Autumn, birthdays, Weymouth, and William

William recently turned six months old, and although in some ways it doesn't seem like he's been here for five minutes, in another way it feels as though he's been knocking around our lives forever.  Everybody says that having a baby changes your life, and they're right - everything is somehow different now.  Yes there's the ongoing tiredness and endless early mornings, nappy changes are becoming more-and-more frequent, and quiet moments are snatched at, at the tail-end of days.  But the house is more homey since William came along, blankets feel softer, cooking smells richer, and cuddles are warmer.  I've undergone subtle changes too; if William has had an impact on my personality so far, it's that I am a little more emotional, a lot more patient, and have a heightened enjoyment of the little things.

Talking of enjoying the little things, we took a lovely trip up the coast to Weymouth this week.  There's nothing quite like an out-of-season seaside town to put you in touch with the autumn - the Esplanade was peaceful, the cafes and restaurants quiet, the beach reserved for local dog walkers, and the pavilion (where we stopped for a good hot chocolate, and where the man behind the counter gave Schnitzel a biscuit) warm and welcoming.  It has been years - three decades actually - since I last set foot in Weymouth, but the childhood memories came flooding back as we looked across the sandy beach and enjoyed a promenade along the bright-but-breezy seafront.  I love Dorset in general, and it's a county we've found ourselves visiting with increased frequency over these last couple of years, so I'm hopeful that at some point, Weymouth may provide lifelong memories for William, as it has for me.

Moving through autumn always brings with it the seasonal reflections, but this year I feel more settled within myself, and as I prepare to climb another step on the birthday ladder, I'm feeling more together and in control than I have felt for many years.  Our home is full of love, we are financially secure, everything is relatively peaceful in my relationships, and I feel lucky and grateful.  I know my direction now, I've embraced the maturity that comes with no longer being "young", and I feel that - finally - I've found a way onto the first page of a new chapter, after a long period of rocky soul searching.  And it's this inner peace that will pave the way to a wonderful festive season - William's first Christmas - which I hope will be a joyous and memorable one.

Blogging Sunday

 I've become a convert to the joys of Sunday.  OK, I know that any day off work should be considered joyous, but I've always questioned the point of Sunday a little bit, especially compared to the exuberance of Saturday, the king of days.  But recently, I've changed my mindset, and have established a new way of doing Sunday, discovering along the way just what a wonderful day of the week it is.

The morning begins with a leisurely linger at the breakfast bar, reading the newspaper, and enjoying freshly baked breakfast pastries, along with a glass of chilled cranberry juice.  I'm making sure that I start every Sunday in this manner; it's a lovely way to wake up.

After the long wake-up, we head out into the woods for a dog walk.  Schnitzel doesn't exactly require extensive walks, but she does need some exercise, and our local woods is the perfect place to do it.  I love the woods, and I love watching the woods change through the seasons. Today it's very leafy, but in a few short weeks the Autumn will take hold, the leaves will fall, and the character of the woods will become darker and more mysterious.

Back home, and after a light lunch, we do a bit of play with William.  He's already growing up fast, it's difficult to understand where the weeks are flying by.  Sundays are the perfect day to spend some quality time together.  You can see him trying to comprehend his surroundings more, his attempts to raise his hand if you wave at him, and the way he tries to focus on the things before his eyes - be them a picture book, the TV, or the fish tank.

As the day moves ever onwards, it's time to think about dinner.  One of the things I love most about the weekends is the increased time you can devote to cooking.  Just yesterday I made a lovely loaf of granary bread, but today's specialty is a tasty roasting dish - diced potatoes, onions, chorizo, sweetcorn and feta drizzled in olive oil, sprinkled with paprika, and left to roast away for an hour.  When it comes out the oven, I throw on some soured cream, then serve up with tortilla wraps and a colourful side salad.  Delicious!

