the things not said

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There is light at the end of the tunnel.

I haven’t written here in nearly four months.

I know that breaks so many rules about blog writing and believe me, I’ve been beating myself up about it for a few weeks now. I’ve been busy and I should have blogged about all the things that have been keeping me busy but instead they distracted me, so just to mention them and to justify my silence. In the last four months…

I got a full time job in a very special design agency that is like a family that I really love being a part of, see Publica. As it happens, half of my role is to be a copy writer so let’s just set the record straight right now, I have been pursuing my dream, just not here.

My son turned five and started school, funnily enough the same week I started working full time hours. If you are a mum with children in school you will know how this will have gone down. Oh and also he got a sickness bug that lasted a week after four days at school.

I turned 40 which sadly didn’t keep me busy at all, it was a very low-key affair, no ‘holiday of a lifetime with my spouse’ or ‘spa weekend away with the girls’, but I just wanted to let you know I have entered a new decade and no it’s not OK, they are not the new thirties and I do feel different. That said, I am determined to not be a ridiculously ungrateful, first-world cliche about this and will march on like a good little soldier. I mean, what choice do I have anyway, it happened.

Someone in our family has cancer. The 11,000 miles between New Zealand and England just got so much bigger. We all hope no one we love gets this news but I imagine the stats are fiercely stacked against that being possible. It’s heart breaking and mind messingly disappointing.

My other half is working on a project that takes the lion’s share of his time, mind and emotions, which is part of the career path he has taken. I don’t resent it, I am proud of how hard he works, but it’s no walk in the park being the full time working wife and mother with a good attitude. I’m trying. It’s exhausting.

Also we had a lodger for a couple of months, Minnie broke her arm, we haven’t had a holiday since Christmas, I’m on the school PTA, food doesn’t magically appear in the cupboards, occasionally I have a social life and Facebook sucks me in!!

And so I think that’s why I haven’t written in the last four months, just been lacking in focus, time and energy. But I think more than ever, the time has come to start blogging again. For these key reasons:

when I am writing so much for clients, I need a place where I write for me, where I am the person who signs it off and says it’s ready to publish
I’ve learnt so much about SEO in the last four months, I want to put it into practice
I have things I want to say, thoughts are brewing and buzzing up there in the loft space of my head
words give me life

I’m out of practice, it’s probably going to be a rough ride to begin with as I get back into the saddle, I am re-thinking what this blog will be about so there may be changes, but I’ve written this one and I’ll be back again soon.

Purpose #3

Published by thethingsnotsaid

Just in case anyone was wondering, I’m still pondering my purpose. I haven’t had a ‘this is the way you should go’ moment as yet, but I have been thinking about the concept of purpose a lot lately.

I’ve discovered the search for purpose is not like it is when you are young or in a film with Robin Williams, where you stand on your desk, shouting ‘Carpe Diam’. You can’t dream a dream and step into it the next day. No, it’s more of a slow, steady, talk about it with your spouse for weeks and weeks, cautiously debating all the many intricate ripples that will come from a decision you might make in the near future that may or may not have a positive or negative effect on your career, your children’s lives, your bank account, your marriage, the happiness of your parents, your sanity!!

For instance, finding work for me feels like a complicated maze of possibilities that could lead to the dream job but I have to test out twenty routes before I find the one that will get me to where I want to go. I’m a working mum who has the privilege of being able to work on a freelance basis. I decided to pursue a new career path where I get paid to write, and I feel so grateful that people are giving me a chance. Seriously I pinch myself that the work I have at the moment is to communicate, to play with words, to research topics, find out what makes a company special and put that into words, to look for spelling mistakes, to improve a sentence structure. I’M SO EXCITED!!

And yet as I do this I also want to give my children a joyful, secure, peaceful, exciting and wonder filled childhood. I want them to feel valued. To know they are fearfully and wonderfully made. To have courage and confidence that comes from knowing your parents (who know you best) think you are worthy of anything you set your sights on. And I want this in a society that bombards me everyday with how that should be achieved. Spend tons of time with them. Read books that tell you how your child’s brain development is effected by their home environment. Aspire to the beautiful, perfect family photos on Facebook and Instagram. Nurture them. Discipline them. Don’t spoil them. They deserve the best. Can I just say AAAAAAGHHHHHHH! Being a mum in this day and age is so damn stressful!

