Last Monday it was a case of coming back down to earth with a bump. I knew that after having Robbie at home for just over two weeks it was going to be hard for both of us to readjust to the demands of our usual weekday routine. I hate the early starts, even on a good day 5am feels like the middle of the night!
Robbie loves his job and usually after a couple of weeks off he can't wait to get back to work, but this time it was different. The prospect of some very tight deadlines when he got back would usually have made him more eager to return, but not this time. He could happily have taken another couple of weeks off. I think his time off gave us a chance to learn (or re-learn) some very valuable lessons. For most of that time I still had to work and to attend to my usual daily responsibilities, so we couldn't go away - who wants to go away in February anyway! Instead we learnt to take pleasure in the ordinary little things in everyday life and to value what we have. Most important of all, we enjoyed the luxury of time. We had a lot of fun, we took time to visit and appreciate some of the interesting places on our own doorstep and we had time for each other.
That was the easy bit, the secret is to make sure that we hang on to those important things when back on the treadmill of normal life. Last week was hard, perhaps harder than either of us expected, but we were strong and together we got through it. This week will have it's trials too, not least because Robbie is in so much pain, but we will deal with it together. We will make time to talk, to laugh and to enjoy special moments even on the most challenging day.
We stored up so many good memories while Robbie was off work. On the last day of his leave we went to the Rural Shopping Yard at Castle Ashby. It was like a spring afternoon, and we had a lovely time. Robbie bought some real ale mustard from the deli and there was even a shop named after him - Mr B's Traditional Sweet Shop. It was fun looking at the shops and enjoying the beautiful countryside but what made it really special was sharing the experience with Robbie.
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” Charles Swindoll
If my brain was like a computer I would be able to erase old files and junk to free up memory space. Instead I find myself struggling to remember what I went to the shop for but still able to remember useless chunks of information from years ago. On Thursday evening I found myself sitting in a parking space at the local Tesco which is attached to a filling station. As I waited for Robbie I glanced up at the signs above the fuel pumps Esso, and suddenly an advertising jingle replayed itself in my head. "The Esso sign means happy motoring, the esso sign means happy motoring, so call on the Esso sign", I dread to think how long that little gem has been lurking in a dusty corner of my brain. I looked it up when I came got home and YouTube alleged that it was from the 1950s, I will admit to being a child of 1960s but I wasn't even a twinkle in the 1950s!
Anyway by the time we got home I had skipped nimbly over the stepping stones of memory and recited a sizeable chunk of a Robert Browning poem to Robbie. I have probably mentioned before that Robbie is a man of varied and surprising tastes, but I may not have revealed that he likes me to recite poetry to him. For some reason my maternal grandmother cropped up in conversation and I told him that The Pied Piper by Robert Browning was her party piece - she could empty a room with it! For those who are not familiar with it, it is a lovely poem but it is very, very long. She knew the whole poem by heart and as a young child I thought it was the coolest thing to get her to recite it for me, it fees as if I have known that poem for ever. Reciting it brings back many happy memories, but it is no practical use.
Anyway, back to computers, I have been doing battle with my computer for some time, or to be more accurate, doing battle with the Blogger template I use for the blog. I have tamed most of the gremlins in the system or at least found ways to work around them, but when I wanted to change the layout slightly it started acting the fool. It left my text looking as if it was hanging in mid air, all I wanted to was to have a distinct dark coloured background with light text in my chosen font. It seemed like a fairly simple thing to do, but Blogger wasn't having it. I wasted hours trying every way I could think of to get it to do what I wanted without success. I don't like to be beaten and in the end I found a rather clunky solution, I created what I wanted elsewhere then turned it into a PDF file and imported it. It worked! There should have been a much better way of doing it but at least it is done.
So now I have my next battle, trying to the make the 'contact me' button work. So far it has led me a merry dance, but if I am capable of keeping Robbie more or less on the straight and narrow, I am certainly not going to be defeated by a contact button!!
Sometimes when I sit down to write the blog I cant write about the most pressing issues, thoughts and feelings as it would either be breeching the confidence of someone who would not want that issue made public or it would make extremely boring reading. That was the case today, so I did what I usually do when this happens, I clicked on to a site for writers looking for inspiration. There was a long list of questions, but the one that jumped out at me was 'describe yourself in one word'. That was a fairly easy question for me to write about because my special word was given to me a very long time ago and over the years I have grown into it.
I went to a very traditional school that put a strong emphasis on academic achievement. The teaching methods may seem rather old fashioned by today's standards but I am glad that we had to learn so much by heart, because it has stayed with me all my life and the poetry in particular has brought me so much pleasure. From the age of 9 we had spoken English lessons with the formidable Mrs Nichol who could strike fear into even the bravest heart without even raising her voice. We had a textbook called Poems for Pleasure and we were expected to choose a poem from the book, write it out in an exercise book, learn it by heart and then recite it in the lesson. She would hear half the class each lesson so the whole process worked on a fortnightly cycle.
When my name was called I took my exercise book across to her desk then walked across to the corner opposite her desk and recited my poem. I was fairly pleased with myself as I had remembered it without prompting and I hoped I'd read with enough expression and meaning to satisfy. There was a long pause when I finished the poem then her deep terrifying voice boomed out "Idiosyncratic, what is the meaning of idiosyncratic?" I was frozen to the spot, the word was not in the poem and I had no idea what it meant. I told her that I did not know. She replied "idiosyncratic, meaning peculiar unto one's self; learn it and remember it because you will need it for the rest of your life to excuse your spelling!" My spelling has improved since those days but the word has remained with me ever since. I developed a great respect for Mrs Nichol, she was certainly formidable but she was an amazing teacher with a very good sense of humour.
I like the word idiosyncratic, it sums me up very well. I do things my way, I am not a sheep, I don't follow blindly I make my own decisions and I have my own opinions. That may irritate people sometimes, but I like it that way and I am not going to change, so don't waste time trying. If I had to choose a second word to describe me it would be 'determined' (or as my family would say 'stubborn'). It is not so easy to think of just one word to describe Robbie, he is a man of many words and one word would never be enough to describe him. At the moment the only word that even comes close is impossible!
