Too Much to Say

I've just been away for a week at New Word Alive, a Christian, umm...well, some people call it a conference but that sounds too dull, some call it a convention but that sounds too sci-fi...
Anyway, whatever you call it, it was very refreshing and just what was needed.
I first went to Word Alive in 1994 when it was part of Spring Harvest (I only gathered on the way there that it was no longer part of Spring Harvest. To do with some fairly significant differences of opinion that I don't think I have fully grasped yet so will not try to explain.) but I hadn't been since 2004, just before getting married. This year I went again without Husbink and without many people I knew in the group as two of the stalwarts were busy at home with their very new and gorgeous little girl.
So anyway, there is plenty to be digested and spat out (hmm, I eant that in a positive way, perhaps not the best choice of phrase!) over the next few days and weeks but for now I will tell you a very silly thing from the week...
I went to stay at my lovely friend's house on Sunday night to make the long journey on Monday a little less long. Her best friend who I know reasonably well by now was also there. Anyway.
Monday morning, we were all sitting on my friend's bed having cups of tea when she declared she had a present for me.
Knowing how lousy I've felt over the past six months or so, when a certain item came into her work place with the book people, she felt compelled to buy it for me.
It's cuddly. It's a hand puppet. It's a goat. It sings. In a bizarre voice. The Lonely Goatherd. Sadly, only one verse!
So much fun. Husbink, clearly, hates it. Well, actually, I don't think he hates it quite as much as the bravado shows. Or so I will keep telling myself.
Should you wish to witness it, YouTube has more than one clip showing it but you can see one here.
It is very good to have very silly friends :)
More of the serious stuff soon.

It comes, it goes...

So for a bit there I was back in the blogging zone...it seems to have gone a little awol of late.
I have half written a post but I can't quite finish it...which actually is relevant to what the post is about...keeping secrets. So you see, the post is quite hard to write!
Anyway, I'm ticking along. I'm off to Spring Harvest next week. I'm looking forward to it but I'm also a little nervous, I always am for some reason, many reasons I expect.
We had a nice weekend last weekend with Husbink's parents. It was VERY relaxed. So relaxed as to be lots of sleeping and not very much else.
Husbink is on nights again tonight and I am off ot home group. I would rather be sleeping but I'm sure it'll be good for me.
Anyhoo, just to check in really. :)

Proud

There are times when you simply have to be proud to be human, proud to belong to the people that you do. One such time for me was last night watching Comic Relief.
I get a lot of whiners at work. People who complain about everything, especially money. Last week seemed to be full of them. They only see the bad and they are so unbelievably selfish as well. Our shop is not cheap, people who shop with us are pretty well off, not just in the grand global scheme of things but in the UK scheme of things too. And yet they whine and whine and whine. So I start to think the worst of people.
Then you see that Comic Relief raised a record breaking amount of money. £57million on the night, up to £59million now. People aren't all bad. People are prepared to reach into their pockets to help other people. This was a good thing to be reminded of!
The other thing that I really enjoyed about it was the whole celebrities prepared to make prats of themselves thing, like teachers at the end of term or leaders on the last night of a holiday club... It somehow makes you feel part of something, which is also a very good thing. And something, as I think I've mentioned before that is seriously lacking in our communities these days. I feel more part of a radio show audience than I do part of my street. If that makes sense.
Anyway, all round, it was an uplifting thing. An uplift I need to take with me over the next few days.

Why does it make a difference?

I was coming to post about something else but an email I've found on the way has changed the topic!
So.
This email was from a friend and it was a forward from a friend of theirs regarding blood/bone marrow donation as a general need and specifically for their daughter (the friend of a friend's daughter. Keeping up?!) I am not a blood donor because I can't be - I had two blood transfusions (following my two jaw operations) in the "bad" window when bloods were not properly screened and there was BSE and so on. So I can't donate blood now or ever. That's a slight tangent.
With this email was a flyer highlighting the family's campaign. I was thinking along the lines of "oh, that's sad, poor them, hope it works out" before opening the flyer. Then I opened it and the girl affected is just gorgeous. About eight years old, beautiful smile, really bright looking, her hair in cute bunches and so on. So now the story is devastating, desperately sad, wish I could donate (but see above, I can't - though maybe bone marrow? I don't know.)
Why does the fact that she is cute make any difference at all? Obviously there have been studies into things like maternal instincts and that cuter children (bigger eyes, whatever it is) do bring out more of the natural desire to protect but still...
I can't ever know if the reaction would have been the same on opening the flyer - maybe it was just having a face to the problem that was the trigger and how she looked didn't really have anything to do with it but I think we've probably seen this on bigger scales anyway to know that it isn't just me and that the story and just a face does not produce the same interest as a story and a pretty face. Thoughts?

