I'm a chimera

It was my 17th wedding anniversary yesterday, and we had a nice day, albeit a very lazy one. We were going to go out for a meal last night, but in the event decided that even that was too much effort, so I cooked at home instead - pan fried tuna steaks with scallops, very nice, if I say so myself - all in all trying my best to be the proverbial ideal husband. I had the feeling, though, that in being that person that I was flirting with hypocrisy, because although I love my wife and I've no interest in any other woman, I know that 'Sammy', who's infatuated with a 13 year old boy, even if it's wildly unlikely I would actually do anything about it, is there all the time, buried just beneath the surface of my public persona. I'll probably see the boy this coming week, as well, given that I'll be back at work on Wednesday and it's school half term holiday week, and, even though I doubtless shouldn't, I'm looking forward to the prospect, having not seen him for the last couple of months.

Mark - Thank you very much for your magnanimity in the face of my ingratitude.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Resonances

This was originally going to be part 3 of the previous post, but I ran out of time earlier on.
The last hour or so before I went to bed last night was spent reading another Nifty story, but this one was far more of a love story than a 3 orgasms per paragraph fantasy fest, even though there was some eroticism involved. It made me cry, because it reminded me so much of someone who could've been my life partner, if things had been just a few percent different. The characters in the story were more or less the same ages as I was and the boy I loved was at the time - I was in my mid-twenties, and he was 10 years younger - but the few percent of difference between us and the fictional characters was an unbridgeable chasm - he was straight, I knew it, he knew it, but I loved him just the same, I was in love with him, and, in his own way, he loved me back as far as his nature would allow, but when the story man and boy ended up spending the night together for the first time, not having sex, but just cuddling together and saying that they loved each other, that's when the tears came, because for me to have been in that position, him sleepily snuggling up to me and saying "I love you" would've been the pinnacle of my life, but he didn't and couldn't love me in that way. If he had been able to, I would never have deserted him, even if there was no physical sex involved. Love is always, in my opinion, the most important thing. There must have been something there, though - he's still my best friend, even though we're both married with families.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Yesterday...and the day before

Two things I want to say, one easy, one not so straightforward.
First of all, the easy bit. Yesterday's interview went reasonably well, despite my contriving to arrive 5 minutes late - always give a good first impression! - after being delayed in traffic en route. I'd decided to go by car because the train connections coming back weren't brilliant, and I did indeed get home a good hour earlier last night than I would've done by train, but, needless to say, I was frustrated not to be there on time - at least I didn't have time to sit around waiting to be called into the interview room and potentially getting nervous. I answered all the questions that were aimed at me, and I think I managed to give the impression that I knew what I was talking about, doing my best to stress my experience, which is my big selling point. There are 11 candidates for two vacancies, one of whom has had to have his interview rescheduled to next week, so it will be 10 days to a fortnight before I hear the outcome. I'm fairly optimistic, but, of course, I've no idea of the standard of any of the other candidates.
After finally getting past the immediate confusion I caused myself on Wednesday, and being able to think about it reasonably rationally, it was a case of "sound and fury; signifying nothing". It is, however, embarrassing on two levels - what actually happened, and the display of a level of ignorance that would shame many a 12 year old. Before I get the chance to chicken out again, what happened was that, after spending far too much time reading sites like Nifty in the last 9 months or so, and with full foreknowledge of the levels of exaggeration implicit in that kind of fiction, I was overcome with curiosity about the effects of stimulation of the prostate gland, and used the only suitable tool I could find, the handle of an old toothbrush, to satisfy that curiosity. Anal sex, either giving or receiving, has never interested me, not from any moralistic qualms, but because of a strong personal 'yuck' reaction - whenever I've thought about it, I can't get away from the excretory associations. To my surprise, and, as I've said, confusion, I did find it enjoyable, although 'enjoyable' is the strongest adjective I'd use - it hasn't moved me to flights of hyperbole - the confusion being to do with the feeling it gave me, and I know I'm falling prey to ignorant stereotyping in saying this, that it made me feel that I might be closer to the 'gay' end of the spectrum than I would otherwise have admitted to myself. That in turn led to me thinking along the lines of deceiving my wife and being with her under false pretences, at which point I dissolved into being over-emotional and lost my capacity to think rationally about the issue. Now I have dragged myself back to somewhere closer to reality, I know there's nothing inherently 'gay', in the pejorative sense, about anal sex, and I myself am the same person I was before Wednesday morning - I'm still bisexual, with the 'split' in my attraction being where it was before, around puberty - boys and women, as it ever was. I'm really sorry if anything here has offended anyone, but I can only speak from my own perspective, and if I'm not going to be honest in this blog, I don't see the point of writing it.

