Six months along the road

The first day of October...

It's now a whole six months since I hung up my suit (or more precisely, commited six suits to the large metal bin at the recycling centre and put the best two into a black dustbin bag in the spare room for posterity) and waved goodbye to the profession that I had followed for thirty-something years.  Today is, I think, Saturday, which would have meant something to me once.  Saturday was, for me, the second day of the weekend, the one before Sunday, which was increasingly depressing because at the end of it the weekend would be over and I would have to kiss goodbye to Patricia and disappear to London for four days.

I don't know why my mind keeps on focusing on that, because life is so very different now that all of that professional stuff seems like a life on another planet.

So how are the days now?  I get up, usually, sometime between seven and nine, depending on how much sunlight is coming through the bedroom window.  Down the stairs, ruffle Lola's tummy as she rolls on her back full of excitement because the day has started at last, put some bread in the toaster, some water in the kettle, switch on the espresso machine and wait for electricity to do its job while we see to breakfast for the cats. 

Breakfast is usually in the garden, either out front if the sun is beckoning, or under the parasol / umbrella on the terrace if it isn't, and Patricia comes and finds me with her first coffee of the day and we contemplate what is to come.

And at some point, during the day, the dog gets a walk, the shopping gets done, usually combined with a visit to the tip with a sack or two of garden rubbish, the work of the day is accomplished (or from time to time not, as the case may be) dinner is eaten and digested and the evening ends in a mental catch-up on the events / successes / failures of the day, before a glorious eight hours or so of sleep.  And in the words of Scarlett O'Hara, tomorrow is another day.

Despite that sounding like a very leisurely existence, we've accomplished a bit these last six months.  The front garden, which used to look like this:

now looks more like this:


and the part of the back garden that was once rather worse than this:
now looks like this:

and the Lola that looked like this:

now looks like this:


and a hundred other things are a little bit nearer to fruition, if less visible.

Life is, slowly, moving on.

One day in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to satisfy ourselves with worrying about a little bit of maintenance, or planting / tending to / harvesting something that has grown in the garden, or painting, or making music, or reading, or walking the dog, or just doing "nothing", but for now that is still some way off in the future

It's a journey that has its ups and downs, like all journeys, but it is, inexorably, getting there, and the steps along the way bring a lot of pleasure, punctuated by the antics and interactions of Djé, Pastelle, Jazz, Java and Lola.  All that I can say is that life, now, seems to have a lot more purpose than it did when I took the train to London every week, and a lot more fulfillment, albeit it can be physically hard sometimes, but it has a lot more enjoyment too.

And sad Sunday evenings are no more, a thing of the past, forgotten in the annals of time.