End Notes

As I began to wake this morning I remembered that it's coming up for six years since I started this blog. I did so at the suggestion of Kim in order to practise my writing. But it's been much more than that.

It got me though the hardest five years of my life,* providing me with community, friendship, and a reason to write about positive things. It helped me find goodness in my darkest hours, and I found it enormously beneficial as I struggled to process and harmonise all the conflicting elements of my life. And, crucially, it drew interesting, artistic, engaged, engaging people which allowed me to believe I couldn't possibly be as dull as I'd thought I must be. Or as monstrous as my husband tried to tell me I was. For a long time I thought it would always be my only social life.

But then I was asked to set up and run creative writing classes for community learning and development, and I met actual people in my home town every bit as interesting, artistic, engaged and engaging as those I met on the blog. The classes were a success and I was asked to do more in another nearby town too. And those people were great. And the odd thing was all of these people seemed to like me. I started being invited out for coffee, to lunch, and to the pub after classes. And there I met Dave, last January, on the very first post writing class pub visit.

By this time I knew my marriage was over (thanks to very illuminating relationship therapy sessions), but assumed I'd live alone. I have never lived on my own, and was really looking forward to it, even though I had no illusions about it being in anything other than a low-rent bedsit. I had talked to my sister about moving back to Kent where I grew up, and was positively salivating about being so near to London, so falling in love with a bloke four doors down came as somewhat of a surprise. Him falling in love with me even more so, and when he asked me to move in, and I heard myself saying ok...

2012 was my year of magical living, if I'd been given a year to live at the start of it I wouldn't have chosen any other way to spend it. Now this blog has done its job. I should probably have put it out of its misery last spring, yet I kept it limping on. However, for various reasons I will do so now. This is to be my last post here. Thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing your lives with me. Thank you for your support, and friendship. I see many of you on Facebook where I have more control over who can eavesdrop on conversations, and I have email contacts for some of you as well, so I'm not abandoning the friends I've made here. Should anyone not yet a friend on Facebook want to become one you need only ask, and I can also be found on Twitter and Pinterest where I indulge in different types of dialogue (Twitter, for me, is mostly about trying to save the world, Pinterest is about luxuriating in it).

Here's one last photograph:

Snowy Sunday on the river.

Bye, bye.





*You know the story: husband's long term affair discovered; attempt to repair marriage; philosophy degree; masters degree (creative writing); realisation that marriage wasn't responding positively to fixing attempts; frantic rethink about repair methods; near death experience; realisation that I wasn't able to help husband...