The half year review

It's almost six months since my fortieth birthday, so it seemed appropriate to sit and rest a while and observe the vista from atop the early gentle foothills of middle age. Or middle youth. Or Middle Earth. Or whatever we like to call this large expanse of green and beige crimplene that lies in front of us when our twenties and thirties are left behind.

Some observations then from the watch tower half a year in to the second act:

Watching the birds, thinking, monitoring the progress of the new plants in my little garden, revelling in the natural world more joyfully with each day that passes - and the continued enjoyment of my constant companion nicotine - seem to have replaced in my mind the space previously occupied by preoccupations of a more earthy kind. Whether that is to do with being 40 or with being single for nearly two years or a combination of both is a moot point. This doesn't concern me; I know that if the setting and the situation and the person were right, the old Eve would reassert herself. What I do wonder, though, is whether she can happily coexist with these other natural pleasures.

Having a complete absence of concern relating to what some might call status is by no means a new arrival on my shores but is more pronounced now in its presence. I care not for work, but I don't loathe it either, and perhaps on my better days have attained a Swiss-like neutrality about the whole concept. Work - and the workplace - are funny strange chimeras, occupying so much time and space in the emotions of those in their thrall that they can drive out almost everything else. And I do feel ok about saying that because I've been there myself in the past and like all reformed addicts can see the effects quite plainly in others whilst they remain oblivious. This is probably enhanced by observing the red teeth and claws of others and feeling overwhelmingly free by comparison. A delightful feeling, as is - at last - having mastered the art of relaxation.

Thinking about what I might do next has also been much on my mind recently, the next in my terms being the immediate future and the slightly more distant afterwards when the barn has sold and I'm free of those financial obligations. I am planning - this long bank holiday weekend in fact - to apply for a place on a part-time MA course at a local university. If I'm lucky enough to be offered a place, then two years of part-time study lies ahead with all of the excitement and learning that would offer. Quite by chance, that two years of study would conclude at the exact same moment as the contract for my current job ends. It might also - fingers crossed - include the time period during which the barn sells. So my landscape two years from now could look significantly different.

On the family front, it's nearing the end of the first academic year that Roo has been at university and the first time that I've lived completely on my own - ever - as an adult. In some ways, Roo turning twenty last month was more significant than me turning 40 and I think, not for the first time, about how time really does fly. Tempus fugit. Yes indeed, with bells and whistles on.

I also seem to have inadvertently performed major brain surgery on my computer this evening. Serves me right for following the primrose path of procrastination and random meanderings when I should be working on those assessments.

Photo of an Arctic Tern chick taken last year on the Farne Islands, Northumberland.

Digging up the past

The barn was around 200 years old when we bought it and already in an advanced state of decay. Sometimes during the long hard process of converting it into a house I’d stop and wonder what its original builders would have thought of the idea.

The barn had been built to house cattle; this much we knew from the large wooden manger that was still clinging on at one end of one of the gables. At some point, the full double height building had also been divided horizontally into two. We took a guess that the new upper level had been used to store grain in an attempt to make it just that little bit harder for the rats to get at it. The floor boards on the top storey were reinforced with iron strips to help deal with the loading. That part had worked, although the presence of deep and multi-generational rats’ nests in the walls confirmed that only rodents with vertigo had been deterred by the effort.

The long since abandoned rats’ nests and the manger were not the only signs of previous habitation. Tucked here and there behind rafters or floorboards were more human signs; rusty tobacco tins and ancient empty bottles, irregularly shaped of thick green tinted glass and with a marble caught in the throat, showed us where weary farm hands had taken their ginger beer and rested after a day’s hard labour. When we excavated the floors downstairs to cast a more stable concrete slab, we unearthed tens of thousands of shards of broken glass and hundreds of pieces of clay tobacco pipes.

