. I used to be very into candles, but Lovely Bloke isn’t, so I don’t have many of them any more. Until last week, when Rachel Yoxen became a more regular presence in my life and brought me a posh one from Molton Brown. You have to love well connected friends like her, don’t you ;)
Anyway, I digress. I saw these two garden candles in one of our sheds the other day and I thought back to when I bought them from Habitat with Lovely Bloke. A waste of time in his opinion, but I instisted on them and we brought them home. That was five years ago. And tonight, thinking of all sorts of things, I’ve stuck them in a plant pot outside and lit them. I couldn’t believe it when they came to life!! I wasn’t really expecting them to, to be honest.
At Christmas I spoke to a friend in “da Norf” (which means the North of England, for the uninitiated to Oasis, the Verve and Manchester United speak). She told me she was planning on leaving her husband, because she was a different person with him, to who she was with her friends.
.
She wanted to be the person she liked most – the version of her with her friends – at the school gate, socialising, not the version she was at home with her husband. It’s got me thinking and being a bird, I have been talking at Lovely Bloke about it for some time now. He’s a good listener sometimes….
Lovely Bloke feels that committing to life together is one big compromise and that you have to accept these differences as people grow and change. He thinks it’s selfish of my distant friend to be thinking of uprooting her children and moving to work out who she really wants to be. But I think he’s wrong. I think she’s doing the right thing. If you can’t find, or be given space in your relationships to work something out, then I don’t think it’s the right place for you to be.
Lots of my life has changed beyond recognition in the last 5 years. Redudnacy for both of us (ok, I know, I volunteered for mine…), two children, complete role reversal at home and self employment on a range of levels for both Lovely Bloke and myself. Then the Shed project. And I wouldn’t change any of it. Other than to wish I’d had the confidence in the business then that I do now. I might have slept more in the first 18 months for a start!
I’m just trying to get around to the fact that life is full of changes. Some are great, some are sad, some are bad. But what they are is what they are. We can’t change them. We can change how we deal with them. And sometimes, we can work some things out in the midst of all this: who we are, what we want and where we want to be – by taking some time out, turning the lights off and lighting a couple of old candles from a shed down the bottom of your garden.
I usually end my blog posts with a call to action – “come and tell me what you think” etc. But very few people ever comment on them. Which is strange, because the analytics tell me how many hundreds of people read them. So if you want to tell me what you think of this blog post please do, but if not, no worries, I’m just happy to know that you came by…
Hope you have a lovely weekend in the sunshine. x
I’m fairly sure that the Royal Wedding presents an educational opportunity of some sort to our boys. I just don’t know what it is.