The day ends, and climbing into bed, I can look back and say that I've had a good one.  The rain rattles down outside (we can hear it too, because in the summer months we tend to leave our balcony doors open all night) but indoors all is well - William is asleep in his crib, Schnitzel is dozing on our duvet, and as peace descends, there's a golden chance to delve into a book - which for me, right now, is this beautiful edition of Death on the Nile.

Sundays may have just become my favourite day of the week - a perfect antidote against the stress of the modern world, and a day to enjoy being a family together.  I could certainly get used to this being one seventh of my life! 

Time waits for no man

If it's July then it must be Wimbledon (well, except last year!) and on my Wednesday off work, I settled down to watch the quarterfinal between Roger Federer and Hubert Hurkacz, on Center Court.  Not the festival of tennis I was hoping for, it was over as quickly as it begun, Hurkacz demolishing the Swiss superstar in three sets - including a six-love wipe-out in the third.  You have to say that on the day, Hurkacz was as brilliant and Federer was poor.

Game, set, match Hurkacz, and as the Pole soaked up the deserved applause of the Wimbledon crowd, Roger Federer left Centre Court, the cameras just catching a glimpse of him raising his hand to his eyes as he rounded the corner towards his dressing room.  If he was about to shed a tear, it's understandable - the stress and emotion put into a match at such a high level must be huge, and is amplified in singles tennis, where everything is on you to perform.

But perhaps there was another reason for Federer's emotional exit, and Centre Court felt it too.  It felt it when, at 5-0 down in the third set and serving for his life, the crowd erupted into a spontaneous standing ovation for the great player, as if they knew that they would never see him grace the turf again.  You see, even a great player like Federer is unable to halt the march of time.  It's a sad reality that we all have to face, aging, and for me the sadness of watching Fed's straight sets exit hit home not just for him, but because it made me consider my life too.  I realised that I watched Federer lift his first Wimbledon title in 2003, the year I started university - and so with an acknowledgement that he's getting old, I also realise that I'm getting old too, and that the end of the Federer era also marks an end of an era for me, as we both segue into middle age.  Change has been in the air for a while now for me, punctuated in a single moment when a midwife passed me my new baby, and I stepped very quickly into a different bracket of life.

I'll be sad to hear that Federer has retired, sad not to see him float across the Centre Court grass for years to come, and yet if he comes to that decision this summer, I certainly think it's the right one.  He is, in my opinion, the greatest single sportsman of my lifetime - not only ridiculously talented in his sport, but so respectful of the game, a great winner, a good loser, generous towards his opposition, welcoming to the fans, and without any of the petulance of some others.  Maybe that's another reason to be tinged with sadness at his inevitable decline - he's a one-of-a-kind embodiment of sportsmanship, of which we all need to see much more. 

Lovely intangibles

So we arrive, slightly embattled, at Christmas Eve, and this year it really feels like a much-needed shot of cheer.  I think in troubled times, we gain a great deal of comfort from traditions - they give us a certain surety, and stand concrete in their reliability, so you know that after a torrid year, things are going to be ok.  Christmas traditions link us to our past and the people who shaped it, bound up in the happy memories.  I always watch Carols From Kings because it reminds me of my Grandma.  I like to open a tin of shortbread on Christmas morning, because that always seemed to happen on Christmas mornings at home.  And I always watch the film Holiday Inn on Christmas Eve - that's sort of a tradition I started myself.  What I love is that people across the globe are doing similar things, keeping their traditions and versions of Christmas alive throughout the ages, defying the difficulties that the world has thrown up this year, and delighting in those often-intangible joys.

I believe it is this warmth in the human spirit, this will to seek happiness, which so rejects the coldness of winter - both physically, and metaphorically.  In another of my favourite Christmas films, Miracle on 34th Street (the original Maureen O'Hara version obviously), a desperate Fred Gailey tries to convince love interest Doris Walker that her cold, cynical outlook on the world simply won't cut it, and that the only way you can make it through this life with heart and soul intact is if you let yourself linger on the small pleasures, however irrational or foolish they may be:

"Look Doris, some day you’re going to find out that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn’t work.  And when you do, don’t overlook those lovely intangibles.  You’ll discover they’re the only things that are worthwhile."

