The fabric of life

I woke at 5.30 this morning with a blog, half-formed, trying to get out of my brain. I think that’s the trouble with taking time off from physical endeavour – I’m not too physically knackered to keep my brain comatose! I have had the last three weeks or so as a rather overdue break from WWOOFing – I had been on the go since April and, although you get time off during your stays, it is never quite as relaxing as being with family, and I was definitely struggling at my last placement in Scotland. I spent two weeks with my sister and family in Sheffield – a city that is far less grim and grey than I had previously thought: in fact it has the highest number of trees per head of population than any other city in Europe! (Who works out these statistics, I wonder, and do they physically go out and count all the trees? – see what I mean about my brain working overtime?) Its several years since I was last there and we had some lovely drives out into the Peak District, where the heather was at its purple best, and many leisurely chats over the kitchen table of a morning. We also went to the Shrewsbury Folk Festival where we camped for several nights at a time of year when camping in Britain is becoming a bit of a challenge – there were two nights where it was so cold that I slept virtually fully clothed and was still cold – but the festival was great fun and the company wonderful. For the last week or so I have been back at my Mum’s where I have been reunited with a much-improved Jeni and also my winter wardrobe – hurray on both counts!

Recently, I have heard with sadness of the passing of two people that I know. I was going to call them ‘friends’ but as they have not been an active part of my life for many years, I am not sure how they should be referred to. One was the husband of my first husband’s first wife (who is also the godmother of my daughter!) – now there’s a complex relationship for you, and I had not seen him since my children were small, and didn’t know him very well before that, but he seemed like a good and lovely person on the few times we did meet. The other was, again, someone I hadn’t seen much in the last forty years but he was part of the fabric of my childhood: his parents and mine were friends before I was born and we saw them quite frequently all through my childhood where I openly hero-worshipped Ian (and to a lesser extent, his brothers) as they rampaged through life, climbing trees, riding motorbikes and getting into all sorts of minor mischief. Then, as I went into my teenage years, gentle flirting with Ian at family gatherings became the order of the day and, at one point we went on an experimental date – I think we both wanted to test whether a childhood friendship could change into a romantic one but we both mutually agreed that it couldn’t and I went off to college and he went back to Uni and that was that. Except of course, it wasn’t, as my parents were still friends with his parents and down through the years I have been kept up-to-date with the family’s ‘doings’. It was all a bit of a blur, to be honest, who was married to who, which children they had and when, divorces and heartaches and all of life’s happenings lived second-hand through my Mum’s letters and phone calls. Ian’s father died of Motor Neurone Disease a few years ago and, when Ian and his mother attended my father’s funeral, it was obvious that things were not as they should be with Ian. Shortly after that he too was diagnosed with Motor Neurone and has been getting inexorably worse ever since – it is a cruel disease as the last muscle to ever be affected by the illness is the heart muscle. However, I don’t want to dwell on the negative aspects of all this because, while I was in Scotland, I stayed with his mother (unofficial WWOOFing, again) and was invited to go and visit Ian. I was extremely worried about this as I have always been frightened by physical and mental disability and didn’t know how I would react to someone at such an advanced stage of the disease – I did not want to cause upset or offence with an inappropriate response however understandable, but Mary talked me through how he would be and off we went. It all went really well, and although shaken(I nearly wrote ‘shocked’ there but realise that I wasn’t) by the extent of Ian’s incapacity I had a lovely time reliving old memories and also meeting, over the course of a few visits, a couple of his sons and their families. That particular thread of my life’s fabric has been finished now – not broken, but lovingly knotted and woven back into the material, and that got me thinking of fabrics and threads and weavings in relation to my life, and it’s amazing how threads rarely get completely broken. I know that reading this blog at the moment there could be two ex-boyfriends, one ex-husband (the other is not computer literate, so it’s unlikely that he’ll be reading it), one ex-step-daughter, a step-aunty, a couple of ex-WWOOF hosts and several friends who I hope are not ‘ex’! Perhaps I’m not typical – perhaps other people don’t collect complex relationships like I do, but everyone I’ve ever met has helped to shape me into who I’ve become – some more than others, and I am loathe to lose those threads because, if I did, I might unravel completely!

This has been a different sort of blog to usual, but I hope you haven’t felt it was too introspective or self-indulgent, because, to me, it felt like the right time to acknowledge all the people that read this blog and to let you know that you all form the threads that make up the warp and weft of my life. Thank you.