Being Me

A bit of a break from the last post for something more lighthearted!

On Friday, Husbink got home from the night shift and wasn't completely exhausted. It was a beautiful day so I suggested he didn't sleep and we went out somewhere. We went to an RSPB reserve on wetlands east of Goole. It was very beautiful. There were lots of birds. (I love wigeons, they are so cute - pictures another time). We also saw stoats. Or weasels. We aren't quite sure which but they performed very well. (I quick Google search confirms our opinion that they probably were stoats. The fact that a few of the same images came up for stoats and weasels though makes me not completely confident...) And we saw rats. But they were out in the country so they were cute too! (Actually, they were quite interesting as my immediate reaction to them was "gosh, I've never seen an unstressed rat before!" they were just chilled, nibbling food, sunbathing...)
Then we Ikea'd (I think it is a verb, no?) and acquired new furniture so Saturday was spent rearranging the house. And buying lots of seeds so that I can grow patio vegetables (potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, peppers and another go at spring onions but I'm not holding my breath there.)
We played poker on Saturday night with friends in Leeds.
Sunday was chilled other than a strenuous gym session and a challenging sermon in the evening. I had some pain so I was pretty grumpy and a bit wiped out. I still have some pain today so I'm still a bit wiped out. Though that is partly due to the personal training session too.

ANYWAY. That was all preamble to the point really. The point was, that I had a really good weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed all the things we did but I also realised that I've been having a bit of a tendency to behave how I think other people are expecting me to behave at the moment. With our new cell group or the knitter natter group or whatever, I've been taking the lead from the people already there rather than just being myself. If they don't like me when I'm being me, well, at least they know what's not to like!
Durrr.....

A personal debate in public

I thought I'd expand one of the paragraphs in the previous post a bit since I've received a few offline comments about it and writing things down helps order thoughts and people's opinions are very important in such things too. Opinions? Perhaps not the right word - people's wisdom is better I think.

So.

1. I think it is important (and in many instances explicitly scriptural) for Christians to meet together because...Fellowship is good. Spending time with people on the same journey, though at many different points, is a seriously necessary thing to do. Some of that time can be formal (corporate worship, bible studies etc) but some (most?) needs to be relational. It needs to be about getting to know people and having genuine relationships with them that lead to accountability, honesty, true support...
2. People need to worship together. Le Welsh will know who I'm talking of when I mention a chap who once said "sometimes it takes me a full half hour after I wake up in the morning before I start truly worshipping God" (or something along those lines). Well, sometimes it takes me the whole day. And the next day. And the next. If I did not have times of corporate worship giving me a good kick up the backside (yes, sometimes they can give a bad kick up the backside too) I might quickly lose all ability to worship God. Except perhaps those glorious moments of blue skies/trees/mountains/birdsong/rivers...I think and hope that I would always feel drawn to my creator and saviour in those contexts.
3. We need to learn. Yes, there is an abundance of Christian material (not least the bible!) out there from which we can gain knowledge and understanding of God in private but I do not think we can take away what comes from learning together, discussing with others, hearing directly from people wiser than ourselves. We need to come together to be taught. On our own we can pick and choose too much and start creating the God we want to exist rather than continuing to be created by the God that does exist.
4. Communion. I think perhaps in contemporary times this is not as obvious as it would have been thirty or forty years ago. Because we are in a major backlash against tradition and formality and ritual (some of which is good) we may have lost sight of the fact that communion is scriptural - it is just some of the trappings of it that perhaps are not. Communion can certainly be part of a meal with friends. It can certainly be taken out of "the church" but it does require Christians together to do it.

Next come the things that I think are vital to our Christian lives but don't necessarily have to be done together.