Then there is my marriage. Gareth is the love of my life. I chose him to be my one. We are two halves of one whole. We share a bed, a house, two children, a bank account, an extended family, a dog, a fridge, a TV, an iTunes account, every Christmas Day for the rest of our lives and I could go on, the only thing we don’t share is underwear! He is the most important person in the world to me. If he doesn’t stay that way then all those things we share, suffer. So it’s crucial we look after our marriage for them. And yet because we share the bed, the house, two children, a bank account etc etc our marriage is without a doubt, by a long country mile, the toughest relationship of all to get right.

As I consider all these things, trying to work out my purpose I am then challenged with ‘Who am I in all of this?’ Where have I gone? Am I just a watered down version of the woman I thought I was a decade ago? Do I even like me? Does anyone else?! Can I even do what I want to do, be who I want to be?

I guess what I am trying to say is that what I think I have learnt over the last month or so is that trying to work out your purpose is not making decisions about your life, it’s making the decision to live. To choose life.

Whatever you do, do with all your heart. Make your choices mind, body and soul. Own your decisions. Know that only you can live your life.

My purpose is to choose life. So what gives me life? What makes me happy to be alive? What are the moments when I feel really alive? That’s how I fulfil my purpose.

An English Woman in New Zealand

Published by thethingsnotsaid

Recently The Telegraph voted New Zealand the best place to live. And it’s not for the first time. We moved here from the UK in 2012 and on a regular basis my husband and I say to each other that we feel like it’s a privilege that we get to live here. If I were to vote on where is the best place to bring up children, I think I’d be hard pushed to find somewhere better than New Zealand.

As we have just passed our 4th NZ anniversary, and the country did just get a major accolade, I thought I would write a list of all the things that remind me I am an English woman in New Zealand. Not quite as sexy sounding as Sting but hopefully just as interesting.