Love & best wishes
Sammy B

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

As Max Quordlepleen said in 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe' "at the risk of putting a damper on the wonderful sense of doom and futility here", the implications of tomorrow have been on my mind. If I don't get the job I'm being interviewed for, we'll probably be lurching towards financial oblivion, whereas if I do get the job, I'm going to be away from home for something like 38 weeks a year for an indefinite period. No pressure there, then. The interview itself and my own sense of my capability to do the job, not wishing to seem immodest, isn't a problem - whatever issues I have doubts about, my professional competence isn't one of them. It's just a case of seeing what happens, I guess.
On top of that, I managed to mess with my mind in a big way earlier today by trying and enjoying something I'd never done or thought I wanted to do before - it only involved me, and no illegal substances or activities, I hasten to add - but it made me wonder very seriously about what I actually do want in my life now, and whether I'm in a relationship under false pretences. I'm the one who's got to work that out in the first instance, of course, and then decide what, if anything, to do about it, but I doubt if evasion will work indefinitely.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Semicentennial's semicentennial

This one's crept up on me a little bit - I didn't realise until last night that my next post, i.e. this one as it is now, would be my 50th since I began the blog in February. It's been a bit of a strange mixture of the banal and (for me at least) the deeply significant, but, overall, I'm pleased that I've done it and I don't intend to sign off just yet. I was going to put up a link to my personal 'national anthem', 'Never Understand' by the Jesus & Mary Chain, but the embedding code on YouTube has been disabled, and I'm too technologically challenged to find another way of doing it. I'm sure anyone who's interested in the song will easily be able to find it.
I had good intentions to get out and about and do a few things this morning, but I've been stricken with hay fever for the first time this year, so I'm currently aestivating indoors, hoping that it will pass in the next couple of hours and allow me to venture out later. I used to get hay fever really badly from my late twenties for about 15 years, but, fortunately, it's been a lot less of a problem recently, although there is still the odd day like today when it turns round and bites me.
I had a really odd experience in the early hours of this morning - a kind of a dream within a dream. I dreamt I was fighting off someone who was attacking me, an old man but one who was very strong and determined, and then 'woke up' thinking I was shouting out and gripping my wife's arms so tightly as to bruise her, then woke up in reality to find her safe and well and asleep beside me. I have had nightmares on odd occasions in the past, though very rarely, but I can never remember anything quite like this before.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A sunny and fairly sunny weekend

Weather-wise, it's been the best weekend for ages, and, personally, it's gone as well as I could've reasonably expected given the way things looked to be heading in midweek. We managed to have a nice family afternoon yesterday, visiting a local event up the hill from home and then eating the Sunday roast in the garden, taking advantage of the unabated sunshine. There's still a little tension in the air (and there would certainly have been more had my wife picked up on what I wrote about in my last post), but for my wife to say "We had a nice weekend, didn't we" before she left for work this morning certainly puts things in a more hopeful light.
I'll have the dubious pleasure of calling in at work later on today, because I need to pick up some paperwork to help me prepare for the job interview I've got coming up on Thursday - I need to get used to the idea of being there again anyway, given that, unless something unforeseen crops up, I'll be back to the grind in 9 days time.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The boy (visiting) next door