And really, isn't this a motto for our current time?  In a year where we've had to refocus our enjoyment and look inwards for our pleasures and our passions, do those lovely intangibles not mean more than ever?  To me they do, and I think to others they do too.  You only need to look at how early the Christmas trees went up in people's homes this year to see it - 2020 was the year that life fell back on some of the old fashioned things that we've always cherished, and often taken for granted - love, family, friends, unity, and home.

From the end of a truly tumultuous year, I as writer of this blog wish everybody reading a peaceful, loving, meaningful Christmas.

October soliloquy from an autumn child

Let me photograph you in this light
In case this is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realised
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless

The dreams are strange.  They come in the night and wrest me from my peaceful slumber, they dance with me and push me around, and they take me on constant circles, revisiting the same old ground time after time after time. I'm not brilliantly well at present, I have no resilience, my confidence has been shot to absolute pieces.  Problems and issues, which a year ago I would smash out the ballpark for fun, now weigh heavily on me, and become exaggerated into mighty mountains within the confines of my mind.  At the age of 34, I seemed to be all over life.  At the age of 35, it all seems to have come crashing down from the inside.  What happened?  COVID, I suppose, changed everything.  Work pressures, home pressures, family pressures. And I think the eradication of so much in a social sense - be that watching the Gulls, meeting friends for a drink, shopping, and so on, has taken a substantial toll.

Thank goodness for English history, which has become my primary means of escapism during this whole sorry episode.  At least there's Simon Schama's inimitable A History of Britain DVDs, which I put on whenever there's a spare hour, and plenty of books to crack through.  There's a comfort that I've always found in studying our history - first of all, it reminds you of the hardships and battles that those before us had to fight, thus instantly connecting our struggles to the bigger picture; and secondly, it remains unchanged as the years draw ceaselessly on.  And I suppose that's comforting to me because I've realised that I'm getting older too, and that nothing is static, everything is always moving, evolving, becoming different.  And I'm not comfortable with that - as inevitable as it is, it scares me, and it makes me sad because I feel as though with every passing year, I'm losing my connection with my past, and with a lot of the people who are, or were, important to me.

I realised not too long ago that life is all about those people.  I don't know if I'm late arriving at that conclusion, or if I'm early for my age.  In Club 18-34 you live for yourself, your mind's busy grasping everything that life throws at you. It's a very exciting time, and I suppose that as you travel along your own road, you tend not to give too much thought to all the other drivers.  But then you realise - or at least I have - that without your fellow travellers, the road is barren and pointless.  So you make more frequent stops, you check in more with your friends, reconnect with the ones you haven't seen for ages, and try to reconcile your differences with the ones that have slipped away.  Then along comes COVID, and we're back to square one.  Nobody wants to go out anywhere because it's miserable.  You can't invite people over because it's no longer comfortable, or even permissible.  So what do you do?

The truth is that I'm tired of caring so much about things like this.  Absolutely, utterly tired of it.  I've tried so hard to make all kinds of things work this year, and I'm exhausted.  There have been some successes, of course - we finished the building project; I have a good core group of friends who are important to me; I think my marriage is in a good place.  But honestly - I'm all over the place at work; I can't deal with all the demands of family; and I miss too many people.  And I just don't have any answers to these problems at the moment.  So I'm trying to do what you're told to do; to be kind to myself, and take breaks, and go for walks, and get plenty of sleep, and so on.  Because I'm aware that I'm not firing on all cylinders right now, and I need to spend the remainder of autumn putting myself back together again. 