People are super friendly. Right from the minute we arrived in Christchurch airport and a lovely lady scooped up our tired selves and helped us stand after a 32 hour long trip, I have always been warmed by how friendly Kiwis are. They love to smile.
Sometimes their accent really does sound like a foreign language. I remember in the early days their pronunciation of pear/pair, bed, router, ten and even my name made me ask for a translation. Now that my own children speak fluent New Zealand I can work out the words much quicker.
As well as the accent they have added words, where frankly I think it’s totally unnecessary because the original one was just fine and not as silly sounding. Words such as; lolly (sweet), capsicum (pepper), togs (swimming costume), jandals (flip flops, OK maybe ours sounds just as silly), singlet (vest), jersey (seems to mean any kind of jumper, pull over, cardigan), I could go on, but I won’t.
Having people round for a BBQ and not having steak on the grill means it is not really a BBQ. We were only told this a few months ago so I am horrified to think how many people were offended by our sub-standard BBQ’s during the first three summers!
Christmas is on the beach, most people buy plastic trees, Christmas lights are ridiculous because it doesn’t get dark until you’re going to bed, pavlova is the traditional pudding and cherries replace clementines, Father Christmas is woefully over dressed for the weather, you’re likely to be up early and outside for the whole day, there is NO MULLED WINE! It’s just really odd.
A night out is unlikely to go past 11pm. This may be because most of our friends over here have small children, but I have a feeling that across the ages a Kiwi would go home from a night out way earlier than their English peer. Which is probably why the streets feel a lot safer and are a lot cleaner!
Rugby is referred to as football, while actual football is called soccer. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
They don’t have pubs but they have awesome coffee shops, most of which roast their own coffee. I have to say, even though I am a decaf girl, I do pity UK friends on Facebook when they post about being in Costa Coffee.
The availability of fruit and vegetables is effected by the seasons. I once went to three supermarkets to find a lime so I could make Key Lime Pie, only to be told by them all that they weren’t in season, so therefore not available. They looked at me like I was mad for asking. And if you want to buy peppers in March, expect to pay about $10 for one. Of course this means the standard of fruit and vegetables is way higher.
On similar lines there are foods that only come on the shelves at certain points of the year. Recently I found out that marzipan is only stocked at Christmas time, and I had to hunt out a boutique bakery to buy some seriously expensive almond paste for my Simnel Cake. How can marzipan not be a basic, all-year round product???
Your children don’t start school until they are five and a lot of children start school on their actual fifth birthday day. I am still so confused about the timings of schooling over here, I have to have it explained to me every year and I’m on the PTA!!
There is no Marks and Spencer’s and nothing comes even close to it.
This is a tough one…you are really far away from the UK. It’s really expensive and two days of travelling to get home. So if something big happens like your sister turns 40 or a great man, who was very special to you dies, you can’t be there.
This also means you don’t see a lot of your family and friends for years at a time. However when they do come, they come for a really visit and it’s always in the Summer time so you get to travel and have fun on beaches and eat ice creams daily.
An earthquake here is like rain in the UK, it happens on a regular basis. For Christchurch this means there is a very flat and quiet city centre and a lot of people who live with a significant amount of stress and anxiety.
But then Kiwis are really positive people, they want to see the good side of everyone and everything so they are incredibly resilient in times of crisis and stress, which is a beautiful thing to witness.
When going for a job, you most likely won’t find out what they would like to pay you until they offer you the job. Makes for uncomfortable discussions when the subject does finally come up!
They don’t have Ben and Jerry’s or Haagan Dazs. They do have amazing, independent sellers of gelato but these places will not be open on a Friday night at 10pm – this is no good to me peoples.
I have only seen the South Island and I am told the North Island has a very different landscape, but on all of our travels I find myself saying, this reminds me of the Lakes, or this is like Southern France or I feel like I am in Italy here. They have it all, plus the Remarkables.
BUT they don’t have stately homes, really old cathedrals and cities like Bath or Chester or Durham.
Everyone pays for everything with their Eftpos (Switch) card. In the early days I would apologise for having to pay for something that was $1.72 using my card, because you’d get kicked out of a place for trying that on in the UK. Over here, card payments are 99% of transactions, which is why I barely ever have cash on me.
A new thing for us is that we will be spending a lot of time this year, painting wood. We bought a 100 year old weatherboard house, which when we first came we said looked like an oversized Wendy house. Sadly they are nowhere near as much fun when they need a re-paint.
They are way better on customer service when selling you something, but they are very disappointed in you if you come back with a fault or criticism.
If you send an email to someone, don’t necessarily expect a reply…ever. I have to say, I do miss the common courtesy and politeness of British society. I am thinking all my friends in the UK will be saying what, are you joking? But seriously you notice when it’s not there. Note, this doesn’t take away from my earlier statement that Kiwis are friendly, they absolutely are, but particularly in the area of getting back to you on email or by phone, they just don’t seem to have the same requirements.
And finally, when you put all our differences apart, all these superficial trivialities and you get to have real friendships with people, you realise…we’re all just exactly the same.

Thanks for putting up with us these past four years New Zealand and England, I still miss you. Even when I am living in the best place to live in the world.

The Hundreds and Thousands Biscuit

Published by thethingsnotsaid

My children’s favourite biscuit is probably the Cookie Bear Hundreds and Thousands biscuits.

I can’t remember what brand makes them over in the UK but these are the ones we prefer here in NZ. They are a pretty simple biscuit and therefore just asking to be made at home. If I make them myself then I know what is in them and the children still get to eat gaudy coloured biscuits. Everyone’s happy. Except maybe not the Cookie Bear because he doesn’t make any profit this way.

I did a test and these work just as well with Gluten Free flour so you can do a GF version if you need to. Even more people are happy! Well, still not the bear…

This is taken from The Primrose Bakery Book by Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas.

Ingredients:

85g unsalted butter, at room temperature

100g golden caster sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

200g plain flour (can use 200g Gluten Free flour)

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

For the icing:

150g icing sugar

2-3 tbsp boiling water

Drops of food colouring as required

Hundreds and thousands…erm lots of them

Recipe:

Beat the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy. Add the egg and vanilla essence and beat again. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, then beat until well combined.

You will have a slightly sticky dough, which I then roll in a little bit of flour so I can put it in a snap lock bag. Put this in the fridge for an hour.

When you return in an hour, put your oven to heat to 180 C. And roll out some greaseproof paper on a baking sheet.