Our (relatively) new next door neighbour had a barbeque yesterday afternoon, and he invited us to drop in. My daughter was out at her usual Saturday afternoon activity, so we told the neighbour that we couldn't stay too long, because we had to leave at 5:00 to pick my daughter up. As it transpired, it was a good thing that we only had time for a brief visit, because a few minutes after we'd arrived, another group of guests came into his garden, a couple and a boy of around 12 or 13. Not too put too fine a point on it, by the time we left half an hour or so later, I was finding it very difficult to disguise my interest in him - he wasn't quite on a par with the boy who I see regularly from work, but he was the most attractive I've seen anywhere near here for a good while. Given our recent difficulties, I don't think it would've been the best time for my wife to catch me drooling over forbidden fruit, so a strategic retreat came just at the right moment. For all the navel-gazing about what I would or wouldn't do in the face of temptation, the fact remains that I could still get involved, the basic attraction is still there.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Accentuate the positive

It's a really nice day here today, my daughter found out yesterday that she's got a part in her school's production of 'The Canterbury Tales' after auditions earlier in the week, and, most importantly, my wife is much happier with life today, which, in turn, makes me feel far more at one with the world. I'm not so naïve as to think that everything in the garden is suddenly lovely, but the way I feel now is obviously much preferable to how things were 24 hours ago. 'Look on the bright side' is such a cliché, but even clichés have their truths to tell sometimes.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Life...just one damn thing after another

The way the blog has gone over the last week, anyone reading it would be excused for thinking I was inventing the content of the posts for dramatic effect. I might doubt the truth of it all myself, were I not the nut connected to the keyboard. I say this, because, having spent last weekend wrestling with the skeletons in my cupboard, it now seems that my marriage is flirting dangerously with the rocks, but not for the reason I alluded to around a week ago.
Ironically, it all began with what should have been good news. Before my time on the sick list, I'd applied for a number of internal vacancies with my company, a move designed to alleviate two of the major stressors in our lives - my current job and its associated problems, and the fact that we're rapidly running out of money, because I had to take a drastic pay cut 4 years ago to be able to return to working in Cornwall rather than Berkshire, where I was at the time, so that I could be at home on a daily basis, something which was necessary at the time for reasons connected with my wife's job, and which I can't say too much about because of professional confidentiality (my wife is a psychiatric nurse, and the problems arose from a case she was involved with). I heard yesterday that I'd been offered an interview for one of the jobs I've applied for, and given that I'm likely to have substantially more experience than most, if not all, of any other applicants I would expect to be up against, I should, if I give a good account of myself, have a pretty good chance of being appointed. The downside, of course, is that I'd be going back to working away, and given the roster pattern of the potential new job, I'd be spending even less time at home than I did when I was working in Berkshire. This isn't something I'd embrace with enormous enthusiasm, but if I hadn't been prepared to do it, I wouldn't have applied for the job in the first place. In enunciating my reservations about the prospect of being away again, I managed, seemingly, to give my wife the impression that I was going to deliberately 'throw' the interview to avoid being given the job when were talking about it this morning. This led, I'm afraid, to a rather bitter argument, with me harking back to the reasons for me having had to leave my previous job and my wife bringing up the circumstances of our moving to Cornwall in the first place, 10 years ago, which, through a combination of a couple of bad decisions and a couple of pieces of outrageously bad luck, cost us something in the region of £30,000 in the first 12 months after we moved and which set the scene for our financial travails ever since. It finally degenerated into my wife questioning what we were carrying on for, and me, in that moment, being unable to come up with an answer that could convince myself, never mind her. The only saving grace is that my daughter had already left for school before all this kicked off, so that she, at least, wasn't dragged into the mire, but if we've got to this stage without me even mentioning those rattling skeletons and their present-day offspring, the immediate future could be somewhat bleak.
There is, however, a Plan B which has come to my mind since this morning, which, while it involves a high-risk strategy, might yet give us the best of both worlds. I'll discuss it with my wife later, if she's willing to listen, and we'll see what happens.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Drowse

Try something new today! Or so the catchphrase goes. So I'm going to attempt to post a song which pretty much sums up how I'm feeling at the moment - one of Queen's, but probably not one of their better known tracks, although I've always liked it ever since I bought the album on antediluvian vinyl about a squillion years ago. "Waves of alternatives wash at my sleepiness", that's me today!




Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

P.S. Complete with adverts, sorry!
((Hugs))
Sammy B

Evening sunshine

After the emotional roller coaster of yesterday, today has been very quiet and calm. The weather here hasn't been all that wonderful during the day, but the clouds have all dispersed over the last couple of hours, and I'm now looking out of the window at an almost clear eggshell blue sky and the sunset glinting on the houses on the opposite side of the little valley where we live. It's not 'Cider with Rosie' country here, just a suburb-ish area with a lot of 1970's semi-detached houses, but there are times when it's almost as good, and this is one of them.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The dark place

This post has been, in a manner of speaking, about a quarter of a century in the making. It's certainly something I've been skating around since day 1 of this blog. I've even tried, over the last few days, writing a fictionalised version for my other blog to at least allow me to rehearse, as it were, finding a way to talk about the issue, but reading JJ's post of last night that so upset me has become the catalyst to finally drag this dark place in my life into the open.
I'd had doubts about my sexual orientation in my mid to late teens - I had a massive crush, albeit not at all sexual - not even in fantasies - on a middle school boy when I was in the sixth form (he was 13/14, I was 17/18), but I was still reasonably convinced that I was straight. I had a very close friendship with a girl who I'd met through a part-time job, and had I had any self-confidence at all, it almost certainly could have become far more than it was, but I never did find the courage, and it finally dissipated completely when I left home at the age of 20 to move to a new job in North West England. I was lonely, even though I was lodging with relatives, screwed up because I hadn't made the move that might well have made things click with my female friend, and generally feeling pretty sorry for myself. Enter the boy.
I'll call him B, because that has no connection to his real name. I'd known him since he was a baby, because he was a distant relation - I'm not too well versed in genealogy, but I think he was (is) my second cousin. When I first moved into the area, B was 7 or 8, and was a delightful, happy, affectionate child. I remember staying over at his parents' house one weekend shortly after my move (to allow for a boozy night out) where B took every possible chance to cuddle up to me, to the extent that his dad, always one for a smart one-liner, said that he thought his son was going to grow up gay, much to his wife's chagrin. At that stage, I thought no more of it than that B was the sort of boy who liked his hugs and attention, and I had novelty value.
I didn't see him overly often - 2 or 3 times a month, perhaps - during the next couple of years, but we always seemed to get on well, and he still liked, even as he got to the age where a lot of boys wanted to be tough and independent, to sit on my lap and have a cuddle every now and again, but almost always when there were other people around. I'd had a couple of unsuccessful attempts to start a relationship with the opposite sex, stymied by my shyness and the fact that I was on shift work - Saturday night shift is a pretty good passion killer, by anyone's standards.
I moved out of my relatives' house after a while, and rented a flat nearer to where I was working at that point, but I still saw B about as often as before. I'd begun to take him out to various places at weekends and in school holidays, and it eventually came about that he decided he wanted to visit my parents in Kent, because his dad had done that as a child. I was due some annual leave during the school Easter holidays, so it was arranged for me to take him down for a long weekend. We arrived late on a Thursday evening, and, given the space that my parents had, ended up sharing a double bed in the spare room. B, in his typical way, spent most of the night cuddled up to me, while I spent most of the night awake and painfully aroused. I'd begun to feel attracted to him some while before (he was 11 by this time), a combination of guilt and lack of opportunity restraining me from doing anything about it, but having him hugging me for hours and my perception of what his affection, physical and emotional, meant led me to add 2 and 2 and arrive at an answer much greater than 4. By the time I got up, I was almost insane with desire, the house was empty, my parents both being at work, so that when he came downstairs half an hour or so after me it wasn't long before I ended up hugging, kissing and touching him on the living room couch. Had he not had an understanding, or instinct, of where things were heading and the courage to say what he said next - " Do we have to have this sex stuff  " - I have no doubt that I would have had some kind of sex with him. The only very minor credit I can claim for myself is that I wasn't too far gone to realise that he'd said "no" and that he meant "no", and that I stopped what was I was doing. I was devastated at what had happened - I burst into tears, which I think disconcerted B as much as what had nearly taken place before - and tried to find some way of apologising to him. I doubt that he fully understood what I was trying to say, and I'm certain that he had no idea why I was so upset, so the fact that his response was something so grown-up is amazing to me even now - " Don't worry, you forget it and I'll forget it ". And he has, by any superficial appearance. He never mentioned it again, although I didn't make any attempt to remind him, and on the few and far between occasions that I see him these days - 3 or 4 times in the last 10 years, as far as I remember - he's still friendly towards me.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, I seriously contemplated suicide, the only time I've ever been in that kind of place in my life - I even went as far as to acquire a stockpile of Paracetamol, which I was going to wash down with liberal amounts of Pernod, to make sure - but, with hindsight, I know that B would probably have blamed himself, so I'd have ended up damaging him as well as myself.
The longer term effects of what happened are still playing out in my life, even 26 years on. I felt so guilty about what I'd allowed to happen that for a good many years I almost suppressed my attraction to boys - there was the occasional bout of ' window shopping ', including one on my honeymoon - and I certainly did my best, and still do, to never allow myself to get close to any boy, emotionally, and even, as far as possible, in terms of physical proximity. I've been lucky in that regard that my only child is a girl - when the midwife said " It's a girl " when she was born, my immediate reaction, fortunately not aloud, was " Thank f@*k for that " - not so much because I might have been tempted to something incestuous, as the fact that there would have been far more boys around a son than there have been around my daughter - friends, teammates, etc.
All in all, I have to admit that my self-control over the years isn't so much of a virtue as it might seem - it's more to do with the knowledge that the rapist in JJ or Larry's stories could so easily have been me.