Autumn itself presents a dichotomy of joy and melancholy for me.  It's hands-down my favourite season, not because it brings a birthday, but because of the crisp clear mornings, the colours in the falling leaves, the early nights, the cosy house, the smell of stews, the thick jumpers, and the earthiness that speaks straight into my soul.  But these same aspects are also the ones that make me so very reflective - they always have done.  If spring and summer tune your senses to the optimism of the future, then autumn makes you look back, sometimes years, and offers the natural time to think, to remember, to grieve - and possibly also to atone and to forgive.  Autumn is the time when the bandages around my heart are liable to slip just a little bit, when ancient wounds unpick by a stitch or two, and when the questions of "why" and "what if" make their subtle creep out of the undergrowth and into the consciousness of the season.  It's not a great thing, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either - I accept that I am a product of everything that has happened in my life, and with this version of self-awareness comes the memories.  It's just an inevitable part of me, so if you see me around town in a nice thick coat, kicking through the leaves and watching my breath dissipate in the morning air, be aware that my mind is likely to be nowhere near the rest of me.

So, here we are - late October 2020, Halloween on the way, Christmas inching into view.  And thank God for Christmas, for it's my sole aim at present.  At Christmas time we will make merry, we will watch the old familiar films, we will sing the timeless festive songs, we will breathe easier, we will love deeper, we will reconnect with each other, and we will reaffirm just how wonderful life really is.  In the meantime, I'm keeping my head firmly down as a means of pure self-preservation from the battering autumn winds and the driving autumn rain.  And I guess that's enough right now - the better dreams can happen another day.   

Challenging times

I guess I fell off the blogging wagon again recently.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy keeping this page going, but I guess there’s a combination of factors that have just diverted my attention elsewhere, and like with every aspect of life, you really can only fit so much into your day.

These have been dark, stressful and frantic times for many of us, me included.  Work has hit a pace that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and now that working from home has become the new normal, it sometimes feels like there’s very little escape from the office.  As one colleague told me recently, “instead of working from home, they should just call it ‘living at work.’”  My trouble is that we seem to have hit a perfect storm this year.  The pandemic is a worry.  Work is a stress.  And having a seemingly endless building project going on at home is the proverbial final straw.  Aligned to that, my usual avenues of enjoyment and stress-relief have largely (if temporarily) been restricted – I’ve had to abandon the garden, because the scaffolding on the side and back of our house has made it so hard to get in there; live football has gone out the window, and I really miss my visits to Plainmoor; I’m less motivated to do exercise because the treadmill’s in temporary storage; and I’m not settled enough to concentrate on reading ,because things have been constantly buzzing around my head.  As for blogging?  Forget it.

I think adaptability is key right now, along with a philosophical approach to the fact that 2020 just hasn’t worked out as planned.  There were a lot of archaeological sites I wanted to visit this year.  We had a great holiday booked in Scandinavia.  I had planned to see more of my friends.  Hell, we even thought that July would see a new addition to our family.  Alas these things have not come to pass, and even dwelling on them is futile, but boy does it all just chip away at your ability to cope.

So here we are, and what I’ve learned from the last few months is how uncomfortable it feels to be overwhelmed.  I've unconsciously tripped into that hole a little bit, so now the fightback must begin – I’m going to learn how to be more resilient, how to say no, and how to make sure that we look after ourselves, whilst all the madness drifts past.  And I’m going to focus on the positives.  The scaffolding came down from our house this week, so I can begin to get going on the garden, including planning a new “tropical” corner (well, we are in the Westcountry!)  I’m going to try and have an hour dedicated to reading.  I’m going get back into doing some proper exercise.  And I’m also going to make sure that at home, we’re kind to ourselves and each other.  Because you know, in amongst this crap time, there’s still a lot to look forward to, and I’m sure that happier times are just around the corner.

"Nothing that's forced can ever be right; if it doesn't come naturally, leave it."

So said the brilliant singer-songwriter Al Stewart. It's a piece of knowledge that you acquire as you go through life, but even when you know it, it isn't always so simple to put into practice. I think I learned it, quite hard, about 15 years ago. Yet even now I find I don't always enact it in my life.

