Today has got off to a great start for me and it looks like it will only get better as I am spending the day with me, myself and I!

My One and Only husband has taken our Darling Son fishing, about 120 miles away, as you know, he rarely does things by half! Going out the door, he left me a photocopy of where they are going saying that ‘If we are not back, this is where we will be’! Need I be concerned? No, even if it sounded like they were heading off to the Wild West rather than a day trip to the sunny South East.

So, our Saturday started around 8 o clock this morning, which is not a great time for me. I dream of us all sleeping in and missing football, just for once, while deep inside I know that this will never happen with due to the compulsive nature of this activity in my Darling Son’s psychic! But I can dream, especially as this was the end of the first week back at school and we are now officially firing on all cylinders. We are back at full steam ahead, even if that is only the full steam of one child.

Summer time is so different to term time and these few weeks transition are always challenging. So whilst he has been embracing his new regime, I have been embracing mine albeit in the form of returning to beautiful embracing September sea swims.

September is the most perfect time for sea swimming and this week I had the longest swim with one friend, a fortieth birthday swim and breakfast with another and lastly on Friday I had a swim with all the girls that got me started in the beginning, the yummy mummies who swim after school drop at nine o’ clock every day. This week the group included the fabulous four original members that I tag along with, a friend who joined in after me and low and behold, two husbands! Then we were coincidently joined by the original of the species, the legendry mother of six who inspired the group in the first place, I believe. It was a great swim and someone remarked as we all waddled in like a line of ducks ‘it looks like we came by bus, there was so many of us!’ It must be September!

So all this effort and more this week deserved a duvet morning! The Angelus bell is ringing; I think I will give myself one more hour. What a perfect way to spend the odd September Saturday morning!

So, what are you doing today?

It never ceases to amaze me how suddenly one can topple from the pinnacle of happiness to the very depths of despair.

I ended one decade in a state of joy and carefree abandon and within a mere two hours of waking up in the next decade stood on a beach populated with striding masses walking off the excesses of Christmas wiping tears from my cheeks before they could freeze on my face and before my children could notice. Only the playful antics of our new dog could lift me momentarily from my despondency.

It’s not important to know the reason for this sudden change in my mood. What is important is that you never, never truly appreciate the people in your life until they are gone or until they drop a bombshell upon you that they may have been juggling in their hands for ages but which you never really expected they would drop and certainly not on you.

And so my New Year resolution is to take much more care of those around me, those people who matter to me, who help me, whom I may take foregranted but without whom I would be a mere shell on a seashore.

It’s New Year’s Eve. I drove home from a tea party a little after 6 p.m. It’s an annual tradition amongst the older generation of my husband’s family. It’s wonderfully Dickensian, taking place in a fine Georgian house on a fine Georgian Square in our capital city where two floors are now inhabited by businesses and the top two floors by one of the family where he lives with his wife and two small children in what, from first impressions, people might consider to be the eccentric mayhem of a socialist worker but which in reality is a mortgage-free, rather splendid existence though it’s a long way down to the basement to the washing machine and he had to survive with a chemical loo up until a couple of years ago.

But he and his wife have it looking rather funky now. Funky in the manner of a flat in Kreuzberg, the quarter of Berlin best associated with all breeds of alternative, radical and social rejects (as in those that rejected rather than being rejected). Sonja, the German wife, beckoned me upstairs with a “I haven’t seen you for ages, sit down and tell me what’s been happening with you”. I took a seat (or one of the mismatched chairs) at the distressed pine table (only this one was actually distressed and fabulous and original and probably something she found on a skip). She sat opposite me, relaxed, open, with her severe German spectacles and her sharp German eyes. I started talking. I see this woman once a year, sometimes once every two years and yet I told her all about it…my 2009.

Germans have that way about them. At least five people in the 15 minutes preceding this had asked me what I had been up to and I had trotted out the same jaded “took redundancy, stay at home mum, hope to get back to work when the recession abates” line and they had all nodded understandingly and said “ah well it’s good to spend time with the kids” and I had agreed and moved on. I mean, what’s the point in attempting to explain it all? Who among these gentle, elderly, privileged, intellectuals would be able to grasp it in the few minutes that one can devote to small-talk of this type? But Germans get to the nub of the matter and the German in me instinctively knows that they appreciate truth and sincerity. As a anglophile German once said to me “when you make the friend of a German, you’ve got a friend for life”. And it’s true.