Thank you very much to Brian for becoming my latest follower.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Worthlessness

Sometimes, things happen that make me feel as though I don't deserve to be here. JJ's blog reappeared overnight, temporarily at the moment, with a new post that explained some of the story that led to it being deleted. As was the case after the tragedy of Larry (Grown Up Wrong), what the boy has written has made me feel irremediably disgusting and worthless for having the desires that I do. I've consoled myself in the past with the thought that I would never force anyone to do anything they didn't want, but that's only a resolution made in the absence of immediate temptation and opportunity, so I can't guarantee that I'd abide by it in a real world situation. If I can't even convince myself that I could control my urges, why should anyone else believe me?
Self-pity is kicking in again, I feel like crying.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Trouble on the horizon

I've got a suspicion that an elephant in the room which I've somehow managed to elude for months, if not years, is about to make its presence felt. Without wishing to delve into too many gory details, my sex life has dwindled rather dramatically over the last few years, and it's now got to the point, for the first time in quite a while, where my wife has felt compelled to want to talk about it. It's not that I'm unable to get involved, given the right circumstances, although I have to be rather more careful than before my heart problems, but I'm not sure if it's what I want now. Obviously, I don't want to lie to my wife, but if I just come out and tell her the unexpurgated truth, I don't think it's too likely that she'll want to carry on being with me. Given that I still love her as much as ever, that's not an outcome that I want to have to countenance, so I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment as to where to go next. I guess some people would accuse me of wanting to have my cake and eat it, but I'm not doing any eating - I'm dealing with my attraction to boys with self-restraint and just not allowing myself to get anywhere near them, while, hitherto, I've just evaded the other half of the scenario. Truth will out, I suppose, sooner or later, so it will no doubt come down to trying to work out what the least worst option is and putting it into practise with as little hurt to all concerned as possible. I've just got such a bad feeling about how this weekend is going to go.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Back in harness...but not yet

I went to see an occupational health doctor yesterday - a few years ago, this was an in-house function of my company, but it's now been 'outsourced' to BUPA - and after that assessment and another chat with my manager this morning, I'm deemed to be sufficiently recovered to go back to my job. I can't say I'm overly thrilled to be heading back, but at least I've got a stay of execution for another couple of weeks, because I'm due to be on annual leave once my doctor's certificate runs out this weekend, so it will be somewhere around June 2 when I actually get my nose back to the grindstone. The only thing that worries me about the situation is what happens if I'm embroiled in another scenario like the one that led me to being sick this time round - I have no ambition whatever to leave work in an ambulance, or even handcuffs if I lose my cool completely. I guess I'll have to practise counting to 10, or 110.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Man of the people...

