Just two days after we got back from Singapore was Oldest Daughter’s A Level results day. I’m not sure who was more nervous about this – me or Oldest Daughter. She was nervous because she needed good grades to get into Durham University (she wanted to read Philosophy there). I was nervous because I knew […]
Tag: kids
Singapore
I know that I’ve made much in this blog about how much I resent E for not just being honest and leaving for good in 2008. However, there is one thing that takes the edge off that pain. There is one thing that would never have happened if he had left – Singapore. In 2010, […]
Occam’s Razor
On Saturday I met up with one of my loveliest and best friends for the first time in about three years. We were at University together (she was there at the very beginning of E and my relationship) and whilst we don’t see each other very often, when we do it’s like no time has […]
Clouds
As May and June headed towards July, I began to feel that life was calming down and brightening up a bit – albeit with the odd cloud darkening our days every now and then. At the end of May, after I’d spent the best part of five months asking E to tell his parents what had […]
A foreign country
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – L P Hartley, The Go Between Yesterday I finally did something that I haven’t been able to face doing since E left. I started re-reading the letters and emails that I had found (and I had written myself) when I discovered E’s first […]
Blithbury
Blithbury (n.) A look someone gives you by which you become aware that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.” – Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: The Deeper Meaning of Liff – After my sober March, I was now drinking again, but I was much […]
Stories
When we moved to Singapore the first proper storm we experienced – at 3am – resulted in a Sound of Music-esque scene, where, with each fresh crash of thunder, a different child ran barefoot into my room and threw themselves under my duvet. For those first few months my bed became a place of sanctuary […]
Grenades
I’m breaking with this blog’s usual ‘timeline’ to interject with something that happened today. I wanted to mark it, diarise it, write about it whilst it was fresh. So far, this blog has been retrospective, and I’ve had months to calm down and try to put things in perspective before writing, but today provided an […]
First Day
In what would be a year of Firsts after E left, I think my first day at work in 19 years was one of the most daunting. I had literally been at home since September 1998. I was used to my own company, my own rules. I was used to silence and my own space. […]
Dark Hours Symphony
It’s a very long time since I did O’ Level music (the fact that it was an O’ Level, not a GCSE, is indicative of exactly how long), but it occurred to me the other night (when I was wide awake, obvs) that my Dark Hours Anxiety has a particular pattern and follows an almost […]
He-total: Life without Ex 