A lot to Answer For

Last night, I, yes me, renowned hermit, Canada reject and committed social degenerate attended a house party thrown in honour of the Yoga Class of 2010 (I promise I will stop harping on about this very soon) by the very talented and alluring Anatomy teacher and...what can I say - I had an excellent time. 

She lives in an amazing house near Casa Loma in Toronto and many might actually mistake it for Casa Loma, if you didn't know what you were looking for (the one-way system doesn't help).  I'm staring at the temperature gauge in the car and it's telling me it's minus 13 outside and I'm thinking yeah right, like you don't know Mr. Wind Chill - that sneaky bastard. I feel a tug at my sleeve, it's my recluse self, saying, 'oh, this is terrible, let's go home' but the fun seeker in me said, 'No! F- off you recluse muppet! keep going!'  Finally after driving through the weather equivalent of Pre-Menstrual Tension - one minute diagonal and blinding sleet swirling so ferociously around the car I half expect to take off and the next vertical winds that could bend a lampost to sudden stillness;  biting cold serenity - I pulled into her drive. 

I'm so glad I did.

Stepping into a house full of famliar faces who have shared with me a meaningful experience - all happy to see me, well I felt like Norm walking into Cheers - I just hope I didn't look like him. 

I was engaging and engaged (though I suck at Taboo) and found myself able to carry a conversation with sincerity - no need for small talk.  I felt really comfortable; I felt almost like my old self.

Could this mean I've found my mojo? Actually, I think it was more a case of  mojo finding me.  To its credit , it patiently waiting for me to emerge from the suburban basement. If I wasn't 4 weeks from leaving, I'd have to say that in the words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, 'life found a way'.  The friend pyramid had started taking shape.  Of course my timing is impeccable.

I felt the spark of something sustainable fizzle over pot luck dinner and bubbly and as I turned left onto Spadina at 2am, after a night filled with love, light and laughter, I felt that same spark snuff out to release a wisp of grey smoke. Happy to have had that one taste of belonging in a place where I have for so long felt like the 5th wheel, I was overjoyed at the release and the realisation that...well, if it can happen here, everything will be okay wherever I end up and this time, I know what to do.  I also felt intensely sad.

Yes, I've wanted to go home for a long time and that hasn't changed.  It sort of can't and it's not because I've decided I want to stay, because I don't, there remains a lot that doesn't work for me here (from a practical perspective) to justify that decision, but I don't blame Canada anymore.  Therein lies the most enormous learning.

My job now is to make me work in London and London work for me and my family - especially my family - in a way that I wasn't enabling before.  I lost my way a long time ago and I realise now that my experience in Canada had to be such in order that I find my barings again.  No more 2 year sabbaticals for this kid...of which I've already had too many.

Yep, I've got a lot to answer for...but life's been a real trip so far - I look forward to the next leg. 

From Nurtured to Nurturer

The end of one very important journey that started almost inconsequentially in September 2009 was marked last night at an emotional graduation ceremony that took place in the very studio where each and ever graduate had sweated blood and tears to complete a gruelling 200 hour training course of which I hasten to add, not a single minute will ever be regretted whatever we go on to do individually.   It has been real and we are now all tied by that experience for ever and a day.  In many ways, I feel I got very lucky with my group.  I will have trouble finding a more genuine and sincere group of people, but that is exactly what I set out to do from now on: seek or create (or boot out - cruel to be kind and all that jazz).

Meet the proud newly qualified Yogi:

If I'm looking a little haggard - training, even in Yoga can be hard.  200 hours over 4 months plus classes (3 per week was mandatory) and projects...let's say it wasn't exactly Zen but it is now and the time has come to give back.  The process starts this weekend where I am truly blessed and honoured to have been asked to assist a Yoga for Haiti class, the proceeds of which will go to Medecins sans Frontiers in Haiti.