1. Love. Kind of like point one above but not so much about the growing/discipling fellowship above, more about the outward looking, how we treat the world aspect. It is impossible to sustain that love with God and how we keep ourselves "fuelled" or "topped up" or "on track" with God may indeed bring us back to point one above.
2. Justice/Social Action/Call it what you may. An offshoot of love but a more active one. We're all different. For some this will be a serious money challenge, for others a serious prayer challenge, for others a serious get off your backside and be my hands challenge.
3. Stewardship. More of the same in a way. Taking good care of what we have in the widest possible context. Environmental issues are utterly mainstream now but they are utterly Christian too.

So.
I know there are many shapes of church now. There are traditional (in the broadest sense - to encompass all that meet in a building on a Sunday morning and have something more or less akin to the hymn sandwich style of my childhood) churches. There are mainstream non-traditional (like our local Vineyard that meet not on a Sunday and structure things differently but are part of a fairly well known, fairly widespread organisation). There are new style house churches. There are churches that meet in pubs, clubs, shoe shops (that is possibly the best of the ones I've read about). There are groups of friends that meet up to encourage their faith.
The thing is, with any of these "new" styles of church (by coincidence, I've just taken a break from writing and popped over to Simon's blog which contains thoughts on newness.) when they become successful or popular, they are going to find that they need a bigger building or a purpose built building or that in fact Sundays really are the most convenient time to meet... They are going to find that they do and say the same thing every week, creating liturgy all over again. They may find that they go on loving and acting in the world in a more upfront out there sort of way than their predecessors but they are going to start looking awfully similar.
Because of that, I have always felt it better to try to change the churches that already exist and help people (myself at the top of the list of people to help) change their habits, change what they desire from church, change their outlook, rather than dash off and create a new church from scratch that is going to hit all the same problems in a year, five years, ten years, twenty years. As someone put it recently about the church I'm currently affiliated with "They were all young twenty years ago and doing amazing things. Now they're all writing books about the things they did then." The church is relatively new despite being in one of the oldest buildings in an old city. They've gone from big ideals and newness to big ideals and familiarity. This is not a criticism, it is what happens. But I'm bored of it. Is this just my problem? Do I need to face a time of discipline to get through it and come out the other side? Do I need to fight along the way and use my dissatisfaction to create change? Do I need to depart all together and try one of these new fangled systems of church?
I've just deleted a whole other paragraph because I think that is enough thoughts for one day. I could go on for a long while with related thoughts and ideas but I'll stop here for now. I would love to hear what you have to say, by comment, by email, by phone, face to face... When I've thought some more (and maybe had some feedback), I'll perhaps post round two! In the mean time, I'm going to do something that I've been considering for a while and email Traidcraft to ask about fairtrade wool...

Truthfulness

Truthfully, I enjoy my job about two thirds of the time. The other third tends to be pretty frustrating, irritating and silly. In the non-good sense. Two-thirds enjoyment isn't bad I think.
Truthfully, however much I might enjoy it at times, it is not enough. Over Christmas, it was enough. I love meeting that many people and doing things to help them - even if it is helping them part with cash that perhaps some of them should not part with. Hmm.
Truthfully, I love tutoring. My students are fab. They make me laugh but they are also learning which is so exciting and encouraging. I was fearful for one of them quite recently. I really didn't think she was going to improve but now we are getting somewhere and I hope she will get the grade she needs to do the almost entirely non-maths course she wants to do next year.
Truthfully, this city is ok. It is very beautiful. There are some fun things to do. People are superficially friendly.
Truthfully, we do not have any proper friends here. A few of my colleagues are heading that way - they are lovely people, they just aren't quite proper friends yet.
Truthfully, I'm sick of churches. I wondered the other day if I was having a crisis of faith but I realised I'm not. It is simply a crisis of church. This is surprising to me. I have always been very pro-church. A lot of people are unsure whether church is vital to faith. I have always said yes, yes, yes! But now, I'm sick of churches. I know there are 'alternative' churches out there but they have yet to fill me with joy either. This is truthful, but perhaps not the full story, being such a small space.
Truthfully, I'd rather not be here. I would still rather be on the other side of the world. I'm sorry. I've tried. It has been a year. More than. I'd really like to be able to say "that was nice but it is over, this is now, this is good" but I can't. I'd still much rather be there. That doesn't mean it would be the right thing or indeed that we shall ever live there again. It certainly won't be the case for another six and a half years.
Truthfully, there are people I miss all over the world now. There is never going to be a place to live where I don't miss someone. And that's not a bad thing, actually.
Truthfully, I'm sick of my body. (skip this if you don't want to know...) Bleeding all the time (or what feels like all the time, there are very little gaps) is depressing. It is also tiring. It also requires me to eat more red meat than normal. And more fruit (which is a little less obvious). Cysts are no fun either. They at least don't happen quite so much of the time but they really hurt when they do. And then when they burst...that's really no fun.
Truthfully, I don't know what I'm waiting for. I've been playing at waiting for so long - waiting for Husbink to finish uni, waiting to be settled into married life, waiting for a good time, waiting for some stability. I thought I was waiting for babies now but see above, I can't pretend to be waiting for babies just at the moment. So what am I waiting for? And when I stop waiting, what is it I'm actually going to be doing? The waiting takes the ideas away and I have to stop it.
Truthfully, most of the time, I'm ok. I'm alright. I'm quite happy really. But the health stuff takes it out of me which when combined with the church stuff and the waiting stuff make it hard to pull myself together at times.
Truthfully, at moments like the end of the last paragraph, I realise how very British I am. I do believe, in one way or another, in the stiff upper lip. Pip pip!