Then get the dough out of the fridge and it should be a good texture to roll out easily. If it is sticky (I thought it was more so when using the GF flour) add some flour to help roll it out to 5mm thick. Using a cookie cutter of about 6cm diameter, cut as many round biscuits as you can. Place them about 1cm apart on the baking sheets. I had two baking sheets worth.

Bake for between 8 and 12 minutes, depending on your oven and how golden you want them to be. I like them a pale shade as I think they are more melt in the mouth than disintegrate in your mouth – personal preference rules here. After six minutes I just keep checking on them every minute or two.

Put them on a cooling rack and let them completely cool before you start icing. I do this whole first section without children but this is definitely a recipe that could have children involved. Mine love cutting out biscuits but I wanted to have neat biscuits so on this occasion, they weren’t invited.

A nice, neat, child-free stack.

The icing is pretty simple to make up. Add enough water to the icing sugar to get a thick, and yet still runny consistency. I start with one of the suggested tablespoons and go from there until I get the desired texture. Basically you want to be able to spread it on top of the biscuits easily, but you don’t want it to dribble off the edges.

I went for three different colours rather than the traditional pink. I always put in too many drops so my colours were pretty dark, the green one looked like snot.

This is the part the children were invited to join in with. A little dollop in the middle of the biscuit and then use the back of your spoon to spread it out in circular motions. Don’t go too close to the edge.

Then add your hundreds and thousands on top. You want to get them on quickly when the icing is still sticky. For a few of these the icing was already setting so I had to press the hundreds and thousands into the surface of the icing. And despite that there were literally hundreds and thousands running all over my counter. Probably should have put them on a plate when adding the hundreds and thousands, but children don’t find that half as entertaining.

And there you have it. Really easy and if not healthy, certainly healthier than the shop-bought versions. I’m sure you could make them with a sugar free, digestive biscuit and icing made out of avocado or pureed almonds but where’s the fun in those?!?

Surprisingly both my children went straight for the bogey green ones.

To the Moon and Back Doesn’t Come Close

Published by thethingsnotsaid

I don’t think I am going to be alone when I say that without a doubt, my most favourite part of every day is the couple of minutes I spend tiptoeing into my children’s bedrooms, just before I go to bed. The house is silent, there is nothing left for me to do and my children are fast asleep in their beds. I walk in and feel the same rush of joy I felt when I clapped eyes on them in the delivery room. Bending down to adjust their duvet cover so they are fully wrapped up or lifting their heads back onto their pillows, I can smell their skin and place the tip of my nose onto their super soft cheeks so I can practically drink in their deliciousness. Then I whisper that I love them and creep back out. Sometimes I will get on the bed and snuggle alongside them for a couple of minutes, sometimes I am so overwhelmed with how much I love them I can get tearful, sometimes they look so gorgeous I want to wake them up and say sorry for all the times I have shouted at them that day and promise I will be a better mum tomorrow.

My babies are four and six years old at the moment. And most days I want to runaway from home because I find being the mum I want to be for them, or the one I think I should be, is so damn hard. For every time I get it right or I think I’ve finally had breakthrough on a behavioural issue, there are about six moments when it’s just, well…ugly.

In that moment when I am drinking in their soft perfect skin and delighting in their innocence, I think back to earlier that day when I was locking one of them out in the garden because they wouldn’t sit down at the table and eat their food with a fork, even though I’d politely asked them to six times already. And I feel sad that they aren’t sharing in this moment with all its peace and joy and lack of shouting.

My children are literally feral at the moment. Definition of ‘feral’: resembling or characteristic of a wild animal.

A couple of days ago they were both running around the garden fully naked, which happens all the time, no matter the weather. And BOTH of them stood in front of me and weed on the patio. Even Minnie. Just took a wide stance and urinated.

Feral.

Jackson is by far the most challenging at the moment. His commitment to being a man-child is exhausting. He wants to be a man and take himself off wherever and whenever he chooses. We go to the park or the shops and he marches off. Doesn’t say he’s going, doesn’t look back, doesn’t come back. But then we can be walking to pick up Minnie from school and he has his arms up wanting to be carried in my arms. If he wants a snack he can build a ladder out of furniture to get his hands on the chocolate biscuits he saw me hide earlier on. But almost every dinner time he wants to be spoon fed (hence the locking out in the garden).