Sonja, with her matter of fact, straight as a die manner, disarmed me, stripped me of my mask and I relayed everything to her (and simultaneously stepped outside of my body and looked down at myself and said “what are you doing?”), and she sat back in her chair and lit a cigarette and regarded me as someone whose story was genuinely interesting her and when I stopped she said “I think that’s fantastic, really fantastic” and she meant it because they do, Germans, otherwise they just wouldn’t say it. She then said something about being in control of one’s own destiny and how important that was and that one must embrace the opportunities life presents and do what feels right. I had such a nice time with her for those twenty minutes in that high-ceilinged kitchen where the sink splash-back was an ancient Dunlop tyres sign and I tripped down the stairs with renewed confidence and joined the others, smiling, effusing, embracing, sipping Lady Grey tea from a delicate china cup poured from a delicate silver teapot, and feeling great about the end of this year.

As I drove home, it started snowing heavily and my 3 year old clapped her hands with glee in the back of the car and I realised that she didn’t remember snow because she was only 8 months old when we spent a Christmas in Germany with 2 foot of snow outside our hotel for 10 days. It has stopped snowing now but I hope it freezes and I hope we have more snow tonight and tomorrow I’ll start 2010 by building a snowman for a little girl filled with the wonder of it all. Einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr!

I’ve had one of those weeks. I know everyone has bad weeks but this one was a killer. My beloved football club obsession is becoming millstone-like. I’m not sleeping. I’m not eating properly, as in I haven’t time for proper meals so I’m snacking on whatever is easy and generally unhealthy. I’m seriously neglecting my family and friends. I’m arguing with my football friends, probably because we’re all too enmeshed in the madness that is our club and when people are tired and stressed, they fight with those closest to them. Money is non-existent, we’ve got debts, we’ve got to make tough decisions, cut budgets, risk pissing off lots of people and that feelgood factor that surrounded the club when we survived relegation this season has long since been replaced by despondency and frustration.

It feels a lot like we’re clinging to a shipwreck and hoping to God the tide will turn and carry us back to dry land. The problem is that the only dry land is a very bleak desert island. There might be a coconut tree or two on it but there’s not much else; not much shelter from tropical storms, not much in the way of food and I’m wondering how you could fashion a raft out of the few bits of debris lying about.

But faced with the alternative which is being swept back out into unchartered waters with no certainty as to what might lie ahead, whether an ocean liner might appear on the horizon and save us or whether we might drown, that desert island is utopic by comparison and I’ll take it.

I attended a gospel choir Christmas concert tonight, a welcome respite from my week. I very much enjoy the occasion of Christmas – the music, the carols, the collective friendliness of people. The concert was particularly joyous, the singing and the musicians spectacular. I was moved more than once, especially when a lone pianist played and sang “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”.

Afterwards, I drove through the main street of our capital city, hoping to glean some sense of festive cheer. I was sorely disappointed. Despite a very creative Christmas tree on the central promenade made completely from various sized lighted balls that changed colour, the atmosphere was muted and bleak.

The message from the concert tonight was “Discover the beauty within”. Someone said to me recently that maybe we need to stop looking further afield and look back to what is in our own community. Instead of spending vast sums of money that we don’t have on trying to create a master race of a football team, try to cultivate local talent and make a community proud of its own rather than supporting people who turn up for the weekly match and then disappear back to where they came from. Maybe it’s time to start discovering the beauty within!

I think there’s a balance to be struck somewhere. We’ve got to learn from mistakes and live within our means and focus on what’s good and vital and cultivate those things. It’s a message that transcends football clubs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x55fCkqutjU

Hello out there! Yes, the silly season it truely upon us. I  can only imagine that we are all so un-idle  at the moment that we have no time to blog?  I can even get the good smells wafting over the air waves and hear the sound of rustling wrapping paper. There must be lots of fabulous Christmas traditions happening. What’s yours? let me know.

There’s no excuse for speeding. There really isn’t. There is nowhere that you need to be, nothing you need to do, no one that you need to see so urgently that it’s worth risking potentially taking someone’s life for it.

I have a tremendous ability to put myself in a zone where I concentrate entirely on the moment, on getting where I need to be, doing what I need to do, getting to whoever I need to get to without thinking beyond that immediacy. I was a speeder. A very out of control, very determined, very much in denial speeder. I’m not anymore.

I have a friend to thank for saving me from myself. My friend will not let me speed, persists in craning to see the speedometer if there’s any chance that I might be close to exceeding the speed limit and has become my conscience. I have to admit that this constant supervision of my driving really irritated me. But it only irritated me because I knew I was in the wrong. And, as I think I’ve alluded to here before, I hate being proven wrong.