A Celebration

(There are many things to post about just now but this outranks them all. By a long, long way.)

After a bit of a lie in, I got up this morning and saw that I had just missed a call from a good friend, my phone being on silent. I'd been meaning to ring her for quite some time and so initially was very pleased. However, in the few minutes it took me to ring her back I had realised a more significant reason for a Saturday morning phone call and was not surprised when she answered sounding a little teary.

A wonderful, wonderful lady who many of you will either know personally, have met at our wedding or at least heard a lot about over the last eight years, died peacefully in her sleep this morning. She was 98. She has wanted to die ever since I've known her, she couldn't understand why the Lord wouldn't take her yet! At the same time she revelled in all the people she knew, in all the marriages and births that she witnessed, these last few years a number of small people have kept her going very well. All we ever wished really was that when the time came it would be painless and peaceful. It was, as we understand. We were a little saddened at Christmas when she moved into a home as that was something she had always wanted to avoid but all reports are that she enjoyed it and kept very lively and chatty right until Thursday this week. On Friday, she was a little sleepy.

I have tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat while I write this but I know that above all, we should celebrate today the wonderful life that has passed.

A little bit of brainstorming with Husbink and Mrs SD has led to the following options for the day...
A visit to Tiger Tiger - when it opened in Leeds, she was there like a shot, enjoying sitting at the bar chatting up the barmen. The best bit was, we couldn't go at the time! It was an over 25s bar so she at 93 (or so) could enjoy it while we at 23 techinically could not!
A lot of shouting of "Come on Tim!" - she loved Wimbledon and especially our Mr Henman. We can't force a day of tennis so unseasonally so perhaps just settling for the supporting would do!
Displaying photos - her mantle and window sills were covered with wedding and baby pictures. Many of us were honoured to have our turn in pride of place after our weddings.
Bake cakes - she was very good at this, my favourite always being the lemon cake.
Eat pizza and donuts - she did like to see us well fed.

But by far and away the thing that will always remind us of her most I think will be the glasses of bucks fizz that we had in her living room to celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Easter...or any other special occasion. Raise a glass, cheers Hilda!

What constitutes "full time"?