It is tradition to give new yogis - or yogis in the making - as this is truly a life long practice and I fear I will not in one lifetime really achieve that status (but I'm going to give it my best shot), a string of Mala beads (see this link for the meaning of http://www.swamij.com/108.htm.  I'm wearing mine in the picture.  These ones are made from Sandalwood and give off a strong but sweet musky smell of a life less ordinary. 

I walked into this feeling vulnerable as a child, truly lost and needy and wondering whether this would turn out to be just another expensive hobby but I walked out last night as secure as Mother Earth.  I know what I must do.

That isn't to say that I've become superhuman or anything - I'm already fretting about getting the nipper into a new school in London; what council tax will be in a new borough and general cost of living in the UK.  And then I think, nevermind that, I don't even have toilet paper in the house at the moment or milk...we had to eat dry Mini Wheats for breakfast (bit crunchy but not bad at all).  Ahem.  So you see, there is much to repair but I have the tools.

I leave you with a couple of my moments in time with some of the Class of 2010!.  Cheerio - the supermarket beckons.

Bubble wrap or styrofoam beans?

The house sold in one day.  Did I tell you?  It's madness and proof that meditation works.  It works like praying does - all I asked for was a smooth transition - it's turned out to be smoother than a Jamaican bob slayer's bob slay blades but faster.
 
The house inspection: (...let me just take an arrogant sip of vintage wine here and swallow irritatingly loud...) A walk in the park.  Not one thing came up...not a single cotton picking thing wrong with the house.  HA! I say - for this is the house of despair.  The emotional tomb!  I guess inspectors are not trained to check auras.  No, I jest - it wasn't the house, the house it fine.  It's the inhabitants. Luckily we don't get judged or else the house would never get sold. Ever.

No, now it's time to sort and pack.  Not sure what I hate more but it must be done.  Thankfully, as anyone who has ever visited us will attest - and knows me from before; I owned more furniture when I lived in a squat in South London.  (It was a phase and my mum soon put an end to that).  It shouldn't take long unless of course I let the pyjama king help in which case we may end up having to rebuild the house from its foundation up, for he is capable of trying to pull fixtures out of ceilings as if they were baby calfs from a cow thinking, genuinely believing that he was in fact helping.

I will have more trouble deciding which shoes (I never wear) make it back to London and which get to live on a wire shoe rack at a Cancer Charity shop for all eternity.  The Balenciagas will have to come with, as will the boots I bought in Venice but I will have to think long and hard about all the cheapo shoes I got in Aldo.  Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against Aldo - in fact I may very well have become one of its best customers during the summer of 2008 as I slowly descended into bi-polarity.  But to be honest when space = money on a pallette - the mass-made flats will have to go as will all the stuff from Joe Fresh.  Joe is Canada's version of Primark cept you need a car to get to these monster superstores so by the time you factor the petrol and all that ...it's actually cheaper to buy at Harrods.   So, thinking about it, I might have to keep the Joe stuff afterall and get rid of the Old Navy rags.

Then there are the books and CDs...do I really need the CDs?  They're all on the I-Pod...which won't work in the UK because I bought it here.  Fuck - the CDs come with.  Ok - I'll get rid of the Twilight books - they are rubbish anyway and they take up more room than a sofa.  No idea why I got so into them.  They are for pre-pubescent 13 year olds whose hormones are going through the equivalent of London's 1990 Poll Tax Riots.  Oh, yes I remember - I was having a nervous breakdown and it was the only thing I could handle.  Terrible ending...just about acceptable if you've been housebound for 20 years, living off microwave food and just graduated from Mills & Boon romances....but that is only my opinion. Not fact.  I repeat not based on fact just my bo-jangled reality and actually at the time it was just what I needed - so in fact - please read 3 times a day for 14 days and have your prescription reduced before starting the next one because it ends you know...after 4 books and then you have to live with what's left.