... but whose people? If he follows the example of his predecessors, David Cameron as a Conservative prime minister will do his best to look after his own. I hope that Lib Dems who have helped him to the top of the greasy pole will be some kind of moderating influence, but I suspect that the '30 pieces of silver' will sway their judgment. Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that there's something about politics that seems to bring out the worst in those that practise it, no matter what their nominal affiliation.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Hoping it's au revoir and not goodbye

After a few days of uncertainty, I tried to link to ' JJ's Yacky Box' this morning and found that it had been deleted. I'm sure that JJ's parents think they're doing the right thing, and I've no intention to criticise them, but I'm disappointed, nonetheless. As I said when I started this blog, JJ's site was one of the main reasons I was inspired to set sail on the blogsphere and I'll miss reading about his life and times. If, at some point in the future, circumstances allow him to resume, either with his old blog or a replacement, I'll be an avid follower.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Perfectionism

Looking back, even to when I was a child, one of my most persistent character traits is perfectionism. For much of the time, I've seen it as a positive thing, but now I'm far from being convinced that that's the right view. I had an autograph book when I was about 10 or 11, very thin on autographs of anyone well-known, and long since lost, but I remember verbatim what my dad wrote when he signed it - 'Whatever I am doing, I always do my best'. That seemed to me to be a philosophy worth emulating, but as time has gone on, I think that I've misunderstood what he was getting at. His idea was to do his best, but if things didn't work out, don't dwell on the disappointment, learn from the experience and move on. I, on the other hand, tend to err to the side of wanting to be the best, despite the impossibility of that aspiration, and as a result sometimes being unrealistically self-critical (and even, rarely, critical of others), to the point of dredging up events that happened years in the past - there are things that happened when I was 18 that still make me cringe today, even though I seriously doubt whether anyone apart from me remembers them. My blog often falls foul of the same syndrome - I spend so much effort on making sure that the choice of words and phraseology, the spelling, punctuation and grammar (to regress to the schoolroom) are all as good as I can manage, that the spontaneity of what I write, the life and soul of the enterprise, is lost. As an example, the idea I referred to in the post 'A new story' has so far amounted to 3 draft paragraphs in almost a month, the irony being that if I published any of it, in however perfect or imperfect a state, I'd be lucky if more than a handful of people even read it. I often complain about the modern world being obsessed with style over substance, while being guilty of exactly the same offence.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Election & aftermath

It seems that yesterday's election has left us with the first hung parliament for a long time. It will be interesting to see how the various politicians and parties deal with the situation - I would hope that they could get together and come up with compromises that will benefit everyone, but I suspect the usual horse trading for narrow partisan advantage will dominate. The most disappointing aspect, from my personal perspective, is that the Liberal Democrats have again fallen foul of our 'winner takes all' electoral system - as things stood as of a few minutes ago, they had 23% of the overall vote, but only around 9% of the parliamentary seats. It's a patent injustice, but as long as the existing system favours the 2 main parties, there's pretty much no chance of substantive change.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

What do I want?