We battle every day. It’s relentless. Getting in the car to do school drop offs. Picking up a handful of things from a shop. Walking to the park with the dog. Eating any meal at the kitchen table. Tidying up rooms buried in toys. Getting into the bath. Getting out of the bath. Reading a book for homework. Staying in bedrooms after 8pm.

And one of the biggest frustrations I have at the moment is that in all this fighting they have no idea how much I love them. I know they couldn’t possibly understand because their childish worldview only understands comfort and getting what they want as being loved. How could they possibly understand that me withholding chocolate or refusing to carry them is actually because I love them so much?

I tell them I love them everyday. They know I love them but they have no idea just how much. I don’t know that I can comprehend how much I love them. It still takes me by surprise. Jackson looks at me tearfully as I say goodbye at pre-school and it’s like running the last mile of a marathon walking to my car. Minnie rides her bike without stabilisers in the school “do-athalon” and keeps a good pace, and I want to give her a trophy. My little boy gives me a cuddle and tells me he loves me and I can’t see how I will ever let him have a girlfriend, ever. I look at a photo of Minnie when she was two, with blonde curls and a sweetheart pout and I can’t believe something so beautiful came from my body.

To say that we love our children to the moon and back only scratches the surface. A parents love is unfathomable. It’s unbreakable, overwhelming, exhausting. It’s of God.

Purpose #2

Published by thethingsnotsaid

I love the seasons. For me, I see the wisdom of God every time there is a change of season. Like it says in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.

It’s one of the things that attracted me to New Zealand when we were considering where we could move to. This country has seasons, sometimes all four in one day.

We’re coming out of Summer and into Autumn over here and when you live in the “Garden City” this becomes a true celebration of colour. Our road is tree lined so it’s lovely walking underneath a canopy of reds and oranges for a month or so.

Yes for all my UK friends, Easter is in Autumn – weird?!?

I don’t have a favourite season. Gareth gets practically euphoric when Spring comes with the long days and the promise of Summer soon approaching and my friend Jan named her business after her favourite season, Autumn. I appreciate both of these and I also love the warmth and holiday feeling of Summer and the crispness of a frosty Winter and the need to wear lots of jumpers and scarves.

We’ve just had a hot weekend and it was like Summer revisiting – I did three washing loads in one day which brings me so much joy. But at the same time I almost felt annoyed by the heat, like I’ve had enough of you already, I don’t want to have to shave my legs so much and we’re done with the sunscreen rituals!

OK so we might miss the ice cream.

What I like so much about the seasons is that they come just when you need things to change, they are timely. Each one is part of the bigger picture, a calendar year. Each season is important and has a purpose. Some feel harder and take more than they give, others remind you that life is full of blessings and joy. I know there are parts of the world where the seasons are not so different and honestly, I don’t know if I could live where it was always Summer or always Winter – I think I would get depressed living where it’s hot or cold all the time.

I love change, movement, beginnings and ends.

Thinking about that this week, whilst I am in this curious season of finding my own purpose, I realise that for me one of the biggest challenges in my life has often been to be in the middle of a season, away from the change of a beginning or an end.

A quiet Winter beach.

I’m searching for answers at the moment and I want them to come now, but I know this is a season that is important. I don’t want to rush out of it and push myself into the next one prematurely. I want to experience this season and all that it has for me. I want to learn the lessons this season has for me, because the next season is always much better when you have got everything you can out of the previous one.

I have no clear answers to my questions of purpose yet. I expect that not all of them will be answered in this season but I hope some will and unlike the seasons of the year or the tides of the sea there is no set time when the new season will come. It could be next week, it could be next year.

There is no point me rushing to get to the next part, I need to get all I can out of this part, my now. And if I get impatient for change I can always walk to the beach and watch the tides come and go or look up and see the leaves fall from the trees. They remind me that every season of my life so far has come to an end at some point. I finally graduated, Gareth and I did get married, we sold the house I hated so much, my babies came, the perm grew out and Bryan Adams didn’t stay at Number One forever.

Just like Spring, which seems so far away for us now, new beginnings will come, things will blossom and the days will get brighter.