I'm ok now. And I must go fetch The Lish from daycare and begin the hell that is known as 'the bedtime routine'.  Luckily I have the meatballs I made yesterday - I wasn't joking about stirring the meat sauce - look:

So I won't need to 'cook' tonight.  Heaven.  Jim Jam king is out so I shall finish the vintage red alone with Aragorn and Legolas and hope to be comatose by the time he swings in like a silverback gorrilla or if the Sambuca makes an appearance (and it is very likely since the good Doctor is there - we'll talk about him another time) - like a herd of wildebeest tearing down the house with their hooves at 5am.  It is a farewell dinner with his best friends in all the world afterall.  I know how sad that will be...so all is pre-forgiven.

Stir the Meat Sauce

Do you remember the part in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta is arranging for Lois the nanny and a relative's baby to be cocaine mules?  Meanwhile he has to deliver guns to Jimmy, take the coke to Sandy's to cut with Quinine, detour to his wife's mother's to hide the guns that Jimmy now doesn't want, make a red herring trip to the supermarket to throw off the helicopters that have been following him all day and STIR THE MEAT SAUCE so it doesn't stick to the pan.

Well, apart from all the illegal stuff there, that is pretty much how my next few weeks will be including a possible early trip to Madrid to sort a banking issue out.  Christ on a cracker - I'm going to need all the mantras, mudras, meditation and masugganahs I can get to make this a smooth transition.  I have been praying (my kind of praying) for an easy ride - actually I think it's going to be ok, I just hope it's not going to be OK in the Goodfella's sense where Ray gets done and the only way to stay out of jail is to cut a deal.   Mind you if I do have to cut a deal, I guess I will and that will be ok too.  Everything is going to be A-OKAY.  Can you sense the manic edge?  

But the house has been put through the house version of a car wash and tune up, so of course now (that we are soon to vacate it) the house is in the best shape ever.  It's always the way.  I've sold 3 houses I've lived in so far and every single time they've really only started coming into bloom the week they go on the market.  So then I find myself, wrung out, strung out and sitting in a house that I love and don't feel like selling anymore.

Odd then that up until that point I seemed quite happy to live with leaking toilets and dripping taps, gashes in walls and stains on carpets.  Typical.

I have to wonder whether it's a trait or just a symptom of never having really committed to any house.  I have a feeling that the next place we get will in fact finally be that home I only ever see during the For Sale period.

The home inspection happens today.  I'm feeling good with a healthy dose of nerves added to the mix but once this is out of the way then it's time to stir that meat sauce because the extravaganza is only just beginning.

When small things are larger than life

I will begin by telling you that pending the usual - we've sold the house... in less than 2 days.  So, I guess Canada has somewhat recovered from the so called credit crunch.  Well, I certainly hope so and good luck to everyone.

So, it appears I'm up to my old tricks again.   I'm leaving a place; community if you will, just as things were beginning to feel familiar however let us not romanticize familiarity as we all know what it can breed except let me, if I may, differentiate between transient familiarity that leads people to take stuff for granted and the sort that makes you yearn for the comfort of friendly faces and places - as I understand it.  For instance: I have discovered some shortcuts around town, yes that is true and much obliged am I to them and I know where to find secret ATMs or cheap parking lots that you only discover with time and the help of a little local acquaintance.  I can also unreservedly recommend the bulgarwheat salad at Cultures on Simcoe and King and while these insights are a product of 'familiarity', they are passing commodities with no lasting resonance. 

Let's see.  There is a place on Charing Cross Road in London called Gaby's that makes the best tabouleh salad I've ever tasted, never found a comparable tabouleh salad anywhere else in the world (or the parts I've visited).  I believe the secret is in the hint of mint, the quantities of which are known only to the chef.  Anyway, this tabouleh salad was purchased one late night in 1989 in London and consumed on the night bus to South London with my friend Monkey Girl after a night of abandon at the Electric Ballroom in Camden.   It was so delicious that well, here we are 21 years later and I still think about it every now and again.  Or do I?  Am I really that enamoured with the salad? I think you know what I'm trying to say.