Excavating the floors was the toughest job of the whole conversion in my mind. Because the rest of the still somewhat unsteady building was standing over our heads, it was much too risky to use machinery and so we dug by hand. For three months, night after night after night and illuminated by a harsh electric spotlight, we excavated the whole area down to the depth of more than one yard. It was exhausting work and carried out with no greater sophistication of tools than the original farm labourers would have used when they built the place more than two centuries before. Even on the coldest evenings of winter, the physical effort of digging the thick London clay would have sweat coursing down my face and dripping off the tip of my nose within minutes. It was much like going to some kind of intensive hard labour boot camp gym for hours every night; needless to say, we grew very strong and very fit.

Near the end of our digging and with the finishing line in sight, we made a remarkable discovery. What had seemed at first to be a piece of particularly stubborn buried brickwork turned out to be the remains of an ancient forge. We gradually and carefully unearthed what was left of the structure; some standing remains, complete with ashes, of a forge that long pre-dated the rest of the barn even. It was impossible to remove it from its centuries-old resting place, so when the time came to lay the sub-floor insulation and cast the new slab, we made sure that the forge was completely shielded from the liquid cement. Maybe one day, some time in the distant future, somebody else will come along and reveal it to the light once more.

I was out working in my little garden again today, clearing more rubble and digging through the soil to lower the ground levels and create a couple of raised beds. I didn’t unearth any real treasures, just a few rusty pieces of ironmongery, empty snail shells and hundreds of startled earthworms. One more day of digging perhaps and then I’ll be able to turn my attention to the nicer parts of gardening: making a gate, choosing plants and planting bulbs and seeds and such. Time enough for a treasure to turn up yet though, I guess.



This wonderful photograph of greenfinches was taken by John Mullin - just announced as this year's winner of the RSPB 'Big Garden Bird Watch' photographic competition.

The evolution of procrastination

If multi-tasking is considered to be the modern-day specialism of the female of the species, then I guess that spatial orientation – the ability to see and manipulate things in 3 dimensions – is typically the preserve of the male.

Received wisdom suggests that this trait came about because men were the hunter-gatherers back in Stone Age times. If starvation was the price paid for being a lousy shot with a sling or spear, say, or for setting up your trap the wrong way round, then it would make sense. And so it follows from that particular line of enquiry that men ran about all day waving sticks and clubs, hiding from each other and making a lot of noise whilst women stayed behind back at the cave ranch, looking after the children, boiling up bones and assembling attractive throws made of woolly mammoth hides. Thus one also sees the evolutionary importance of soft furnishings.

But there must, even then, have been men and women who defied their pre-ordained gender roles. Men who were, for instance, much better with children, mushroom collecting and stew-making than they were with sabre-toothed tiger hunting and trap setting. I’d bet, too, that some girls and women went out on the hunt and flung their spears with as much accuracy and beat their bosoms with as much glee as their men folk.

I think that because I’ve come to the conclusion that my distant female Stone Age relations were spear slingers and not stew stirrers. (This is not to say that I’m any good whatsoever at throwing things because I’m not; just ask the dog where his ball or stick lands up when I chuck it for him. I am quite a good shot with a rifle though, come to think of it; if we’re at a fairground, I’m the one to ask to win you that giant green plush stuffed dolphin with luminous pink eyes). My (some might say flimsy) evidence for this?

a) I’m dust, grime and other domestic chores blind
b) I’m good at seeing stuff in 3-D

The ability to see things as they could be and not as they actually were was certainly an asset when it came to converting the pile of rotten tumble-down old sticks that the barn was when we first bought it. I had no problem at all in visualising room divisions, stair cases, kitchens, bathrooms, plumbing, drains and all the rest when there was nothing more to it than a few mouldy old rafters and a hundred heaps of rats’ nests. It was also an asset when we were trying to solve ways of tackling some of the construction work without the whole lot crashing down on our heads.

