Dry Your Eyes.....

We have arrived at the end of a year which has been, for many of us, a year of pain and loss, a year of turmoil and grief, a year of recognition and acceptance. It is hard to look life in the eye and say, 'Go on then, I DARE you' and even harder to deal with the challenges that are thrown back at you if do. There is a catchphrase 'be careful what you wish for' and dealing with the challenges does not always bring the outcome you expected.

This year, I have dealt with some of those challenges. The 'L'Oreal' incident in October severley rocked my boat and it took some time before I was able to get the ship steady again (pun absolutely intended). However, this Christmas was just about THE best that I can remember. Neil and I were happy with each other and he was funny and sociable with company, only having one or two cringeworthy moments. He seems to have come to a place where he can have a sensible attitude to alcohol, where it no longers dicates and overpowers him. Our new-found sobriety has allowed us the courage to examine the core of our relationship and found it to be solid as a rock. However, some of the outer layers were beginning to look a bit frayed and these have been renewed or replaced.

We have discovered the shadowy underworld of Low/No..... alcoholic drinks with the alcohol removed or severly restricted and that has been a lot of fun, although we are apalled at the lack of choice in both supermarkets and pubs. Our local brewery, Harveys, does a couple of cracking low alcohol ales which, so far, we have only been able to get direct from the brewery shop. We also get weird and vaguely pitying looks when we ask the store/pub staff if they sell low/no. I feel a letter to the paper coming on......

Having spent a ghastly amount of 2006 crying from rage and grief, from despair and loneliness and, worst of all, from self-pity (what a loathsome creature that is), it was wonderful to spend a lot of Christmas Day crying from laughter, and from joy, as I open my eyes and see clearly the love for me in all its different forms.

I am my Father's daughter in this repect, being overwhelmed by tears of emotion, and I have often found myself unable to speak/sing/read out loud, when the emotions get too powerful. I remember seeing Free Willy with Lizzy, when we sat in the front row and blubbed from the opening scenes to the credits at the end. I also recall a Christmas at Julia's when we gathered round for a group reading of A Christmas Carol, all had to read out loud a section of the book. Julia had to finish off my reading as I disolved into a liquid mess. And I will never forget the first full rehearsal in Bournemouth of Britten's War Requiem, where the unbearable pain and raw emotion of the piece had me sobbing uncontrollably during the break, and there were many times during the performance when I was too choked-up to sing.

Neil Diamond, a singer with a voice crackling (another pun intended) with emotion sang ' Dry your eyes and take your song out, it's a newborn afternoon, and if you can't recall the singer you can still recall the tune. Dry your eyes and play it slowly like you're marching off to war, sing it like you know he'd want it, like we sang it once before.' What superb lyrics!! So 2007 will be a time to do just that, to dry my eyes and take my song out in the newborn afternoon of my life. I can't wait!!

Beautiful Bisley

I have a new love in my life, a love that I have nurtured in secret for many years, afraid to reveal it to the world. I have now decided to 'come out' and confess that I am having a relationship with Bisley.
Bisley is my new filing cabinet, something that I have yearned for since I first realised they existed, and that should have been made extinct in this computer age but is still going strong.My Bisley is smooth and black and sits proudly behind me in my not-so-huge living room,being fed with all the accumulated papers of my life. Like a contented hamster, he stores all I give him until required at a later date. I am strangely and rather worryingly happy to have Bisley guarding my back.
In the other corner, growling and snarling, is whS. whS is not happy to see Bisley. whS EATS paper, and I have been feeding him rather too regularly lately, and then regretting it. What can you do, when you discover that you have fed to whS a cheque, or your latest payslip? NOTHING! The deed is done, and your cheque is now in shreds in a little bucket. whS knows that, in future, papers will go to Bisley first, and may not be fed to him for YEARS, when they are very old, and have lost their flavour. I quite expect Bisley and whS to have a fight one of these nights.

Not wishing to sound like my sister (see her blog In My Day) I would imagine that my love of keeping papers for ever stems from a little known incident about my father. Daddy had signed up, in his youth, for a lifetime membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). He kept the membership details stuffed in a drawer somewhere until one day he saw an article about a small housing complex reserved exclusively for NUJ members and their spouses. Looking for somewhere to live as the lease expired on our big house, he was delighted by this news, and retrieved from the abyss his NUJ membership details. Hey Presto, he got a nice wee bungalow in Dorking for a nice wee rent, where he and Mamma lived out their days.

So I do tend to keep papers rather longer than most, and still have a few payslips from my work at the DPB, which I left in 1995, my divorce papers from Dave (1976) and Nick (1994) and a whole box-full of Jacob's drawings from when he was 2 years old. You never know when these things might be useful!!