So you see, the memory of the bulgarwheat salad on Simcoe and King, purchased alone on a cold trek back to Union for a long and tedious ride home after a day of more lone anti-adventures won't last past March 4th; though I hasten to add, it is very tasty.  No, in the words of Madonna - "I want more" ...from a memory.

That isn't to say that I don't have memories from my time here and I'm going to break from tradition here and actually have something nice to say without a sniff of sarcasm - even though I have been to hell and back and may have, just may have, suffered the teeniest of nervous breakdowns around September of last year induced by isolation and despair - no I can tell you that I will fondly think of my colleagues at the bookstore who are constantly devising ingenious ways of amusing fellow co-workers.  I daresay some old man in Burlington is reading 'Scouts in Bondage', (recommended as a Staff Pick) right now thinking; "This is not at all what I expected!" 

I will not fail to regail friends with the story of how I must be the only person (aside from my fellow yogi graduates) to have been in a graduating class that had someone dismissed for gross misconduct!  A yoga student!! Can there BE a bigger contradiction in terms? I will dine out on that anecdote for some time.  And then I will tell everyone about the wonderful teachers I studied alongside.

My friends at that awful place that I mistook for an office of business and whiled away 5 months of jumping through hoops like a poodle in a circus tent will also people my thoughts as I leave.  They don't deserve the treatment they get but thankfully two of my four closest collegues have moved onto bigger and better things...which believe me doesn't take much when you are benchmarking against that place. This is my OPINION and god damn it all to hell we fought two wars that I may have the freedom to express it.  So that is mine.  I thank you.

I have sobbed at the thought that The Lish will not so easily get to paint and play Cookie Monster Bingo with her 'mannie' quite as often as she has been able to by being 20 minutes down the road.  Mannie is The Lish's name for her grandmother, the world's greatest grandmother I might add.  But I know the bond that has been forged between them these past two years is unbreakable and for that I do not regret coming.  Leaving however is the right decision, long term and I know that in my soul too.

I aim to live the rest of my mothering, wifely and human days in an attitude of gratitude with that knowledge.

Like Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist, I travelled half the world to find something I realise now I never lost just misplaced.

The Good, the Bad, the Sad and the Absurd

So, the For Sale sign has gone up (again- that's twice in two years) but this time it's for real, not that wanting to sell and go wasn't a genuine wish the first time round but times were bad for the economy and the numbers just weren't adding up.  Also last time round the plan was to trade down and find something in Toronto which as I've discovered in relatively little time doesn't make a snatch of difference to winter temperatures or length thereof, (5 months of Hiver is Spanish for torture) or the fact that, I just want to go home - so actually Thank God we didn't, I mean can you imagine? Anyway, listen this post is not about more moaning (repetitive? moi?)

Instead and for posterity (or posterior) I've produce a pictorial of things that have for some reason amused, bemused or be-joyed during my incarceration. K?

I mean look at this!  The local supermarket stores its shopping carts in such a way that the pedestrian has to do this...

That's right - dice with death and walk on the road in order to get to the front entrance - ABSURD!

Ok, now look at this delightful view of the carpark from the local Starbucks.  I'm telling you - this is life in the fast lane.  What? I'm making this up? Starbucks wouldn't come to a place like this?  Oh yes it did.  SAD. 

Right, now look at this.  What a lovely street decoration isn't it? Except it has been plonked right in front of the door to the dentist...by the dentist.  MARVELLOUS! 

Here are more car parks and my absolute favourite - the strip mall - Oh how awesome this place is!

This is all I have to say about life in the suburbs.  Notice the absense of life.

Ok, now for something almost beautiful, if it wasn't so weird.  Work it out for yourself.

The entrance to my favourite shop in Hamilton; it's called Pure and it's on Locke Street.  This is Locke Street:

and this is inside Pure:

It sells perfumes, ointments and jewels of many colours.