But there is a downside I have found to this spatial awareness lark; because I can visualise something as it could be, my brain leaps to the conclusion that that is how it is already. And thus my garden (ok, yard – it’s tiny) in my mind’s eye is a blossoming, blooming, buzzing, chirping place full of flowers, fruits, shrubs, miniature trees, tasteful shaded seating arrangements and colourful pots of good things. When in actual fact it looks more like a piece of derelict waste ground that just happens to be outside my back door and surrounded by a dog-proof fence.

I know in reality that just thinking about how it could be is useful; but it’s not really quite as useful as actually picking up a spade and rake and getting on with it, is it? One can only assume that the trait of procrastination must come as a buy-one-get-one-free side order to the whole 3-D seeing spear slinging gene. So can I say, just for the record, that on Friday – yes, this Friday – I am going to devote the whole day to digging in and getting started with the renovation of the back garden.

You have my permission to fling a spear at me if I don’t, ok?


Talking of procrastination...

My sister sent me this photo of Roo (on the right) and I from her mobile phone to put on my blog page. It was taken at my sister's house just before Roo went back to university in January this year.

Not such cold comfort

A dog’s capacity for sleep is a wondrous thing.

Kaos’s sleep glass is not just half full but brimming over and slopping into a snoozy treacly puddle on the table top. He sleeps for, what, twenty hours of every twenty four? Or appears to, sometimes occupying that half-way fugue state at a point between full consciousness and sense-less oblivion. When he dreams, his legs twitch and his eyes roll as he chases hapless rabbits or misdirected cats. Perhaps his dream net casts further back to his wolverine ancestors and he hunts with his pack, full of cunning guile on an endless plain full of wildebeest or cow-eyed deer. Maybe he’s stationed at the door to a Stone Age cave, permitted wood fire warmth and scraps and bones in return for his protection of the tribe. Who am I to know where a dog’s dreams take him?

When I open my eyes this morning, he is precisely where he was when I closed them, curled up in a ball next to the radiator. That no warmth is emanating from the cold steel panel because I’d switched the central heating off over night simply underlines the force of habit. In his mind, the radiator is a place of warmth and comfort and safety, somewhere to prop his back and stretch his tummy, close enough to me to feel part of the pack but near the bedroom door just in case.

If the heating were to remain off until autumn trails in once again with her misty dew drop fingers and the returning blast of fog horns from container vessels sounding warnings and seeking refuge out in the treacherous shipping lanes, my guess is he’d still sleep there. Such is the power of security and comfort. And habits, once learned, take a long time to break. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years.

One of my favourite books when I was very young was called “The Bunny Fluffs’ Moving Day”. It is a Ladybird Book and was originally published in 1948. It’s a wonderful adventure, told in pictures and verse, of the scrapes and escapades that befall the Bunny Fluff family as they move from one house to another. There’s falling into rivers, unexpected mishaps with umbrellas, some lost-getting and stuff-strewing and wrong-doing along the way. I loved the story, made my mother read it to me repeatedly, re-lived every twist and turn afresh with the Bunny Fluff twins each time I heard it. In between times, I’d look through the pictures, hearing my mother’s voice in my head telling me the story in my pre-reading days. The little hard backed book eventually fell apart in spite of the liberal application of brittle 1970s sellotape, but not before I could read the words for myself.

I’ve got my own Bunny Fluffs’ Moving Day later on today. One of my sister’s friends has kindly offered to meet me at the barn with his van so that I can pack up the last of my remaining items. A fridge, a freezer, my mattress. And the dog’s bed.

If it all goes well, I think I’ll order a copy of the book from an online auction site when I get home. I also think that the dog and I may sleep more soundly tonight.

Dog-gone

I never think I’m one for the grand dramatic gesture.

In my mind, yes, I’m the older guy at the end of Independence Day, seeking to find peace and redemption through the sacrifice of his human bullet into the under-belly of the invading mother ship; or maybe I’m Superman, dashing and Bryl-creamed and saving the world one cape full at a time. But in real life, you’ll much more likely find me right there on the railway station in Brief Encounter, eyes brim full of unspoken passion and unrequited yearning as the train trundles forever away into the distance in a whoosh of steam.

