I'm Alive - Just!

I can't believe it has been nearly a month but I am finally back online and the relief of having internet connection is making me feel giddy with excitement! Now that I'm back though I scarecely know where to start. The last few weeks I have very much felt that I am single and scarcely surviving. It has been testing to put it mildly.

I have mixed feelings about the new house. I spent the first week in floods of panicked tears. The house felt spooky and the landscape is so totally different from the Hovel that I felt a million miles away from everything familiar. All I could think was that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake and that I had ruined my life. I feel slightly calmer now and though I don't love it yet, I have accepted that I live here which is a start.

I know this sounds mad. Why buy it if I didn't love it? The thing is that I have been looking for four years for a house. I have fallen madly for a couple but have missed them. This one had been on the market for ages and I never came to see it because a) it was out of my price range and b)I didn't want to live in the forest.

However they then dropped the price and I thought I would come and look at it. My first instinct was that it wasn't for me. It was too big and too much of a shrine to the seventies lack of architecture for me to wrap my head around. That night though I sat and drew a plan of how the house could be laid out, and I also wrote a pros and cons list. The plan on the back of a napkin solved all of the layout problems with the house and when I looked at the list I realised that this house had everything on my wish list. Four bedrooms (one more than I wanted actually), a big garden, a barn big enough to have an office and storage for junk that I can't be bothered to sort out, a field (which I have no use for but what the hell - perhaps I'll get some pigs!). In addition it has the potential to have a huge sitting room, a good kitchen, a utility room, downstairs loo, a front hall. Finally it is literally two minutes walk from a huge reservoir with miles of walks in all directions.

I let my head rule my heart and I made an offer and you know what happened next.

The difficulty that I hadn't forseen was that I don't love it. I have bought twice before and both times I fell in love with the property before I had even seen all of it. Neither of them had everthing that I wanted and yet I wanted them passionately anyway. This one had everything and I didn't want it but I bought it anyway.

Not having your heart involved is a strange way to go though. I have spent the last few weeks talking the house up to myself and persuading myself that once I have spent every last groat in my bank balance on ripping it apart I will then love it. Sometimes I truly believe that. Other times I don't.

It would definitely be easier if I weren't single. It is a house that needs two of you to drive each other on and to pick each other up when it all feels overwhelming. The Loyal Hound does his best but he gets bored talking about what colour to paint a room and has a nasty tendency to go to sleep on the pile of curtains that are heaped on the floor.

The plumbers are here today moving the bath from the downstairs to the upstairs. I am looking forward to being able to have a proper bath upstairs. I think it will make it feel more like home. In addition I have friends coming to stay this weekend and if the weather plays nice then perhaps we can see the house at it's best, and go for long walks, tackle the garden and sip pimms in the sunshine.

I have taken some photographs but have now misplaced the camera (the joys of an excessively large house!) but I will find it and show you what I have committed to and you can be the judge. Am I 'single and have lost the plot' or 'Single, surviving and possibly thriving?'

I missed you all.

You've changed.....

One of the people I count as my greatest friend is my old boss. I worked for her and with her for 8 years and only left because I no longer wanted to live in London.

I have helped her move house (twice), am an executor on her will, have had her children to stay countless times and seen her through an affair, a divorce and the death of her mother. All that on top of working together in a fairly high pressure environment and still managing to laugh an inordinate amount and stay friends. In eight years we only argued once. That's rare.

The thing is that in the years since I have left London she has changed. I expect I have too but I really notice it in her. She is harder than she used to be, more impatient and more self centred. These are deliberate changes. She was always an incredibly generous person, hugely accomodating and would bend over backwards to help the friend of a friend if she could. I think she got fed up with it and decided that she was going to put herself first from now on and have what she wants. I can understand this but I confess that I feel I have lost a great deal of the person that I was friends with.

She is so much more impatient now and much less accessible as a friend. She was always my first port of call if I had a major dilemma or crisis and now I think twice before ringing her as I'm not sure of the reception I'll get. In the last three years I have asked her to stay countless times and each time she has cancelled me at the last minute with frankly really poor excuses. Essentially she couldn't be bothered to come from London to Wales. What does that say about how she views me as a friend?

I loathe situations like this. People change, I know that, but I don't want to give up on a friendship that has meant so much to me over the years. Equally the friendship simply isn't the same anymore. I know that there isn't an easy answer to this. No quick fix that can resolve it. The obvious answer is to talk to her about it but that is the crux of the problem. She is incredibly hard to talk to now. Aaargh. Life is always so hideously complicated.

I shall stop moaning and get on with painting the office instead.