AND FINALLY... this is where my husband leaves his pyjamas every day.  One day I am going to set fire to them.

So, you see, I simply must leave.

The thing about revising...

..is that it's the world's biggest drag.  I am supposed to be revising right now for my last Yoga exam - it's a written exam in case you were wondering how you are supposed to revise for Yoga.  It's not a competition so no one will ever be tested on flexibility, which is very lucky since I have the flexibility of a rubber dog bone.  My calf muscles are more like tennis balls, an anatomical reminder of high heels and rock climbing (not simultaneously, unless it's Christmas).

No, I must now memorize the Sanskrit names of over 30 poses, know how to guide people into and out of them without mishap and when I tell you that Tiriang Mukaikapada Paschimottanasana is a simple one legged forward bend, you can be sure I have a long afternoon ahead of me.

But I'm excited at the thought that after this...well, I guess I'm almost a Yoga teacher.  I can tell you that I passed Anatomy, Philosophy and the Hatha part of the exam...so it's a definite possibility.  Otherwise, it's back to PR...(NOOOOOOOO, you will never take me alive!) - so you see I simply HAVE to pass.

I am due to assist 4 classes this month, an exercise I'm very much looking forward to.  I've already assisted one and it provided the most enormous high.  I think I may just have found something to replace Rye and Coke - something that I can truly be passionate about.

Ok - I'm going underground now.  I'll be back.

In the meantime, it's only minus 11 so get your bikinis out - I'll meet you in the water park later.

It was 'Cached' all the time

I have no idea what cached means but I'm nothing if not tenatious.  I found the missing blogpost - it was in Google's version of Siberia - or Cached.  Anyhow, this is Dec. 31st's blogpost.  Let it never be said that I didn't close the year out properly!!

Dec. 31st Keep Calm and Curry on.

I've binged and I've purged. Now for something different.


It's New Year's Eve, the house is quiet. The Lish and papa smurf are both napping - it's adorable. I'm sipping Spanish Tempranillo (Shiraz) after a hectic morning of fixing toilets, replenishing bog roll, doing a mound of laundry the size of a boulder, braving the Lululemon sale (extravagantly priced chain of Yoga apparel shops in Canada that you simply HAVE to own something from) - an experience not unlike what I imagine falling into the lion enclosure dripping with beef chimichangas would be - I barely made it out alive - but I did snag and I mean SNAG a pair of ultra thin magic spandex leggings that can make a 300lb woman look like a size 6 (blue and dead from asphyxiation) but beautiful in a vampire-like way, on my engagement ring of all things...ominous. Still, you can't tell and they were on sale so whatever.

I also had to stop for Champagne (which I've already started on of course - and why not?) I don't want to risk falling asleep before midnight and miss out altogether - a very definite possibility, especially since like I said, I've already started and honestly I will never understand why doctor's don't prescribe Champagne instead of sleeping pills -but I digress. I mean let's be honest, Christmas is about presents and New Year is about sleeping pills, I mean booze, at least until I become fully and properly enlightened.

Anyway, to continue then with today's wearying tasks: I queued 7 months for a small bag of king prawns which I will prepare al perejil (parsley) for New Year's Day dinner (a family tradition) and then rushed home to fit in some Nidra meditation before having to pick the sproglette up from daycare, only to realise I'd forgotten shampoo and more shit tickets. Oh we've had the most awful case of bum gravy sweep the family but that's another blog (or bog) post altogether.

I'm possibly the only person I know that finds making time for meditation (something I live for) more stressful than if I just didn't do it at all. But thankfully it's all done now and I feel good. Great even. Again as with every year, the eternal optimist (just a minute, waiting for gaffawing to stop from the peanut gallery), I feel like I'm once again on the brink of the best year yet and I base this in true manic depressive fashion on the fact that it really couldn't get much worse. A spectrum of emotions in that sentence a bit like the pangram: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (contains all the letters of the alphabet).

