Month: March 2013

I want to explore the light

/ Over Hills and Far Away / 8 Comments

I think in general I have pretty good instincts but I am pretty crap at acting upon them.  I’ll give you a few examples:

I thought I should have left my job at the homeless hostel within about 6 months of starting there.  But I thought I would be letting people down or that it might not look good on my CV if I was only in a job for 6 months.

After a year with my ex boyfriend I thought that things weren’t working and that I should leave but various things had led me to think I wasn’t strong enough to cope on my own.  So I stayed and he made me miserable and I tried to make him happy but couldn’t.  I stayed for 2 years and for that whole time he was cheating on me.

The week before I moved here I went to visit my dad and told him that he needed to start looking after himself because I wasn’t coming back for 2 years and I didn’t want this visit to be the last time I saw my dad alive.  He thought I was being ridiculous but we still talked about things like wills and getting his important paperwork sorted out.  I don’t know why I said that to him in the glow of a summer afternoon’s sunshine but I just knew somehow that I needed to because my instincts told me he wasn’t well.  And two weeks later his doctor’s visit told him he had terminal cancer.  Four weeks and 3 days later he was dead and that visit had been the last time I saw my dad alive in any real sense.  Of course I saw him for the two days before he died in his hospice bed but by that time he was not really recognisable as my father – the person who told me that I should say ‘May I get down from the table?’ rather than ‘Can I get down from the table?’, the person who would push me on the swing and let me push off his tummy with both feet just to get higher, the person who kept a text message from me saying ‘I love penguins I do’ on his phone for 4 years because it made him giggle.

So I think I know somehow when I need to change things but mostly I’m too afraid to do so because I don’t want to let other people down or disappoint anyone.  But I’m 29 now.  I don’t want to be living to please others and keeping on to see if it will be alright when I know deep down somewhere that it won’t.  And so I’ve come to a decision.

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The Second Line Song Game

/ Over Hills and Far Away / 17 Comments

I thought I’d resurrect this for anyone missing those long nights at work when we used to keep ourselves entertained by singing one song to the tune of another or guessing the song when the first line is read in BBC Radio 4 voice.  Or this is for anyone who is bored and wants to play an inconsequential game.

Because the first line is always easy… then we tend to la la la the next one! So this is what you have to do for this game:

1. Put your music player on shuffle
2. Write down 30 songs that you come to – but give people a fighting chance! We’re not going to get some obscure B-Side! Believe me, it’s harder than you think!
3. Write down the first line of the song
4. Tag friends and get them to fill in the second line of the song
5. Cross the songs out as they’re completed.

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And a girl ought to celebrate what passes by…

/ Over Hills and Far Away / 1 Comment

Since coming back from Zanzibar I have been feeling, on the most part, so much better. I sank into a quite deep depressive episode since Dad’s death, Christmas and returning to work in January. So much so that when I looked over the planning for the last half term, although I vaguely remember teaching what was written in those sheets, I don’t fully remember reading them.

It’s so easy to fall into a cycle of getting up, going to work, going home, eating, watching a bit of TV and heading to bed again ready to do it all over again the next day. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few months. I’ve been living in this amazing place and I’ve been neglecting to take it in. I’ve been teaching some lovely small humans who will, for better or worse, remember me for years to come. And I’m afraid that perhaps I’ve not been doing a very good job for them, but I am now determined to do better for them. My flatmate has moved out to a village near Mwanza, so now, for the first time in my adult life I will be living on my own – although not fully as I always leave my door open and anyone can wander up if they wish – and so this is a time when I could possibly slide back down again and become a total hermit.

There have been a few things that have begun to help me pull myself out of this slump. One was finding the blogs from my myspace and seeing how excited I was to be starting my masters. That was halted because I didn’t get the job I wanted and I’ve been holding onto that disappointment for far too long now, it’s almost been 7 years. It’s time to let it go.

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