Still at home

My wife is still away, and will be so for another day or two at least, so I'm still holding the fort in sunny (and yes it is, but very chilly) Cornwall. My mother-in-law is going to be admitted to a hospice in the near future, which it tells its own story, sadly. Even if that happens imminently, my wife will remain at her parents until her aunt, who was due to take up temporary residence to help out next week, but who was on holiday and has had to arrange an earlier flight back from Tenerife, gets back to the UK, because her dad isn't well enough to look after himself - he's in his late seventies and had been in poor health himself for two or three years. My manager, when I finally managed to get hold of him this morning, has been reasonable about my circumstances, even if he didn't sound wildly thrilled on the phone, but the downside is that I'm going to end up working through the coming weekend as well as all next week to make up my hours, which means I'll end up being away from home for 8 or 9 consecutive days, in all probability. I guess after the best part of two weeks off, I shouldn't complain, but it's not ideal, by any means.
The sombre mood has been leavened by the odd brighter moment here and there - my daughter and I had a genuine laugh out loud experience yesterday evening. She needed a new calculator for school, having lost her previous one a few days ago (doing her science homework on the school bus, seemingly), and we needed to go to our local 'big city' to get the right type. This meant negotiating the rush hour, and we ended up in a pretty substantial traffic queue at one point. If someone had made a transcript of our conversation at that point, anyone who read it might have guessed at an exchange between my daughter and one of her friends rather than between her and her father, as we discussed the finer points of boy cuteness. It took a good couple of minutes before the surreality of the situation struck me, and I burst out laughing, joined by my daughter when I asked her how many other father and daughter pairings of our respective ages in the area, or indeed anywhere, she thought might have been having a similar chat at that moment! Even if I do seem, on the evidence of my blog, to take myself a little bit too seriously at times, it proved I can still laugh at myself occasionally.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Bad news

I won't be going back to work tomorrow after all. My mother-in-law's health has taken a serious turn for the worse, so my wife is off to the Midlands in the morning and I'm staying at home to look after my daughter. We knew this scenario would arise at some stage, given my mother-in-law's diagnosis a few months ago, but it's happened rather sooner than anticipated. I'll be off for as long as it takes, and if there's any problem with my employer over that, they'll have to sack me. I'll speak to my manager in the morning and discuss things with him then - he's aware of the situation anyway, so I'm not envisaging too many difficulties, but in these penny-pinching times, I might end up on unpaid leave. If that's what it takes, so be it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

200

I was going to use this milestone post to write 200 words to characterise myself, but, on reflection, it's all in the blog anyway.
A long time ago, not long after I got married, a (female) friend of mine, who I'd almost, but not quite, got involved with on a couple of occasions and who I still held a candle for to some extent, asked me the $64,000 question one evening - "Are you happy?". My answer at the time was that I was, around 90% of the time. Now, fifteen or so years on, I think the 90%/10% ratio still holds, except that the happiness quotient now seems to be the lower figure. It's mostly my fault, but I feel I've spent much of the intervening time painting myself into a corner, which I now can't escape from without causing myself, and more importantly my family, lots of pain and suffering. This is going to be a pointless, rhetorical question, but I'm going to ask it of myself regardless - where did I go wrong? There must have been a crucial bifurcation where I made a bad decision and which has led me to where I am now.
*Sighs*

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Truce

After last night's fireworks, today was cool, in more ways than one. I speculated about whether I would be expected to apologise, because if that had been an overt suggestion, I might have lost it again, but nothing like that came about. All in all, 'polite but reserved' might be the best way of describing today's interactions. It may well be that things can be mended, but is that what I want? I don't know yet.
For all the upset of the last 24 hours, I'm still not looking forward to going back to work on Monday morning. I've never, even in the earlier days of my career when I was actually keen on the job, enjoyed going back to work after more than a long weekend off, and even then, not always - I think I'm naturally lazy, and having enough interests in my life to never get bored , I could very easily adapt to retirement, or whatever you want to call it. At least I can take solace in the fact that I've only got to work for another three weeks before I get another week and more off, as part of my first decent Christmas break for 25 years. Assuming, of course, there's been no resumption of domestic hostilities in the interim.
On a lighter note, and something I was going to mention yesterday before being overtaken, if not overwhelmed, by events, I've found a couple of blogs written by Cornish teens which look as though they might be interesting. I'm only keeping tabs on them as yet, rather than going for all-out public following, but it's nice to hear what people who live 40 as well as those who live 4000 miles away have to say about life.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Cracks in the edifice

It would have been another of those 'quiet day off' days, had the last hour or so not happened. Got up, made breakfast for the family, screwed up my resolution to go and get my hair cut, just the usual kind of stuff. Later on, dabbled around online, watched some winter sports on TV, cooked another meal for the family, washed up.
Then the roof fell in.
I could go into intricate details about the way the scenario developed, but the short version is that I offered to do something which I considered to be helpful, to have my wife, far from for the first time, throw my offer back in my face. I was annoyed, and for once had the audacity to show my irritation, in words and body language, and certainly not physically in any way, at which I was dubbed a 'bully' and a 'bastard', and a little later on, equated to someone my wife was involved with before I met her, who was genuinely abusive towards her, to the extent that she eventually had to take out an injunction against him. To say I'm not happy is a huge understatement, and I came as close as I ever have, in my anger, to telling her who I 'really' am. In fact, an hour and a half later, I'm still not sure how I didn't say what was on the tip of my tongue, something like 'Thanks for reminding me why I prefer boys'. Saving cowardice, probably.
I'm not going to claim that I'm blameless in what happened - after all, I could have kept my feelings inside, because that's what I do, day after day, year after year, just to get through life in general, never mind married life, but there are times when the degree of being taken for granted, of having to jump through hoops for little or no reward or recognition, reach levels which bring my frustration to boiling point. What, ultimately, is the point of spending my life not being myself, when I'm not even getting a simulacrum of happiness as a result? It's a question I'm going to have to come up with an answer to, sooner rather than later, if only for the good of my physical health, because the predictable result of this evening's spat was to set my heart hiccuping again.
Nearly twenty years, all breaking down? It could be.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Winter....aargh!

I glanced out of the window at around 9:00 this morning, to find that it was bloody snowing! Horrendous! I have little doubt that it's down to old age, but I've got a thoroughgoing aversion to snow and ice these days, not helped, I guess, by having spent the last 10 years living somewhere that gets very little of either. The snow didn't last long, and didn't stick - all evidence of it was gone in little more than an hour - but it was an unwelcome reminder that winter is imminent, if not here already, and there's three or four months of it still to come.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Imagination, creativity and autobiography

The balance, or lack of it, between the elements in the title of this post might go some way towards explaining why I've been struggling with my writing of late. There has, I have to say, been too much autobiography, albeit fictionalised to a greater or lesser degree, and not enough imagination. I've heard it said that all writing is autobiography, up to a point, and, up to now, that has been pretty much true in my case. That ties me down rather in what I feel I can write about with any authority, because I haven't really had an especially varied or interesting life, and while I've got some capacity for imagination, I wouldn't claim it as my strongest suit. I've been writing on and off today, and made a start on yet another story, which is coming along, and which I've seen a way of linking to another story I was writing about a year or so ago, in pre-blog days (on good old paper, in longhand, with a cheap pencil!), but which I have to admit still has quite a lot of my real life in it, chopped up and reconstituted, as it were. I'll try to persevere, because I do really want to try and come up with something readable, encouraged, maybe, by the relative success of one or two things I wrote a few months ago. As I've probably said before, if I can do it once, I can do it again.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B