I was on my way home from a football match a few weeks ago. I may or may not have been exceeding the speed limit. I honestly don’t know. My conscience was not in the car with me. And on a very straight, very long stretch of road a cat ran out in front of the car. I couldn’t stop. I pulled in a little bit further on, far enough so that I couldn’t actually see the carnage on the road. I was inconsolable with grief. I love cats. I have two myself. I knew there was no way that the cat could have survived. There was a chilling sense of finality to that bump under my right front wheel. As I looked back in my rear view mirror, I saw a car stop and a gentleman got out and crossed to the centre of the road and knelt down. He went back over to his car and then returned and I really don’t know what he did. Maybe the cat was still alive, maybe he brought it to a vet and it lived. Maybe he was a vet and he took it out of its misery. I hope so.

In any case, that brings me to a blog I wrote a few weeks ago about my absolute favourite book of all time “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a very beautiful and very poignant microcosm of human relationships. It pares away the bullshit and takes you to the very heart of the subject. It’s childlike in its simplicity. In the way that children tell you things as they are, before they are subjected to all of life’s influences, so too The Little Prince lays it bear before you.

My favourite piece since I was first introduced to it some 20 years ago is the piece on friendship called The Fox.

It was then that the fox appeared. “Good morning” said the fox. “Good morning” the little prince responded politely although when he turned around he saw nothing. “I am right here” the voice said, “under the apple tree.” “Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.” “I am a fox”, the fox said. “Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince, “I am so unhappy.” “I cannot play with you,” the fox said, “I am not tamed.” “Ah please excuse me,”said the little prince. But after some thought, he added: “what does that mean—’tame’?” You do not live here,” said the fox, “what is it you are looking for?” “I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean—tame?” “Men,”said the fox, “they have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?” “No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean—tame?” “It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.” “To establish ties?” “Just that,” said the fox. “to me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world. . .” “I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower. . .I think she has tamed me. . .” “It is possible,” said the fox. “On earth one sees all sorts of things.” “Oh but this is not on the earth!” said the little prince. The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious. “On another planet?” “Yes” “Are there hunters on that planet?” “No” “Ah that’s interesting! Are there chickens?” “No” “Nothing is perfect,” sighed the fox. But he came back to his idea. “My life is very monotonous,” he said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat. . .” The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. “Please—tame me!” he said. “I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.” “One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. ” Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me. . .” “What must I do, to tame you? asked the little prince. “You must be very patient,” replied the fox. First you will sit down at a little distance from me -like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…” The next day the little prince came back. “It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is ready to greet you. . . One must observe the proper rites. . .” “What is a rite?” asked the little prince. “Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour different from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.” So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near— “Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.” “It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you. . .” “Yes that is so”, said the fox. “But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince. “Yes that is so” said the fox. “Then it has done you no good at all!” “It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added: “go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.” The little prince went away, to look again at the roses. “You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made a friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

Two nights ago, I made the same journey home from our final football match of the season. It was a great night. We won. We won’t be relegated. I drove carefully. The approach to the road where I had driven over the cat is a 60kmph zone. I was driving at 50kmph. I know I was because I had been watching. I turned the corner onto that fateful road and advanced down it. Although the speed limit increased, I continued driving slowly. At almost the exact spot where I had been unable to stop weeks previously a most beautiful, large fox stepped off the pavement onto the road. He was completely at ease, unhurried, almost challenging me as he turned to look at the approaching car. I was able to stop easily and watched him saunter nonchalantly across to the far side and mount the pavement.

I do believe I’ve been tamed.

What’s so entertaining about this American tv show is how the whole Walker family function in unison, albeit, together pulling the same direction and together pulling in opposite directions. They are fixers and keep busy meddling in each others affairs. No sooner has one family member imparted some personal news to another, then the receiver of the juicy gossip has another family member on the phone and tells them, another overhears the conversation and goes directly to the source to sort out the dilemma and why hadn’t they told them in the first place. Are you keeping up?

Then to top that, each family dinner ends in familial chaos when everyone speaks their mind usually resenting the intrusion; going on to vent their emotions and then the next day they pick up the pieces with lots of heart felt drama…. It’s very entertaining.

But what about our own families? What about real life? Is it a cultural thing? Do you get involved when someone is in trouble or do you feel the compulsion to be involved, intimately and constantly? Or would you prefer to keep your distance and let them sort it out themselves?

Life teaches us to be independent, self sufficient and adult, yet all the time having to fit into some group or the other. Our place and approach to our family of origin usually determines how we negotiate every group thereafter, family, friends and work. How do you fit into yours?