Overall the feeling I have about 2010 is once of calm and hope. I'm more concerned with what we will all eat tonight than I am about selling up and hauling ass back to the UK over the next few months.

Curry - has to be, though on second thoughts, have I bought enough toilet tissue? Best get the order in before the chef closes the kitchen and worry about the rest later.

Happy New Year everyone!!

Case of the disappearing blog post

It appears I have misplaced my blog entry for Dec. 31st. It was here one moment and gone the next. It's baffling and disturbing and I feel very co-dependant right now. I have to do something about this attachment business. I guess they are just words but I'm thinking it might not be an awful idea to engage in some sort of techy back up exercise so that I can play the 'did' - 'did not' game with whoever it is that stole the damn thing. Was it you Google? Was it something I said?


Actually this has made me think a lot about possessions and emotional attachment to 'things' as I face the gargantuan task of packing up a 3 storey home so that it will fit neatly onto one pallet bound for the shores of Blightey. I have a matter of weeks in which to do this so, no need to panic. Actually, as I look around I realise I kind of have this attachment thing down to a fine art, either that or it's true that when you don't commit in your heart to something, you don't really feather it so to speak. To wit: packing will be easy.

I have at best a couple of possessions I truly feel compelled to bring home with me. A Selfridges bed and a cherry wood bench. Not bad for 38 years.

But I will probably bring home a few more bits and pieces for comfort's sake. The really important stuff for me appears to be the intangible. I am irritatingly good at holding onto the vapid - you know past gripes, embarrassing episodes but also good stuff too. I was in bed the other night and for no reason at all I remembered a silly thing that happened to an old boyfriend that still to this day makes me laugh out loud.

We lived in a flat with a front door that had the exasperating habit of swinging shut usually as you bent down to lift groceries or something thereby requiring you to go through the whole rigmarole of freeing a hand and fiddling around for the keys again - that is if you were lucky not to have already put them down somewhere inside. The landlord, a Mr. Rahman, came round one day to say hello and put up the rent or some such landlordy thing. I was working at a record store in Piccadilly - believe me when I say it doesn't get more central than Piccadilly on a Saturday afternoon. Somehow the door shut behind both said boyfriend, who was shoeless (it was a Saturday afternoon afterall) and the landlord, who had his whole family waiting in the car outside.

Imagine my surprise to see the landlord appear in the Easy Listening section of aforementioned record store asking for the keys to the flat. My boyfriend meanwhile was sandwiched, barefoot - which explains why it fell to the landlord to come into Europe's largest and busiest record store - between his plump wife and far from starving daughter, in the back of a Volvo Estate illegally parked in front of the statue of Eros. I have to say, Mr. Rahman was very gallant about it all.

The landlord, a devout Hindu from Gujarat must have seen the funny side eventually as we went onto stay 5 years in that flat without any subsequent repercussion.

So anyway, back to the point I was trying to make. If the ship sinks with all my worldly possessions, aside from the bed and the cherry wood bench - it will not matter to me as long as I retain priceless and precious memories of this sort.

If you should  however come across my December 31st post, I would very much like to see it again  - please return it care of the above blog.

We have got to stop meeting this way

Word of the day: bump.  I've reached that point in a new place where you start to bump into people you know.  It only took 2 and a half years (I mean who has that kind of time? apparently I do).  In part, it makes me happy (oh the irony that in less than two months I'm gone) and what's left irritates the hell out of me, that it took THAT long to start bumping into people you know.

The first bump is cheating and so I suppose is the fourth but I have to give credit where it's due and bumps 2 and 3 were genuinely unexpected - except bump 2 is someone off the telly, so techinically speaking I don't really know him nor him me which explains why he quickened his pace on realising there was a tail on him.  And to be fair bump 3 is a hairdresser I sought out.  So actually, the word for today is banal or sad that after 2 plus years the only people I bump into are people off the telly or stylists (whose place of work I decide to stalk).