I’m very far from being a superhero cartoon character or a silver space-suited cowboy in a sci-fi western. I’m really not all that poutingly unobtainably glamorous in black and white either, truth be told. My not-very-grand-at-all gestures are human-sized even if my horizons are broad; I’ve never been inclined towards door-slamming or crockery hurling, after-hours brawling or running street battles.

Which is why I kind of surprised myself today by slinging my bags (and the dog) into the back of the car and moving out of the barn.

There are a couple of old and well-used phrases that are often called upon to describe this moment: reaching the end of one’s tether and the straw that broke the camel’s back are two that have bubbled up. I hadn’t even been aware that the thought of moving out was so close to the surface of my consciousness. Quite the opposite – I’d come back from Egypt a couple of weeks ago determined to make sharing the site with my ex work, even if that was likely to take some getting used to and be tough going in the interim. But it seems that it didn’t after all take much scratching of the surface to let the moving out decision erupt like a geyser and be activated in a few moments. Just one falling-out too many. Perhaps the concepts captured recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent books, Tipping Point and Blink, more closely approach the truth?

I was back at my little house by the seaside with a couple of bags full of clothes, books and food before my brain had time to blink twice. The dog clambered down the steps and flopped onto the carpet behind my swivel chair as if he’d never been on anything more than a walk chasing waves along the beach. I envy the dog his gift to live completely in the here and now, his joy in the fiendishly simple and almost impossible ability to just ‘be’. I wish I could capture it in a butterfly net and swallow it whole.

I spent a welcome couple of hours this evening enjoying spaghetti Bolognese and home made bread with my three year old niece, my sister and her husband. We watched cartoons on the television and ate chocolate bars, drank tea and Diet Coke, and talked of this and that. I am relieved I’ve acted on my misgivings whilst there was still time not to finish tying up the moving threads.

I thought that we could make sharing the space work. It turns out I was wrong. At least I tried.

The answer is 42, give or take

Big questions come in all sizes. Puzzling over whether to have French mustard with your chicken ‘n’ chips ‘n’ salad, say, can sometimes cause you to temporarily stop and ponderously scratch your chin just as much as thinking about if there is life after death.

The big question I took away to Egypt with me was should I make the move back to the barn a permanent one. The trial period of living here had gone well - much better than I expected in fact - and I had more or less made up my mind to say yes before I even set foot on the plane. But I still held the decision pending, wanting to have the opportunity of time and distance (both physical and metaphorical) to reflect. After all, 18 months and a whole lot of trauma on from the break up, opting to move back to live separately and independently from but alongside and under the same roofs as the ex was not something to be decided on the toss of a coin.

Whilst in Egypt, I didn’t think about it much at all or not consciously anyway. I was content to let my mind-scape scene shifters shuffle about in the background doing their thing and to present me with their recommendation when it was ready. A bit like the giant monolithic mega-computer, Deep Thought, in the Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, except hopefully more usefully conclusive than the answer 42.

And the micro-chaps in white mini boiler suits that tunnel through my neurons and synapses and buff up my grey matter didn’t let me down. I have my answer, and the answer is yes. All I need to do now is sort out the practical stuff to make it so.

I left work early this afternoon and drove over to my little house by the seaside to pick up my post. The approach road to the island is a wide black dual carriageway. It cuts across the salt flats like a fat string of liquorice before soaring up and over the elegantly curved bridge that spans the strip of water that separates the island from the mainland. The marshes are covered with tufts of coarse grasses upon which benevolent cows and sheep graze sleepily and eke out a sufficient if meagre diet. There are numerous informal lakes and ditches that come and go with the rain, home to tens of thousands of wading and water dwelling birds. That this landscape is as rare and precious as the rainforests probably escapes their notice as they feed and breed and squabble and groom.

