You might have seen my twitter posts with #InAField as the tag over the last couple of years. Initially they were accompanied by pictures of our candlelabra as we ate in the evening. Most recently the pictures have included boots, tweed jackets and sometimes have even been taken from the back of a carriage as we have careered around a field. After a lifetime of not being sporty I find myself a competitor in a sport so far removed from my working class background that it makes me gasp. Think of Ben Hur, minus the wheel spurs obviously, and complete with a woman hanging onto the back of a carriage…
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Regrets – I have a few, but then again …
How far do you go back? Before I was a woman, before I felt autonomous, before I was a mother, before I was a wife, before I knew, before I understood, before I could, before I knew I should, before when I thought I was loved, before I knew I was loved? I don’t know about you but regrets seem to come with a sense of responsibility and capability. If I look back I can only do it through the eyes of the person I am now. If I revisit places I feel I have fallen short, the ones where I have real regrets, I do it with a sense…
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#F4TFriday – pride
but throughout it all, underneath the upset, the tears, and the turmoil I had a calm centre created from the knowledge that I had been truly seen for the first time in my life by someone whose opinion I trusted and I made Him proud.
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Do not disturb
The sound of the key turning in the lock jolted me from my reverie. I knew that he would be standing behind me, surveying the sight of me in my underwear, obediently kneeling next to the bed. I’d chosen a matching set of dark grey silk and lace. I thought that the colour showed my pale skin at its best. I knew that the knickers cupped and displayed my bum well because of times spent in front of the mirror trying to create the perfect bum pic to send him. I hoped my real life body lived up to the picture’s teasing promise. I imagined the sign on the hotel…
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Friends – a #F4tFriday post
She found me raging in the university library about the lack of books, about the assumption that mature students could afford either the time to search for secondhand books or the money to buy them new. I was raging, spitting derision for the place, for the expectations and hiding behind that rage from my fear that I had made a terrible mistake. She saw my rage and didn’t hide from it, she knew it wasn’t aimed at her and wonder of wonders, what made me spiky and difficult to befriend for others became the reason she liked me. She always knew that my rage had the energy to overcome my…
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Home – a Food for Thought Friday post
My handcrafted home, filled with pictures of children, memories of tears and laughter, and the unpainted putty around the window he smashed when he attacked me in the kitchen not quite set even after a year had passed.
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Under the same moon – a #F4tFriday post
We spend most of our lives apart. We live our days out going to work or sorting chores or household tasks at the weekend. We see separate friends separately. We cook and eat at a hundred and ten miles distance. I don’t help him to reach a difficult place to soap His back in the shower. He doesn’t hold a coat open for me to put on a coat with ease. Our kisses are infrequent, our hugs can be counted on the fingers of no hands most weeks, we rarely sleep with limbs entwined and yet I count this as my most intimate relationship ever. This wasn’t planned. Our love…
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#F4TFriday – in a nutshell
2019 was tough and glorious. Both not cancelling out the other, both requiring me to grow and develop the muscle and grit necessary for continuing to build a life I never thought I would have, all of it in its devastatingly cruel beauty worth the effort even though it often felt that I would not survive another blow. Until now I have never seriously considered setting goals or challenges across all areas of my life. I have had an aversion to setting them for a very long time. Sometimes the act of defining a goal seemed to be closing down all other options and I set greater store by…
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#F4TFriday – Memories, Moments and Wanting More
The Beach Boys are playing ‘God Only Knows, as I type this in front of a fire that I hefted the coal for into my car boot at the garage as He got soaked to the skin putting air in my sodden tyres to keep me safe. In this cosy setting we paint us on a canvas bought for another purpose. We paint over the existing brush strokes with our conversations, moving from twitter to plans, to work, to people we know, with ease and interest. We lighten the shadows, highlight an obscured point of interest, deepen the darkest places until they glow again. Sometimes we just hug on His…
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Freedom – a #F4TFriday post
My world, is comparatively free, but sometimes I wonder at the cost ...