(It was, by the way, a very good adventure. Husbink particularly took some amazing pictures of lochs with fog and wisps of cloud...I shall do them justice at another date...but for now...)
I believe in part time work, quite strenously! As well you know (if you know me), this is nothing to do with being lazy, it is to do with being healthy and happy and seeing Husbink and looking after him and all that sort of thing.
However.
Over the past few weeks, I've been picking up more and more work. It seems that rather a few students got their GCSE mock results over the past month and there has been panic in the ranks and a need for tuition has arisen! So I refuse some and accept some. I now have five hours of tutorials a week, plus all the travelling that they bring. I might be picking up another student next week too but all seems to have gone quiet on that front so I am probably not.
Anyway. I still technically only work 25 hours a week, plus the travel. That makes 30 hours at the absolute maximum. Most full time work is at least 37 hours a week but I am doing enough - more than enough actually, I feel my time being stolen. The house is suffering a little. A couple of my outside interests are suffering. I am quite content though and with the nature of my students, I will lose them all in a few months time once exams are over and can then start again deciding how many to take on and where to "put" them.
But my point is, I keep thinking "I'm working full time now" - which I'm not, officially, but to me I am.
I know lots of you work proper full time or more than full time...is it because you love your jobs? Or that we value our time differently? Or that I'm just quite lucky to be able to be so picky? Or a little of all of the above?
In other news, I have new glasses. Because my eye sight has improved. I'm less short sighted all of a sudden and so reading and writing and knitting (three major uses of my time) were becoming very painful.
My glasses are mostly black and a little bit orange. Not what I was expecting but I rather loved them so...(oh, and they are a lot more subtle than that sounds but I did enjoy telling Husbink over the phone that they were BLACK and ORANGE. He was afraid...)

Time for An Adventure

Having said there has been a lack of adventuring, at last we are off again!
A week of holiday, a week of new places, photographs, walks, food, pubs...hurrah!
This past week has been long and difficult and no fun in many places. So I've made my own fun from time to time.
I have used (at points slightly unnecessarily) my bright green, slightly too large, covered in daisies umbrella. When I received it as a Christmas present I was a little alarmed because of its size but now I love it because it makes me smile.
I have laughed a lot with Husbink. Hurrah for Husbinks!
Just at the moment though I'm stuck on the sofa because my body has said enough! I really rather do need this holiday...
Back to Sense & Sensibility...

Being Lazy

I have taken a long, long time to learn how to be lazy. That's lazy in a good way. Clearly.
Yesterday, I think I may have finally managed it.
We woke up. I made tea. We snoozed, listening to Adam and Joe on Radio 6. We got up to make breakfast...and took it back to bed. Listened to more Adam and Joe and when they finished, switched over to not-Jonathon Ross on Radio 2. Husbink read Empire. I read The Economist.
We eventually got up around 1pm and had some lunch. We played Mario Kart.
Around 3pm we went to the gym. We left the gym sometime after 5pm.
We came home and pootled about before making a fish laksa for dinner. We played more Mario Kart, watched an episode of Life on Mars. I went to bed. Husbink watched Match of the Day.
For me, the gym bit was hugely necessary otherwise I'd have felt like I'd wasted the day too much. Also, I'm not good at not leaving the house. If I stay inside too long, I do go a little loopy. (Various days on holiday when we've tried this have ended in tears. Actual tears.)
It was a good day. But today, I get to be busy again, rushing hither and thither and that's much more what I'm made for!

Not Much Adventuring Going On...

Both in the blogging world and the real world.
It seems we have settled down to 'normal' life again. Which, frankly, is a shame. I know it was inevitable but that doesn't make it good.
Not to say that life in the Used-to-be-Adventuring household is bad; it isn't. Things are ticking along pretty well at the minute. Husbink loves his work. I am getting to the point where the work is good. It has taken a little while to get the balance right but I think I'm pretty much there.
We are starting to meet people and make friends in our new city. We are settled in our house. We have decided on a church (this was not like our deciding on a church in NZ where it was so utterly obvious and right and so on. This was deciding on a church in a "there's very little to pick between so let's just choose" way). We have joined a gym. Much as I always think I shouldn't like the gym and that there should be other (cheaper, better) ways of exercising, the gym really does work best for me. Partly because I can go on my own (and prefer going on my own) so it is something I can do when Husbink works (or sleeps, like this morning when I will go to the gym while he recovers from the night shift.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that it does not lead to anything very much to blog about. I know I used to blog about normal life as much, if not more, than about adventuring but it seems I needed the adventures to make normal life also worthy of note. This is not to say that I haven't had hundreds and thousands of posts (okay, that might be going a little far...) going round my head over the past few months but all of them, for a range of reasons, have been censored before meeting the page.
So that's my quietness dealt with but what now? I am in a state of some change which is always the kind of time for blogging but it is very internal change. Things are now not changing for a while, possibly a really long while, and the internal change is learning to live with that. Does this make for interesting blogging? Or perhaps, if not interesting blogging, motivated blogging?! We shall have to wait and see I guess!
'Til then...