I spotted something as I joined this main road. A bright red metallic helium balloon was bobbing up and down at the edge of one of the fields. It was heart-shaped, perhaps a Valentine gift from a shiny-eyed lover or an escapee from a birthday celebration. Its string must have slipped through someone’s fingers in a moment of clumsiness and was now snagged in the rough hedge. Perhaps whoever it was had watched the balloon float up out of reach until it disappeared away into the sky. Maybe they’d stood on tip toe or jumped up and down in an attempt to save it and bring it back to earth. But helium is lighter than air and so the balloon had no choice but to rise up and away and out of their grasp forever.

There was nothing in my mail box as it turned out, except for an appeal from the RSPCA and a catalogue of clothes for women of a certain age that my mum must have ordered. I added them to the recycling pile and picked up some clean bed sheets and my vacuum cleaner before driving back to the barn. My little house by the seaside is starting to feel less like my home now as my stuff gradually migrates. By the end of next month, I’ll have moved out completely; later on, someone else will move in and make it their place. For them and for me, I hope it’s the right decision.

A trivial wind

Sometimes it seems that the sole function of the brain is as a repository of trivia. Those little sliced-and-diced snippets that are individually interesting but that amount, en masse, to a personal landfill site in a head-shaped capsule.

The recollection of these factoids is like the nugget dispensed from one of those mesmerising penny-a-go sweet machines that dazzle small children (and we more suggestible adults) with their mechanical mystery and promise of good things to come. You can’t help but drop a coin into the impossibly fiddly slot before cranking the stiff metal handle two thirds of the way round amid the sound of ominous grinding of cogs and gears. But much like the recall of trivia, you’re never quite sure what’s going to roll out of the slot at the bottom and rather hope it’s going to be bubble gum and not a dead mouse.

Today’s allocation of useless fact was from my untidy brain filing cabinet drawer of geography (ice age section). Specifically, how the path of the River Thames came to be in its current (more-or-less west to east) orientation as a result of being re-located by a glacial ice sheet. Before that chilly intervention, it apparently ran north to south; I guess it sort of pivoted through 90 degrees like a clock hand changing its mind about moving into the next day and dropping back from midnight to nine pm.

All of which was, I felt, an unnecessarily detailed intrusion into my morning contemplation of the view from my bedroom window at the barn. To be slightly fair to my brain, I can see the Thames from here, off to my left beyond the hedgerows and the trees and the electricity pylons that march in single rank across the acres of fields that lie between here and the water. On an unusually clear sunny day, I can also see the River Medway to the right if I stand on tip toe and peer squinty eyed. A couple of miles further down, the two huge rivers collide, lingering for a while in an estuary before surging on and taking their place in the forbidding and dark North Sea.

The wind was blowing hard from the west and the Thames today as well. The ex and I struggled two or three times to get a fire going in the old Rayburn in the kitchen. The wind was having none of it, forcing the smoke back down the flue into the barn and filling the rooms with a fug of charred wood. The fumes were eye-wateringly acrid, forcing us to open up the doors and windows to vent the place and let in some breathable air. Luckily, it’s still mild today and the temperature inside remained bearable in spite of the lack of heating.

Rather like a glamorous woman who has overdone it with her scent (only far less alluring), the smell of wood smoke clings to one’s garments when this happens and infuses the fibres with its distinctive aroma. Most of the time I am completely oblivious to this. I was today. Until I got in the car with my ex’s nephew who crinkled up his nose and asked if we’d been having a bonfire. Which I suppose we had, in a way.

