Each to their own, eh?

I think today's post is a bit of a confession.

 I was off work with a someone's-sat-on-my-chest-and-I-can't-breathe chest infection. My sinuses were terrible, I had headaches, backaches, eyeaches... and exhaustion to top it off. Pretty nasty.... but there was always...

• The chance to hang about the flat in my pyjamas watching old movies like, Singing In The Rain, and Some Like It Hot, swooning and singing along
• Hot water bottles by the million
• Marvellous tea. Tea of all kinds; Peppermint, Earl Grey, Raspberry Leaf, and my favourite... Yorkshire
• Big un-sexy socks and my Ugly Betty glasses - nice for me, bit scary for everyone else
• Cooking like Delia - or rather attempting to cook like Delia with whatever I find in the cupboard. Makes for interesting eating....
• Sofa beds. Duvet days.

I do try to look on the positive side of life.


So, my confession. Yes, it is a little bit that I loved being for a week, taking my usual Sunday Duvet Day and making it spread all across the week...

But actually, whilst I may look like a twenty-five year old, I'm really a little old granny in disguise.


I have a secret love, and it is crochet. I crochet all over the place. I even crocheted on the tube last week - amidst a few odd looks. 

I'm crocheting a multi-coloured square afghan blanket at the moment. Not sure how big it is going to be. Not sure just yet who it'll be for. But in pretty much every corner of our tiny, pokey, little flat are millions of beautifully crocheted squares ready to be sewed together for my blanket.

Having a bit of downtime meant I could sit on my tod in the flat at two O'clock in the afternoon and crochet my little heart out in peace, (cat on lap), without my man laughing at me, baffled at how a twenty-five year old would rather stay in with a crochet hook than trance it out with my peers in some sticky-floored club, cold and wondering how I'm gonna get home at 5:00am from central London with a tenner in my pocket.

Friday I'm in love...

So many types of love... but today, I am celebrating possibly the most complex of all loves – my being-in-love with my man. 

If we go by our knowledge of period dramas (hurrah!) romantic love seemed simple – categorized primarily by the social class you fit into. You’re a farmer? Well, you cant marry the Queen, lovey.

It all centred around marriage. There were social expectations; no sex before marriage, try to marry into money, women – honour and definitely obey your husbands... But today most relationships are far more free – and thank goodness for that. The social pressure young people felt into choosing either a good marriage or a life within the Church, is luckily not the norm.

On the phone to my Gran yesterday:  ‘Guess what, it’s my five year anniversary tomorrow’.

(Hold your horses, not five years since marriage  - but since I was an infatuated teenager fresh into university, and he’d plucked up the courage to ask: ‘Will you go out with me?’...)

I certainly wasn’t prepared for my Gran’s answer: ‘Good Lord. You’re not marrying him yet are you – too young for that – I sometimes feel too young for marriage myself after making your Grandfather’s tea for over fifty years!’

I was surprised. My Gran is a bit of a traditionalist. I remember being very young, around seven, and after being told that one day I would grow up and marry a handsome man, I piped up: ‘Ooh no, I think I’d rather live with him first – I need to make sure he’s nice before I marry him.’ Neither my Gran, nor my Mum were amused. Maybe social expectations hadn’t quite died out...

With my parents going through the nastiest divorce in history, I’m not hugely impressed with the white fluffy dress. Love and marriage does not always come together as Mr Sinatra would have us believe. Love just isn’t that safe or fixed. We are not in complete control of our lives, the events which might occur in them, nor in control of the person we may become in our future. In the case of my parents; they grew individually and at the same time didn’t grow parallel - they fell apart. The love got lost somewhere in the middle .

Perhaps an even bigger bash to love than focusing on your self too much, is becoming so engrossed in your relationship, that you neglect yourself – and forget how to grow individually. How easy it is – and I hold my hands up to this one - to love one person and love your relationship, but forget to love yourself.   It’s about looking forward together, rather than looking inwardly at each other.

Real, romantic love is like crystal. It’s so very delicate and utterly beautiful and can only take so many bashes before it breaks. It’s complex; two individual souls connecting on a love vibration, but two souls who feel, speak and hear life differently.

I have done what my seven-year-old self thought logical. I am living with my handsome man before I consider marrying him.  I am now fully aware of all his annoying habits - from cutting the end off the cheese in case it’s ‘gone off’, to stealing my deodorant because he forgets to buy his own – and thank goodness, it makes me love him more for his weirdness, not less.

Being in love has taught me that love is free and beautiful, and worth every effort to keep it from breaking, but it should be lived by the moment, not assumed for the future. I have been in love for five years, and it’s easy to transform years into expectation or routine but I am determined to live my love each day by day – and keep on reminding myself how special it is.

Sunshine

Looking outside the window, it's just beautiful blue skies, and sparkly reflecting sunshine off building tops and metal roofs. It's Friday. I've got a chest infection. And I'm staying in my bed. I just think to myself; what a good think it is, that I live on the 4th floor of a block of flats, and all I can see from my windows (apart from an inch or two of the Audi garage round the corner's roof) are these blue skies. Well, it's cheered up my morning, and it's lifted my spirit.
I love sun.

I'm not one of these put-oil-on-and-frazzle-like-bacon on the beach, sun worshippers... I respect my skin too much. I suppose I'm like a little flower.