I'm at the 'difficult second album' stage with the blog, without having had a 'first album'. What do I want to achieve by committing my thoughts to the keyboard and screen, what, if anything, have I got to gain by carrying on, what, if anything, will I lose if I give up?
When I started the blog, I wanted a forum for putting my thoughts in order and a place where I could say things that the restrictions of societal expectation and my feelings of responsibility to my family and friends militate against saying in my normal life. I suppose to some extent I hoped for some feeling of catharsis by saying those 'forbidden' things, not because I feel guilty about myself so much as that I feel unable to find any other way of talking about these issues - I have people in my life who care about me, but no-one who I believe would be both willing and able to get beyond the tabloid fuelled lynch mob/thoughtcrime mentality that seems to be the only 'politically correct' reaction to anyone who is reckless enough to be honest about being attracted to someone under the arbitrary 'age of consent', whether or not they have any intention of actually doing anything about it.
Maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself, looking for some sympathy I don't deserve, but I've spent most of my adult life not being able to be who I really am, not able to live the life that I would choose, not do anything other than be restrained and, effectively, hide, just to get from day to day without being thrown in jail, attacked or even killed. My rational self is well aware that restraint of the immediate needs of the individual is essential to the overall health of society, but when you've spent so much of your life knowing that you haven't had what you really want, even fleetingly, the frustration can almost overwhelm you.
So, what do I want? I guess I know, but I know it is so unlikely to happen that it's not even worth considering.
Love you J, even though you'll never know.
Sorry this has been so self-indulgent.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Another metropolitan foray

Having not been to London for nearly 2 years, I've now been there twice in less than a month. The object of the exercise this time was to meet up with my brother and his family to round off my birthday festivities. I'm not in the market for driving anywhere much at the moment, and certainly not interested in a 500 mile round trip at the wheel, so we went up on the train on Sunday afternoon, stayed over in a fairly nice hotel in west London (cheap internet deals rule, OK!) and then went across to Greenwich yesterday morning to meet up at the Royal Observatory. I'd been to the observatory once before, but that was about 25 years ago, so it was interesting to see how it had changed over the intervening years. We then went into Greenwich town centre to indulge in a long, enjoyable lunch in a decent pub/restaurant, which gave us plenty of time to catch up on family doings and assorted gossip - although we talk on the phone fairly regularly, I hadn't actually seen my brother for over a year, our last planned get-together just before last Christmas having been snowed off, distance and the consequent practicalities of trying to find ourselves in the same place at the same time doing the rest. What such infrequent meetings highlight is how quickly time seems to pass as you get older - my nephew is at university now, while my niece, always my favourite little lady (apart from my daughter, of course) more or less from birth, celebrated her 16th birthday a few weeks ago, and spent most of the day draped decorously over her new boyfriend, who'd come along for the trip. Tempus fugit, in spades!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Emigration

I had a long phone conversation yesterday with my cousin, who's also my long-term best friend. We don't meet up so often these days, living as we do at opposite ends of the country, but Christmas and birthdays, and a few other random occasions, are often marked by marathon catch-up sessions. We've known each other so well for so long that surprises are few and far between, but he genuinely took me aback on this occasion by saying that him and his wife and family are seriously considering emigrating to New Zealand. Apparently, the only thing that's holding them back at the moment is his wife being reluctant to leave her elderly parents. This, coming from someone who's lived within a 3 mile radius of his present home for his whole life, is certainly not what I would have expected, but, if they all think that is what will be best for them, then why not. Oddly enough, my parents briefly looked into the possibility of going to New Zealand in the early 1970's, but I don't think it was ever close to actually happening.
I've considered leaving the UK on several occasions, although my ambitions don't stretch to the other side of the world - I would love to live in Spain, the Canary Islands in particular. If I hadn't met my wife when I did, I might well have actually done it - I was pretty disillusioned with life at the time, for various reasons, and leaving it all behind was an appetising prospect. My desire to get away fluctuates according to life circumstances and mood - logically, I suppose, the lower I get, the more I want to go - but I would never go without my wife and daughter in any foreseeable circumstances, so I guess it's not going to happen at the moment. Perhaps retirement to sunnier climes might come to fruition, but not for a few more years, I suspect.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Off to Cloud Cuckoo Land

I said when I began this blog that I wanted to intersperse my musings about life with something more ' creative '. So far, that has more or less failed to take place, so I've decided to start a stand-alone blog for the products of my imagination, on the basis that if there's a receptacle, I might be inspired to put something in it. I'm not promising quantity, and I'm certainly not promising quality, but I'll do my best to make it as good as I can.
The new blog is called ' Sammy B's Nephelokokkygia ' and will hopefully have some content before too long.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B