Burning bargains

Accepted wisdom has it that if something seems to good to be true, then chances are it is too good to be true. From the astonishingly low prices of your brand of cigarettes just outside the duty free area at a foreign airport to the posh perfume for a tenner at the local high street market or the offer of a diamond bracelet for fifty quid in a pub, most of us aware - at some level - that if we accept these deals they are more than likely to turn out to be goods of questionable providence. Fakes, forgeries, counterfeits, knock-offs, grey market suppliers, untraceable supply chain, snake oil, quackery or just plain old stolen goods - more than likely what we'll get in return for our money.

And yet, like Mulder in the X-Files, we want to believe. We want to feel we've bagged a bargain, that we've made our cash work smarter not harder, that we've been canny consumers with a nose for a great deal. There's something instinctive about it I think. If it's red mist that descends when people are filled with overwhelming uncontrollable rage, then perhaps it's green mist that envelops us when offered a fantastic bargain? But yet if we later smoke those cigarettes at home and find they taste of camel dung, that the perfume strips paint at fifty paces, that the bracelet turns green in the shower, we are extremely angry. Angry that we haven't got we apparently paid for - and yet at the same time angry with ourselves because, that small voice inside tells us, we have got exactly what we paid for.

Very occasionally, though, a bargain does turn out to be just that and really is exactly as good as it seems.

About four years ago, when the ex and I were in the thick of converting the barn, he asked his plumber friend Trevor to keep an eye out just in case someone was getting rid or an old Aga or Rayburn. Either was well beyond our pockets to buy brand new; our coffers were perilously below the watermark as it was and even the ability to afford one second hand seemed highly unlikely. But D was determined that the barn should be as eco-friendly as possible and a wood-burner of some sort presented the most accessible option for us. And, after all, it cost nothing to ask.

Months passed. Then one day, Trevor rang. A very elderly gentleman had recently died, he told us, and his daughter (herself well past retirement age) had inherited the house. She'd called him in to fix and fit some new plumbing before she put the house on the market. The original kitchen, with its free standing pantry, cold room and single tap sink was to be replaced with a modern one in contemporary styling. There was no place in the new arrangement for the Rayburn that had sat in the corner since the house was built in the early 1930s (and unused since the 60s), she said; could Trevor get rid of it please?

We roped Will, my brother in law, in for the job; my sister, pregnant at the time, came along for the ride too. And there it was, built-in neatly to one corner of the kitchen and sparkling where the lady had thoughtfully polished it for us. Surrounded on three sides by walls and in front by a step made of red tiles, the old Rayburn didn't leave its home of birth without a struggle. It took us an hour to move it from its walled nest to the back door; an hour more from there to the bottom of the garden. We were nearly at the back gate, heaving the ton of solid iron with all of our collective strength, when Will saw some paving slabs were in the way of the path. He wrenched one up with his hand... before, with legs and arms spinning like a cartoon, hurling himself forward onto the grass. Where the paving slab had been just a moment before, now there yawned a huge hole in the ground. Not just any old hole in the ground either - this one had a flight of narrow steps heading down into the underworld.

Once Will's heart was back in his chest and he was safely sitting on the grass, we went up to the house to ask the owner about the hidden subterranean steps in her garden. "Oh that," she said, "I'd completely forgotten about the old bunker. It used to be an underground communications centre during the war. It was full of typewriters and all sorts of machines. For a few years afterwards, dad and some of his friends used it to tinker about with radios and such. I don't think anyone's been down there for a long time now".

After we'd peered down the stairs as best we could without a torch, the three of us somehow hauled the Rayburn up a make-shift ramp we'd made out of scaffold boards and into the Transit van we'd borrowed for the day. For the bargain price of £125 the Rayburn was ours, complete with half a dozen sacks full of coal that had also sat untouched in the garden shed for nearly 40 years and - curiously - an oil-burning Tilly lamp with a white glass shade that the lady presented to my ex with a flourish as we left.

