I've Changed My Picture

The lovely view of Brookend Locks is from where I used to live, where I've walked with children and families for 25 years.  In my previous life.  In the town where I lived from age two, grew up, had children and lived my chaotic life until I was 46.

Friends, Children and Bella, doin the lock walk

That was then.  This is now.  Now I live 25 miles away and am finding new places to walk with my family and their dogs, and my friends and their dogs, and some of my children.  Now they are older, they can choose whether to scrape their sorry butts out of the door and are sometimes too lazy or computer addicted to come too.  Also, a little aspie thing, they don't know this place and these walks so don't want to do it.  I have to find another good walk for them to become familiar with and until I find it and drag them round it a few times the boys aren't keen.  Not for two of my boys is the exploration of the unknown, they need the familiar.  

Ruby's a good walk tester though.  She has wanderlust, like her dad.  Likes to look round a corner to see what's there.

View across the fields to our house

So what I need is new picture of where we live now.  A sort of this is where I'm at kind of a picture.  No, not a huddled jumper over clothes under dressing gown freezing in the corner of the sofa kind of picture.  No  beauty or inspiration there.  What is needed is a trawl through the computer files.

Jarrod hiding at the top of the sea wall on a day at the beach

The first thing is - gosh it takes so long for a technically inept person like me just to attach and arrange photos just how I want them.  The second is I am not and will never be a talented photographer.  The bit that goes from wow I want to keep that view/sight forever to oh that's a lovely photo just don't match up.  It gets lost in translation.  I'm a happy snapper.  I look at my family and think I ought to snap just to give them a reminder of a day or occasion.  A visual memory jogger.  

For years we didn't have a camera (couldn't afford one and couldn't have afforded development if we had).  The first camera we owned we bought (third hand) when I was pregnant with Kurtis.  It was great, it took two pictures for every one.  You had to send the negatives off to be developed though, which wasn't a problem in that slo mo world but the problem lay in finding a chemist that would do it.  Then when I was pregnant with Ruby the kids dad bought me a camera of my own.  Gosh I was so chuffed.  My sister and I took the kids on holiday to Worcester and I dopped it lens out, face down on a concrete path in a park.  That was the end of that.  Then I had a couple of camera phones.  Then I didn't.  Then last year, in order to start this blog, for my birthday, the kids dad's mum bought me a camera for my birthday.  It is my prized possession.  So prized, I rarely take it out and rarely use it. Duh.

I do have one picture that I took that I like though - this one of Kurtis on the beach at Brightlingsea.

So, at the top is the picture I have chosen.  I didn't take it.  Ruby did.  On her phone.  Doesn't need a posh camera, makes up for it with a good eye.

Other Peoples Blogs - Post Inspiration

Hello sweeties.

Over the past couple of days I have read two posts, one from John at Going Gently and one from Gertie Pye at Quiltingforengland and they have both inspired me to write a little anecdote from 1988.  

When he was 18 the kids dad had a motorbike accident and had a hind quarter amputation.  He was my toy boy I was 21.  At the time we had been living at his mums to save a deposit for a house.  In the autumn of that year we were given a council flat.  I worked in London at the time and used to leave at 7 in the morning and get home about 7.30 ish in the evening.  His mum used to come round in the day to check he was alright, make him some lunch, wash up, tidy round, do a bit of washing or hoovering.  She was checking on her lovely son she had just nearly lost and helping out his young, stressed, stretched girlfriend who was trying to be all things to all people.  I used to pitch up in the evening all knackered and bad tempered to find the old busybody (old ha she was younger than I am now) had been in my house interferring in my life, telling the world I couldn't cope and was crap at everything.  Now the truth is I couldn't cope and the more anyone tried to help me the more defensive and angry I got.  I would whisk myself into a frenzy and shout and bang and go to bed and get up the next morning and do it all again.

Fast forward a year, kids dad needed operations that needed post op care so I gave up work to do this.  We couldn't afford a TV or a Licence or the electricity to run it so we didn't have one but we did have a radio and I listend all day and half the night.  Like his mum I became an Archers addict.  Ruth was a young farmer and Gill her mother in law used to go to her house to help.  They had a big row over it.  MIL came round when I was listening and said "oh, I'll get a bottle of wine and catch you up".  We sat there long into the night while she caught me up on all the characters and then we had a conversation about the Ruth/Gill situation.  UH-huh you know where I'm going.  Suffice to say, in the words of Johnny Cash "I walked away with a different point of view".

That evening is one of the salient points in my life, when I learnt that no matter how stressed a person is, it is always useful to look at something from someone else's point of view.  I am stubborn and often it takes me while to concede that I am not the most always right person on the planet.  But hopefully, I don't hurt as many people as I used to.

And over the years, those extra bags of shopping, bit of hoovering, washing up etc have been helpful and not just  to me but also to another mother whose children were growing and leaving and who needed to still be needed.  And when my eldest goes to university in September that will be me.