Nice t' see ya...

Hello...
It's been a strange wee while and I don't think I'm out of it yet.
We have had a few adventures which is nice, makes us think we haven't completely lost control of our lives. We took a little jaunt on the chunnel as it used to be called and had a lovely few chocolate filled days in Bruges with all the in laws (all being three of them, it wasn't a vast outing remember!). We've also managed to have a few days out from here, one amazingly beautiful walk on a warm Autumn Sunday afternoon, one slightly soggy, very muddy beautiful in places bike ride. (As well as fighting with mud quite spectacularly (at one point I was stopping every 60-70m to clean out my brakes because my wheels would not turn anymore...) we also changed route a couple of times to steer clear of the phesant hunters. We did not want our squeals of alarm at the mud to be mistaken for bird cries... Ooh, I also had quite an impressively complicated tumble at one point (really not sure what happened) and so now have impressively scraped and bruised knees so that I feel like a child.)
Other than that...well, I'm still not wildly happy about the direction life is going (or rather not going at the moment). Husbink's job is fab and I'm very happy for him. One of my jobs is fab. The other...is not turning out quite as I'd hoped. It may still be ok. I'm giving it time...
We were going to get a dog; we aren't now. We are looking for and utterly failing to find a church. We are looking for and utterly failing to find friends. We are making a mad dash tomorrow night to visit someone in hospital that we very, very much hope is not going to be in as serious a position post-hospital as they could be. I have another blood test a week today. I'm not looking forward to that as they bashed my arm up so much last time (yes, I know everyone can have a bad day so I'm not blaming them but it did hurt. For days.).
What a whinge.
Sorry.
I will, I'm sure, snap out of it soon. It's just taking longer to snap than I'd like!

I need a list

It's a really long time since I've done any serious list writing and I feel that my mood requires one of me now...so, in a fairly arbitrary way, here's a list of my favourite things to bake...

1. Chocolate Fudge Cake (the family recipe, which, to the uninitiated is not the kind of chocolate fudge cake you get in restaurants but more a kind of brownie. Gooey in the middle, crisp on top...Armadillos!)
2. Flapjack (to my own recipe)
3. Ginger crunch (so easy, so sickly, so good)
4. Apple cookies (or apple cake or apple anything cos Husbink loves them and I feel like a good wifeling)
5.Black and White Muffins (a little bit of effort goes a long, long way. With all that melted chocolate goodness, how could you fail?)
6. Albert Square (we have no idea where the name comes from but that is what the book calls it...basically a currant and lemon cake with a little bit of icing...another of Husbink's favourites)
7. Chocolate Cookies (the easiest thing in the world to bake yet they turn out amazingly. The first time I gave them to a group of friends they would not believe they weren't bought.)
8. Bread (I'm just getting into this - I've got a bread machine that turns out good loaves of a sandwich-shaped nature but I'm beginning to experiment with hand made rolls and other goodies. Mostly what I love is the whole section where you think it is going to go horribly wrong while waiting for the yeast to do its thing...and then miraculously it does and you come out with light, risen, yummy goodness.)
9. Spinach and Feta Muffins (they're savoury! They must be healthy!)
10. Anything (well, almost...) new...

Recipes on request :)