The first 'bump' was a girl from my yoga school who was taking a yoga class she doesn't normally take that I usually go to (you following me so far) - so it was nice to see her - oh god, I am actually starting to bore myself here and honestly if I wanted a long boring story, I have my life.  The other person was the man who plays my husband in real life.  We were on the same train coming home from Toronto - that was just a nice surprise but of course, he's my husband not a random friend.  A friend.  Hmmmmn - how lovely will it feel when in London I start bumping into those again.

OK - enough of the maudlin self-pity for just a couple of minutes while I tell you who the famous person was.  Do you watch Departures?  Hosted by the luckiest Canadians in all of The Tundra?  you know?  Those two?  They travel all over the world, filming all their shits and giggles for the Outdoor Life Network.  If you don't get cable you won't know who I mean.  In this programme, these two buddies basically backpack around the world courtesy of Cogeco and Rogers. There is a sensible one who tries to offset his antiseptic common sense by sporting a pierced eyebrow and then there is the other one, the village idiot who you wouldn't leave your dog with for a weekend; the man child who could fuck up the tying of his shoe laces to the point where it would somewhere down the line cause a plane to crash or some such moronic happening.

As luck would have it, I bumped into the village idiot who was walking so fast I was having to run just to keep up in the hope he would grace his fan with a picture that I might post right here for your viewing pleasure but he was wearing earphones the size worn by a fighter pilot and there was no way he was going to hear the whinging voice of a cold Brit laden with Yoga paraphernalia.  I tried. Sorry.

That's when I got the idea to get my hair cut.  As compensation for failing you, I give you...my new haircut:

Obviously not, but this is far more interesting.  Cheerio dears.  I'm off to stand by the window.

One Day at a Time

First post for 2010 and all I want to talk about is what a lovely day I had yesterday but good news doesn't sell does it? Gosh life is long isn't it? Shall we have a little rest?


So here is what I know for sure about the coming few weeks. My part-time jobette at well known Canadian chain of bookstores ends and not a moment too soon. Books rock. Let me just say that one more time: Books are the present, the past and the future. I don't care whether you buy them online, in stores, used or electronically - they are the coolest things since Vinyl LPs and have outlived them by decades so anyway, that's all I have to say on the subject of books.

Retail on the other hand sucks donkey balls. It's not so much the whole dealing with 'people' side of things because often it's a joy to help people find a good book and contrary to most of my UK friends' and husband's opinions about me and my 'people skills' - I think I fared very well indeed. No, retail literally sucks. It sucks your weekends away and any traditional family time. For example at 6:30pm on Christmas Eve, if you still need to be shopping for anything (let alone Christmas presents) - you simply don't care enough about anyone at all and therefore don't deserve shops to still be open for you.

The other thing I know for sure is that the branch I was working for is full of creative and talented individuals who are truly pursuing their dreams from filmmaking to graphic illustration, they all take on these roles as a means to an end. Don't ever underestimate people who work in bookshops and please don't be rude to them because a.) they are likely more qualified than you are and b.) they don't get paid enough to be have to take any bullshit. But it's up to you to decide in the end.

I know too that I will be a qualified, certified (certifiable) bona fide, honest to goodness, ground to air Yoga instructor who will arrive in London sometime in March ready to rumble. I have packing, home & car repairs; the sale of the century to organize, a few farewells to attend to and a lot of Yoga to enjoy in between.

My husband is all about planning for the next step, a.k.a The Future; connecting with the right networks and the small matter of accommodation etc... - it's what he is all about these days and to be fair, it's kind of his job which he does extraordinarily well but me? well I've learnt my lesson about living in the future and building expectations thereof. No, outside of the things I've listed, I have today and that is all I'm going to concern myself with. Tomorrow will take care of itself in good time.