I lift my head, and all my colours shine when the sun comes out.

It's uplifting; sunlight produces Endorphins - natural brain hormones -  which make us happy. FYI: So does eating chocolate, exercise, sex and smiling...

I like it best when my room is full of sunshine, everything is beautiful. It reflects of the mirrors, shines through my crystals on my coffee table - catching hundreds of rainbows - and draws our attention upwards. 

It's rare during November that we look upwards. When it rains, we look down. When it's cold we tuck our noses in our scarfs, and concentrate on just moving quickly. But bring out the sun, and suddenly everyone comments on the beauty around us, the way the dew sparkles on the lawn, and nature is brought up close and personal in our lives.

Just for today

Paulo Coelho: “I know a lot of people who are going nowhere, very fast”.

Sometimes I want the world to just stop for a second, so I can get my footing, and exhale my breath. Life happens quickly. It changes by the day; your circumstances, but also what you know and understand. Often we don’t even notice how much we have changed before suddenly, ten years have passed.

It’s a frightening thought.

I was thinking back on my memories. Working through the random ones – pausing on those that made me happy – crying over those which made me sad. Flicking up and down through my life’s memories, testing myself to see how far I could go back. (I got to five years old, where I can recall getting a letter through the door accepting me into Primary School – hurrah!)

You see, I worry about who exactly I am right now. I believe that when I was a little person – we shall say, about eight – reflecting back, I well and truly felt I knew who I was. I liked making things, I liked Marmite pasta after school, I was bossy – I make my brother and sister play schools – I wore glasses, and I was the best reader in the class. It was simple.

When I thought to all the pictures of my past, my younger memories were my clearer ones.

As I grow older I feel I may have lost some of the ease of knowing what makes me, me. I am not just the little girl who collected flowers in my garden to make perfume – I am a whole lot more grown-up things too which I have collected along the way. As we grow older we become our reactions to the people who have left us, loved us, understood us, hurt us, tricked us and made us laugh.

A whole lot more complicated...

Appreciating our experiences, and loving how they have made us become, even though they may have hurt us deeply, is so important. It may be one of the harder things to do, but it stops us from exuding all those uncontrollable emotions like anger, jealousy and bitterness.

Perhaps think how lucky we are to have such opportunities to learn, grow and expand our minds upwards. I still love Marmite Pasta, but I love to listen now, and not just talk, I have learnt a deep empathy for people who have hurt.

It is through experiencing life; making mistakes and solving problems that we can make our spirit more beautiful and wise. The world doesn't need to stop for us to take stock of our lives, we just need to pause and give our spirit some respect for how we have got to where we are today.

The Reiki Principle:

Just for today I will give thanks for my many blessings.

Just for today I will not worry.

Just for today I will not be angry.

Just for today I will do my work honestly.

Just for today I will be kind to my neighbor and every living thing.

It's a bug's life in my office

There is nothing worse than being told that you have a cockroach (or potentially two) in your office. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a BIG animal lover – even the most commonly hated animals – like bats and rats, They’re sort of  vulnerable for being hated so much.

But I am NOT a fan of insects. Spiders give me the chills when they run – all the hairs on my arms stand up – but cockroaches give me feel-sick fear.

So I’m sat at my desk with my feet wrapped around my chair – feeling like one could crawl up my trouser leg at any given point.  

Marvellous.

I remember when my cat had fleas from frolicking about in bushes too much; it was like every inch of my home was suddenly contaminated. You feel like you’re crawling with them – I immediately bought 3 bottles of house spray – blasted everything and quickly vacated (with the de-flead cat) and ran away to my Mum’s house for a holiday.

(I’m itching, just thinking about it!)

Ignorance is bliss, right?

I didn’t even realise cockroaches were a problem in London. Being told casually by my friend that “oh, they’re probably in most restaurants in London” was certainly news to me.

Irrational fears about insects are as their name suggests – really irrational; like me changing my sheets when I was eight, all because my brother dropped a monstrous spider onto my duvet whilst trying to throw him out the window.

My phobias are pretty common in the grand scheme of things – (does that make them less irrational?):

• Claustrophobia in crowds – I can’t bear being caught up in a crowd of people – I’m quite little, and the feeling of being surrounded by people’s bodies – and ultimately their many auras – fills me with horror. I go all *panic attack*
• Spiders. These little wriggly all-shapes-all-sizes Arachnids are scarier due to their unpredictability – and the way they run. I always feel like they are literally crawling all over me. I’ve got better since I was little and the latest school craze was for boys to throw Daddy-Long-Legs spiders into girl’s unsuspecting faces. *shudder*
•  And apparently, as I have discovered today – cockroaches.

We know phobias are irrational as they make you over-react as your mind distorts reality – but fear is one of the hardest things for our minds to conquer.

A cute blog about phobias I came across called ‘Irrational Fears’ lists stories of reader’s different phobias – some freaky, some not quite so. They quote Franklin D. Roosevelt’s when he said:
 OK. I’ll stand up to my fear – I’ll face my cockroach, by unwrapping my feet from my chair and placing them firmly on the floor. It is only a little evil cockroach – a bug. Calling it a bug is far less scary...  Conjures up images of ‘A Bugs Life’ or ‘Antz’.

‘The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself’

However, I think that ‘Ignorance is bliss’ is a far better quote than Frankin D. Roosevelt’s brave statement.