Slightly Disappointing

I had a wonderful day on Sunday. Well, a wonderful afternoon and evening. The morning was sadly a bit of a let down but I'll not go into that now (another post is brewing I'm sure). So we toddled across to Leeds on Sunday afternoon and while Husbink went to the rugby with Mr SD and a few other friends, Mrs SD and I pootled into Headingly (much faster than I expected from her "I can only go slow now" protestations!) for a coffee and a big old chat. It was marvellous. I love Mrs SD. Then we met up with the rugby goers back at the house of two of them and had a good chatter there too. And then we went to a rather famous (amongst us, anyway) curry house and met up with four more of the old group (and missed those that were missing) and had a lovely, lovely time. I was really in need of people and I got them! It was great to talk and laugh and be silly and talk and eat and... A really lovely evening. We all then went our separate ways (Husbink and I getting home in time to watch Bring Back Star Wars...it was very silly but much, much fun...) So what was the disappointment? Well, it was the morning after. I've eaten at that curry house a huge number of times. We've pined for it while at a distance. This curry house is so well loved to us and our friends that when my mum rang during the meal and I told her where we were she said "oooh, say hello from me!" not to the people but to the building! Right... Anyway, I've never felt ill effect from a meal there (other than self inflicted overstuffedness) until Monday morning. Don't worry, I was not ill, it was in no respect food poisoning or anything severe like that, I just wasn't right. Like you get sometimes after partaking in lesser curry meals. Husbink and I have a twenty-four hour rule that we apply to curries to class whether they were good or not. (Note that this is very different to my twenty-four hour rule for the purchase of shoes, bags, coats...where the accessory rule requires that I am still thinking about the possible purchase twenty-four hours after leaving the shop and thus clearly require the item and must return for it, in the case of a curry, the twenty-four hours should be marked by the meal not in the least playing on my mind!) For the first time ever, this curry house failed the twenty-four hour rule. Which is probably just a reminder that you should never look back.

Growing Up

Over the last few months with one wedding and another and various large social events, I've run into quite a few people that I haven't seen for years and years. And it has been lovely.
I realised the other day that I kept dreading bumping into people from school or whenever because of one ex-friend (and I don't know why they are an ex-friend. Really. No idea. They just stopped talking to me. I did something. I don't know what...very, very weird!). Whenever I run into him it is deeply uncomfortable. He just doesn't seem to be letting go (of this mystery unknown thing. And there is a thing because other people know what it is and won't tell me. Anyway.)
So I'd been dreading running into various people. The kind of people who were friends of friends at school. Sometimes we got on. Sometimes we didn't so much. It was always fine-ish though. You know?
I'd tarred them all with this same brush, I assumed that they all harboured some secret grudge against me that I was never to know of but was to spend every wedding and big reunion regretting despite my lack of knowledge as Husbink and I sat in the corner ignored by all and sundry. Me? Paranoid?!
Not so. It turns out that most of us have grown up! That it was lovely to run into people, find out what they'd been doing, what they are doing, what twists life has taken for them...
It was just reassuring to discover that fundamentally, most people are rather nice when it comes down to it.

Harrowed

The past two evenings, we have watched two films, one at home one at the cinema.
At home on Monday night we got round to watching The Last King of Scotland. Excellently done, very engrossing and very distressing (though perhaps not really as distressing as Hotel Rwanda because it was much more focussed on the effect on one man, not on the country as a whole). I didn't watch about ten minutes of it - I looked away briefly and Husbink decided to hide my eyes for a long time which was pretty alarming. I don't tend to look away from gruesome things in films (perhaps just not look too closely) but I do trust Husbink if he concludes I'd much rather not see.
Anyway, at the end of the film it took us a good forty minutes or so to calm down enough to go to bed and well, it wasn't the best sleep I've ever had.
Then last night we went to see The Dark Knight. I must confess I was not in the mood - for a film or the cinema at all and certainly not for this film. I vaguely suggested we went to see the third Mummy film instead but knew Husbink had been waiting for ages to see this film so...
It was good - in the sense that it was a well made, well done, good film. Heath Ledger was very impressive (though mainly I have to say when you compare various of his roles - this is the same person who played the near silent cowboy of Brokeback Mountain and the same person who played such an "easy" character in A Knight's Tale...that is what makes this such a good performance for me). Christian Bale was good. Michal Caine was good. Morgan Freeman was good. They were all good. But I found it disturbing and disgusting. Not disturbing and disgusting in that what I saw disturbed and disgusted me but I wonder why someone thought they'd make that film? It is dark, dark, dark.
Various people I know read a lot of Iain M Banks and Iain Banks books. I enjoy several of his lighter hearted books but some are just too dark. One in particular I remember finishing and thinking "why did he do that? why did he have to turn out all the lights?" because you are left with absolutely no hope. I said to my brother "why didn't he just let this one thing be different?" and he responded, "because then you could have hope".
The Dark Knight didn't wipe out hope, in fact Batman seems to really believe in hope like I do. The overall message of this film is not the dark despair that a lack of hope brings, that is not the problem here. I simply found it overwhelming that someone thought that this was ok as entertainment - the implied grossness being the least of the problems in many ways.
I dunno. As I say, I didn't want to go. I wasn't in a good mood. I'd already been hounded by The Last King of Scotland the night before. It is a good film. Husbink enjoyed it. Chances are, I'll watch it again sometime. I certainly wouldn't advise you against seeing it. But why would you make it?