It's freezing cold outside this evening. The wind is howling, chattering around the barn through arctic teeth and there's snow several inches deep on the ground. The Rayburn must be 70 or 80 years old now but it's happy here in the kitchen - if rather sooty from burning wood - doing the job it was made to do. The temperature gauge built onto the front of the oven door even still works. I've been sitting right in front of it for the last few hours, feet up on the rail by the hotplate, laptop on an upturned tray on my knee and tea and cigarettes within reach on a chair next to me. Sometimes, just sometimes, something that's a bargain really can be as good as it is true.

Curry and beer and the ex – oh my!

The psyche moves in mysterious ways; and also, it would appear, performs the most unexpected wonders.

That Kaos, my German shepherd dog, settled back into life at the barn as if he’d never been away was not a surprise. Surrounded by acres of orchards with a ready supply of rabbits and foxes to chase, and a wood-burning stove to slouch against until his fur singes – well, from a dog’s eye view, what’s not to like? I was less sure about myself.

From a practical point of view the move back here made a lot of sense. After more than a year of trying, the barn had resolutely failed to sell; there had been a lot of viewings but ultimately no takers. Although we had completed all the structural works on the barn’s metamorphosis from tumble down heap of rotten old sticks to dwelling, there remain a good deal of ‘finishing works’ (decorating and such) to carry out. We concluded that, added to the impact of the credit crunch and the relatively high price tag the place carried, this was enough to put the kybosh on any prospect of a sale for the foreseeable future. And enough to simultaneously put the mockers on the chance for the ex and I to entirely go our separate ways - for now, anyway.

So the idea for me to move back to the barn was hatched. We could, we pondered, live separately, respectfully and independently under the same roof – there was certainly enough space for that to be possible. At the same time, we could pick up the tools again and work together to complete the finishing jobs whenever we had the opportunity or the money to do so. But the clincher that sealed the deal was financial; the split had torpedoed both of us and the idea seemed to present a glimmer of hope of financial survival in these turbulent times. Yes, on all practical levels, the move made sense.

It was on the emotional score that I was less certain. I’d been devastated when D announced he wanted us to split up and had spent the 18 months since slowly restoring myself to a semblance of normality. Good friends and close family had played a hugely significant part in my recovery; feeling ok again at last had been very hard won and I didn’t want that to unravel. How would I feel, I wondered, living with my ex again, being under the same roof but not actually together? Would proximity lead to the re-igniting of any residual flames that I still clung to?

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The move back to the barn seems to have achieved what many months of tears, sadness and soul searching never completely did. For the first time in all that time, D now really feels like my ex. I find myself able to relate to him on a friendly level without the least twinge of anything more deeply emotional. I am not bothered when he goes out, not concerned what he’s doing or who he’s seeing, don’t find myself wishing he was by my side. I would never in a million years have predicted that the final release from those lingering emotional bonds would have come about by moving back into the house we built together and which we shared as a couple.

And so it was that last night we had our first beer and curry night together, a chance for us to catch up and review how things were going at the end of the first week. We chatted, we laughed, we enjoyed some great food, we watched a film, and I raised a toast to the future of us together as housemates of a kind. It was a nice evening, spent together as friends but nothing more. When the food and the beer and the film were finished, we bid each other good night and went our separate ways. I came up to bed full and happy and without the least trace of wishing he was with me, before falling into a wonderful deep sleep.

I’m not the first to observe that the psyche moves in mysterious ways by any means, but this is the first time I have been on the receiving end and seen that wisdom in action.

The joy of text

Ah, text messages. Little packets of electronic wisdom delivered directly to your pocket at random. Bite-sized chunks of news or gossip, events or invitations, trials, tribulations and wild speculation – and all in 160 characters or fewer. A bit like having your own personal postman on duty 24 hours a day, except without the need for a letter box or worry about your big hairy dog getting all over excited.

