Well, this is interesting. Nine months since I posted in the blog – time to incubate a whole new person 🙂 and yes, looks like that’s what I’ve been doing – well, maybe not so much a new person as rediscovering the old one. My Last blog post was 4th October, I remember a nice few days after that – I went to see Mumford and Sons live in Brighton on 10th, fantastic concert, wonderful music, great musicians. Life was good and secure and the future exciting as I planned to give myself time to work out what I really did want to do for the next few years.
On 11th October my husband told me he wanted a divorce, there was no-one else, but no room for negotiation – ah, bit of a spanner in the works there then – and as for ‘no-one else’ cue music to denote my cynicism at that point dear reader, and yes I was correct and he’s getting married to her in September. He moved out at the beginning of December and we were divorced in April. I took the view, being a pragmatic northerner, that I didn’t want to be married to someone who didn’t want to be married to me – and that actually this might not be a bad thing at all for me, not happy for the children, but selfishly I became keen on the idea quite quickly. “When life gives you lemons make lemonade”, great cheesy saying but true – and if you don’t like lemonade make lemon curd or drink lots of G&T!
So… I need to earn money, support the offspring though exams, keep a family home until they fly the nest and meanwhile keep my sanity by doing the things that I really enjoy. The garden has, sadly, not had the attention it deserved – I have got some veggies planted but have been too preoccupied by repairs and building work to give it a lot of time – and interestingly have found it hard to ‘give myself permission’ to things that I do not count as ‘work’. I realised I was making the OU work, for example, stretch to fit the time I had, rather than the time I was being paid to work. I had done nothing else on the textiles at all. This must stop.
I have therefore signed up to do ‘Textiles: A Creative Approach’ with the Open College of the Arts (OCA) with a view to doing the other textile courses and eventually getting a BA in textiles (well, I don’t have a BA – so might as well – and I respond well to formal assessment… some people collect stamps, I collect degrees OK?)
This blog will now be used as part of my reflective practice – so I’d better get better at tagging I think! once again, watch this space, and I hope this time you don’t fall asleep waiting for the next post 🙂