The Dangers of the Telly...

When we moved into our house, we couldn't get much reception on our telly. Not with the roof aerial, not with the little set top aerial. We couldn't get anything on the digi box.
And this was fine. Not a problem. We could watch DVDs, we could play with the Wii, it really wasn't a problem.
Then at the weekend, my parents came to stay. My dad fiddled and fiddled and tweeked and now we have all five channels. Which means we have the Olympics. And that we had the Olympics in time for the British "gold rush" over the weekend.
So now what happens? We come down in the morning, we switch the TV on and it stays on. All day. Pretty much. We do other things (Husbink goes to work sometimes!) but the TV just stays clicking away, telling us all kinds of things that we really need to know. Really.
I know that the all-day element will stop with the end of the Olympics but, well, hmm, what a time waster!

I Miss You

One of the least fun things about all this moving is all the people you have to keep leaving.
One of the very best things about this move is that we are now in fairly easy reach of lots of lovely people - doctor/woman, snoo, associated husbands (hmm, I think Husbink should start a sports team or a quiz team or a support group or anything really called "associated husbands") and several more besides. But they are still a drive away or a train away or something other than a very quick pop.
It has helped spectacularly with the settling in to see doctor/woman and mr me on Saturday (they got to watch me do some un-flat-packing, lucky them) and to have an evening with Snoo and the Hub on Monday (despite the failure of the Wii to provide entertainment!). Not to mention that the ever wonderful Mr and Mrs SD came to help us move in (and brought us a spare fridge, as you do). But I want to see them more! I want to share car journeys to and from work with Mrs SD like we used to. I want to bump into the Hub on the crescent as we go to work in the mornings or come home in the evenings. I want to know that d/w is just down the road (even if, actually, I've probably spoken to her more in the past few months than we ever used to manage then!). No one lives where they used to anymore (if that makes any sense), that era has finished but...
I don't mean to be a big whinger. I've already been round to someone's house in this new city, a very kind and friendly older couple who took care of me on Sunday when I explored a strange new church (it was very different for me, I'm unlikely to settle there but it was a very refreshing change) and I know that I will find more people here. I know I'll meet them and they will be fabulous...I just don't want to have to leave any more people!
All the people in the Hutt that we've left behind, the people we've now left in Carlisle (admittedly with a couple of them it is just the case that we got in first, another few months and they'd've left us), all the people scattered across the UK...would you all like to come and live down the round from me again please? Thank you very much
xxx

Entirely Impossible...

...but we did it!
We found out on Friday that we could move into our new house on Tuesday. We had to be out of our old house on Saturday morning so had a brief spell back at the in-laws (which included MiL's birthday, good timing! And good time). Then Tuesday morning we set off with a full van, a fairly full car and here we are in another new city. In a house full of boxes (thank goodness there is a sofa to sit on...there isn't anything else to sit on!) Husbink had to start work this morning (at 7.15am...which isn't too rude in the grand scheme of things but seems very rude for a first day). I'm not sure it is going well which is a little concerning but I think it is only not going well in an induction-days-are-soul-destroyers kind of way.
I have shifted boxes as much as possible. Washed up a lot of newsprint covered items. Pondered how we are going to fit all our kitchen stuff (and food) into the kitchen. It is a very good kitchen for surface space but not so much for cupboards...hmm.
Then I went to Asda. Turns out that Asda here is in a HUGE shopping complex which was really scary and confusing when the whole place is still scary and confusing. And then of course I had the whole "there's nothing to make you homesick like a supermarket" moment though I don't really know where I'm homesick for. Still, I managed to not actually cry...
And just now, I'm taking a little break and so in the sunshine. The most incredible rain is falling. I've actually had to check a couple of times to make sure it isn't properly flooding the yard, cos it is almost a pond already...