I Need A Change...

... of life. Don't know if this is a mid-life crisis (yeah, if I was a bloke I'd buy a motorbike but that won't cut it for me) but I'm tired of my life. Tired as in fed up with it, and the other evening I couldn't even think of any place I could think of being. Place as in "the last time life was fun"... maybe I should just watch Vicar of Dibley, join a whist drive and order some plant catalogues. Or maybe I should pull my socks up and find some way of getting my life back again. Right now, I would love to move to Scarborough. A house high up on the bay, with amazing daytime and night time views. They've even got an M&S if I fancied posh-people watching in the food aisles... And anyway, I've got one elderly parent in Kent, one in Northamptonshire, and some inlaws on the south coast. None of them would be thrilled with me and the kids being any further north... South coast is sort of out of the price range... and there is the slight issue of schooling-interruption/uprooting of the 12 year old, and the immense network of bureaucracy concerning the 14 year old. I think I need to Make Some Plans.

Ballroom Dancing, Blur and Bad School

A while ago I kept banging on about the Pixies, since when I don't think I've mentioned music much. One of the things that gets me to put a cd* on is to drown out the awareness of the low-level noise coming from our neighbours. The random amateur carpentry games their 4 year old plays, the accelerating vocalisms of their baby. Not the shouty lady who rants at her husband, who we recently discovered has taken to peppering his gujarati with "fuck off". 50 years in this country, and the local dialect is rubbing off on him... No, we are blessed not only to live in a terrace, but one in which the party walls** on either side are Very Thin. So I'm listening to Think Tank, the massively vermillion-fabric'd cd Blur did about 9 years back. Damon Albarn and Kristin Hersh's voices are always good to re-tilt the axis in a mad day...

Because it has been one of those. Back in the swing of the World of Work, with a morning where the recent training actually came in useful in a fairly heavy situation, and where I'd got the 14 year old off to school. By bus for the first time. All good so far. And then his school sent an automated text that he'd got a detention to do that lunchtime... no explanation. And possibly the best way to ensure his continued enthusiasm to attend, with a less than 50% attendance so far this month.

No one at the end of the phone knew anymore than it was for "failing to follow instructions". Yes, that's why he's not been at school for the past year, etc, etc, and why he's under their monitoring... By now already late for the afternoon session I was working in, I got hold of someone who was able to tell me he'd walked out of school 2 hours previously. Although fairly confident his homing instinct, and desire for a quiet spot with his computer, would guarantee he'd be at home, I excused myself and went straight home to see what was what. After which I calmed myself down by catching the tail end of a programme about the coachload of ballroom dancers who'd been called in to be in the Magical Mystery Tour film.






* Too old to be trained to use an iPod. That's for when I'm 80. And I usually forget about 6Music.

** To non-Brit readers, that's a technical term for the bricks 'twixt you and the neighbours. Not a wall covered in lurex, Twister mats and balloons.

Time Flies

No, that is (probably) not a new species of nuisance, buzzing, insect. It is that I have just done a Proper Day's Work for the first time in months, not counting the rather rubbish 2 days of training at the World of Work, which were short bursts of relevant and some utterly irrelevant corporate speak, intermingled with hanging around in corridors being told off for being noisy and critiquing the free buffet. Therefore, it is suddenly 17.43, even though it feels like I only just got in, and I've had to quickly put the oven on. The 12 year old is in a pie-mood, so its some packaged vegetarian interpretation of cornish pasties tonight.

Another bizarre but not-unexpected start to today - especially if you include the dream I had about watching the clock tick by past 9am and not being at work on time - with the 14 year old refusing to go to sleep last night, probably til around 1am, then me waking him at 7am so we could set off at 8.15. Wide awake but acting catatonic, blanking me. How do they do that? Decided not to talk about the situation at work unless anyone asked me - I think someone believed me when I said I'd been away, working on my tan. I still have to pin my boss down to explain it all, and give the official piece of paper, from the gp and all.

Today's Mission...

... was to come home with an

The 12 year old's been moaning that I haven't written about him lately.

So here is a bit all about him and his amazing pasta sauce that he's making at the moment. Hence the onion.  He made some earlier this week, but owing to the fail that was me sending him in with narrow-necked container for it, much of it remained on the school worktop. The sauce that made it home was lovely though.

*********

And here are some photos of today's Weekend Wanderings, in Derby. There would have been some more close-ups of this statue-infested building, but there was an outbreak of sibling scuffling and we had to move on sharpish. People were looking.

I liked this spirally thing. But not the traffic light

A lot of lamp posts 

A window display all about invention and stuff

Thank You...

... to you lovely people, for the really sweet comments on my last post.

Things are heading in the right direction again; the boy has made it into his new school 5 days out of the past 12. Albeit random days, with some digging in of teenage heels along the way. I trotted off for a fabulous head massage at the hairdressers earlier this week, found a jacket and two more cardigans in the charity shops, and have just generally rediscovered life without these silly panic attacks.

Meanwhile, under my job description of Being A Proper Parent And Giving Tesco All My Disposable Income, the new series of Big Brother has been banished from the house on school nights, on the grounds of general tabloidy dodgy morals, as well as being on Far Too Late and so forth. But we have just had a peep at tonight's eviction show and realised there seems to be some confusion*:

                                                                                                                                                                                   

                     Sean from Corrie

  

                Brian Dowling

*or maybe I should have gone to Specsavers.

A Black Hole...

...is where I've been. The back to the World of Work lasted for 2 days, while trying to juggle the 14 year old's life, and I'm now signed off with "acute reaction to stress". Not a route I thought I'd ever go down, but hey...

I'm taking things easy for a bit - lurking rather than posting, not buying things, not doing much. But did walk up to the top of an excellent hill in Nottingham at the weekend, and then found the most amazing cafe with a teeny, narrow wooden staircase up to battered leather chairs with another gorgeous view.

I'm looking out my window over the gardens, with a pure blue, unblemished sky, thinking how mad it is that there can be so much bad stuff going on around the world with a sky as beautiful as that.