Like opening a letter – the handwritten sort with a proper stamp – receiving a text message carries with it that perceptible jolt of joyous intrigue. They even arrive complete with a little musical fanfare just to ramp up the excitement level a notch. Who will it be from? What will they be saying? And heaven forefend the anticipatory anxiety brought to pass by being temporarily unable to open the message and read it. The suspense is quite unbearable. So what if you’re in the middle of performing brain surgery; you’ve just got to see it now.

And so it was this evening that I was on the motorway on the way back to the barn - all aglow with vigour (or what passes for it on a drizzly Monday night) after two classes at the gym – when my phone bleeped with a message. So of course, after pausing for a nano second, I read it. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to, but how could I resist? My mobile even has little flashing blue lights on it; ironic and totally irresistible). A message from my sister enquiring how it was all going with the barn move, answered with a hastily composed reply from me using one thumb and with half an eye on the road.

A few minutes later, the phone bleeped again. “You always do exceed in drama”, she’d written. A pause, before I replied “Do you really think so?” “A little,” she answered, “but I don’t think you court it; it seems to stalk you!”

I’ve been thinking about this since. Is that true? Is that how I really am? It’s certainly her view so it must be how she sees me; maybe others do too. I don’t think I see my life like that – in terms of a series of dramas that I leap to and from like Tarzan on his jungle vines – but the more thought I’ve given it, the more I can understand what she means. And I concede that she might well have a point.

I’m sure if I was a better person I’d be meditating on this right now. Perhaps I will – perhaps I am already – but in my own way, with tea and cigarettes and writing it down. And pondering too on the nature of how quite such an eye-opening insight could have been delivered to me on a tiny blue screen at 60mph.

And breathe...

You may be wondering why I’ve titled my blog Moving Back, Moving On. Well, like a crap poker player or a poor side-show magician at a travelling fair, I’m about to reveal my hand.

In June 2007, my long-term partner and I split up. We were both approaching 40, so add in a bit of proper real-world stress and some family issues and ye olde fabled mid-life-crisis was close at hand. That the split came out of the blue to me is an understatement, although looking back I can see there were many things that hadn’t been quite right in our relationship for a while. We had also been carrying out the self-build renovation / conversion of a derelict 200 year old barn over the previous few years and found ourselves mentally and physically exhausted some way before the finishing touches were added. We’d moved into the barn and made the best of it as far as we could but...

Well, there are always ‘buts’ aren’t there?

Anyway, fast forward through that period... 18 months on, and what with the credit crunch and such we’ve been unable to sell the barn. I had moved out with the dog to my little house by the seaside and been very happy there, whist he’d remained back at the ranch. But we still continued to confront the insoluble unsellable on a daily basis and needed to find a way forward that acknowledged the fact that the wider economic (and personal) financial situation was unlikely to improve within the next couple of years. So...

To cut a very long story short, I have moved back to the barn today. We are not getting back together in any shape or form, but it is conceivably possible that – as there is enough space on site and we have managed to retain / develop a relationship as ‘friends’ – it could work out, living essentially as house mates under the same roof. It’s a trial period in the first instance. I’ve brought over some clothes, laptop and other essentials (the dog, for instance) and will be living and going to and from work from here over the next few weeks.

In the middle of February, I’m off to Egypt for a week’s holiday with my good friends David, Stephen and Liz. By the time I’ve completed the month’s trial and been away on another continent - diving and eating copious amounts for a week - I hope to have some idea of whether it’s going to work out for me here or not. If it does and has done, then I will make the move a permanent one. If not, I’ll either extend the trial period or move back to my little house by the seaside and call it quits.

It has been a bit weird today, of that there’s no doubt. I’ve felt angry at times, sad at others, and fair to middling in between. I’m trying hard to approach it with an open mind; after all, if it works out OK, it could provide a very practical and logical solution for the next 2 years or however long it takes us to complete the finishing touches here and for the credit crunch to blow itself out so that we can sell up. Practically and logically it all makes a lot of sense. Emotionally, well... that’s where the proof of the pudding is in the dwelling.

And so...

Well, just wish me luck please!