Thoughts over recent weeks have taken me to an old university friend, someone I had a complicated friendship with, but who nonetheless became someone I felt very close to, someone I cared a great deal about, a person in that rare "soul matey" category. We shared many years of friendship together, and even when post-university life took us to differing locations, we always made time for each other - either on the phone, or by travelling to each other's homes every so often. This continued for a number of years before a rather silly argument tore us apart. We've both apologised since then, but it appears that the damage - or rather the time taken - has left too big a chasm.

Over the last couple of months I've been reflecting very hard on friends and relationships, and really saw the value in keeping this one alive, if possible. So I've gone back again in humble terms I think, being completely non-judgemental and highly apologetic, holding my hands up to where I went wrong, and trying to light a pathway forwards for us to take together. I think blame lies in both camps, but even that doesn't bother me - I would really just like my friend back in my life.

And what was the response? Precious little, so far at least. Sure she replied, but it's become a stilted Whatsapp conversation with long pauses, unanswered questions and little coherence. My offer to buy her lunch and talk it through put on the back-burner. My phone call, when I overcame my nerves enough to make it, rang off.

She's her own person of course, very busy, and perfectly within her rights to not want to talk, meet, or make-up, so I write this without any judgement or commentary on how she feels (how could I know that?) whatsoever. But where does it leave me? I have to take comfort in Al's words above, that if something is so hard and abstract to achieve, you're better off just leaving it - at least for now. I'll caveat that by saying that I'm always open to reconciliation, if ever the phone rings in the future then I certainly won't have closed my heart. But it's in hope, not expectation. There’s not really anything else I can do.

I must admit, I don't think I ever had a friendship die, that I cared about. Most of the time you fall by the wayside of the casual acquaintences in your life, and that's ok, friends come in-and-out of your life for a season, they say. But this one was different; I miss her a lot, and that makes me very sad.

Advice appreciated, naturally. In the meantime, here's Al Stewart's If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It from the 1976 album, Year of the Cat:

New Year goals

I'm not entirely sure why we humans do it to ourselves really - essentially throw a dart at the calendar, and declare it New Year's Eve, as if tomorrow we'll wake up in 2020 and for some incomprehensible reason, everything will be different, new, better. And yet I'll go along with it like the rest of the world, tune into the fireworks (suitably inebriated I hope), get quietly emotional as the hour approaches, thinking not only of the past year, but of every past year shunting one more notch backwards into ever-dimming memory. Perhaps it's time to start viewing life as one long string of days, rather than apportioning them up into bite-sized sections, easily boxed-up and stacked on the high shelves of the brain's Hanger 51. Would it be easier then? And heavens Nich, you're in a jolly mood today!

Actually my mood's ok today and do you know why? Because despite my misgivings, I know that 2020 will be different. Here's the thing - I finally get it. I finally figured out a few of those questions that have been knocking around my mind for a while. They may not be answers exactly, but at least I've worked out a roadmap, which my goals this year can really help address.

In New Years past, I've become accustomed to setting reading goals, and equally accustomed to failing them. This year, I want my goals to be more beneficial, long-lasting and meaningful, so that they revolve around the cares and interests in my life.  To this end, I actually started some of my resolutions early this year. Here's what I've got:

1. Make more of an effort to appreciate others and improve my connection with them. See previous blog entries.

2. Bound up in the above, I am resolved to keep my expectations of others realistic. People are busy, forgetful, or sometimes just don't care. I aim to be understanding, but also honest and realistic about these.

3. I am resolved to dedicate more time to the interests and passions that I feel I've neglected in recent years. I aim to study more history this year, to visit more archaeological sites, to enjoy the types of visits that thrilled me so much as a student. And I want to contextualise these by reading more around the subject. I'm hoping this blog will help me in this goal, acting as a focal point to share my trips and discoveries!

4. Ok so I just criticised reading goals a bit, but it wouldn't be New Year without one. So I'm setting the goal at 25 books of a 'high brow' nature. We'll see...

So that's my goals set down in writing for 2020. What are your resolutions, and how do you intend to keep them alive this coming year?