Bad Ass (DF) Chocolate Chip Cookies

Published by thethingsnotsaid

If you like your biscuits or cookies crunchy and crisp then look away now because these aren’t those. These are soft, doughy, melt in the mouth cookies and they are fabulous! Their origins are found in ‘the hummingbird bakery’ cookbook, but I have altered them over time to become dairy free so I can eat as many as I like.

It’s Sunday today and these are great to bake now because you can have them as a yummy afternoon treat and then the rest will keep as packed lunch treasures for the children and the just-got-in-from-work-and-I-can’t-wait-the-five-minutes-it-takes-for-you-to-get-my-dinner-on-the-table hubby snack. Oh and they are super good for the just-got-back-from-dropping-off-the-children-and-need-a-cup-of-tea-before-I-start-being-productive nibble.

Ingredients

200g coconut oil (room temperature, soft)

300g brown sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon coconut extract (I figure if I’m using coconut oil I may as well go all-in on the flavour)

400 g plain flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

225g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (obviously needs to be dairy free to keep this recipe DF)

Recipe

Preheat the oven to 170C and put greaseproof paper on a baking tray.

Whisk the coconut oil and sugar until fully combined. Add the two eggs, one at a time. Scrape the mixture from the sides in between eggs. Beat in the essence. Add the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda and mix until you get a good dough mixture. Then add the chocolate.

Once the chocolate is well mixed in you can start picking out lumps of the dough and roughly rolling them into golf ball sized dough balls. Keep them pretty separate on the tray.

I bake them for seven minutes and bring them out when they are still pale with a bit of a golden colour appearing round the edges. That keeps them nice and soft, which is my preference. You can experiment up to 10 minutes for the sort of texture that works for you, but these are not intended to be crunchy so again, if that’s what you want, don’t use this recipe.

Put them on the cooling rack and I always like to eat one as soon as the chocolate is at a temperature that won’t burn my tongue (happened a couple of times, ahem) because you need to check they are a good batch.

Go forth and bring joy to your home.

Purpose #1 *

Published by thethingsnotsaid

I have been feeling quite unsettled recently. I say recently because there is a good chance I have been feeling this way for years now, it’s just that having children, emigrating to the other side of the world and being a working mum can really distract you from anything that is going on below the surface.

Of course I can’t say for sure, but I would like to think I am somewhere close (maybe a little further to go) to the middle of my life. Therefore I am middle aged. This is something that I have been pondering for a few months now as I get closer and closer to my 40th birthday. What can I say, I don’t like getting old.

I consider my peers, those that I know and those that I just observe at a distance, say on the Graham Norton couch or in a blog or a Facebook feed. All grappling with their middle-aged status. There seems to be a scale on how we all deal with it. At one end we have those that arrive and find peace and a new found confidence in their age. They are thankful for their youth and the story they have lived so far. It has given them wisdom and grace. They know what they value, what skills they have and they are going to use their super powers for good.

Then right at the other end you have people who seem to have got lost, forgotten what is important to them and all that they have achieved in their earlier years and out of fear for their older future they try to escape from their current life back to what they had. It’s not at all graceful, it’s messy, desperate and extremely sad to watch as they hurt everyone around them in their futile and selfish pursuit of finding themselves in what they used to be.

I can’t be my 24 year old self anymore because that person didn’t know about mortgages (to be fair they are still a mystery but I do have one). My 24 year old self hadn’t yet lived with the 38 year old version of the boy she fell in love with, she didn’t know what it feels like to wait 14 long days to do a pregnancy test after two embryos have been inserted by a lady doctor, she didn’t know that she could breast feed a baby daughter through the night whilst feeling as close to wasted as anaemia can make a person, or know that running 8k three times a week is more important for your heart and soul than an elusive flat tummy. All these pearls I found out in the last 15 years and they made me a different person.

I can’t even be my 38 year old self because there are so many things that happen in each year of my life that change me and unless I get amnesia or a really good personal trainer, I can’t even go back a year.

The realisation that there is no going back and your younger life is now over happens to all of us who are privileged enough to get this far. And a mid-life crisis also seems to happen to the privileged ones too. How an individual deals with it is fascinating. I mean there are cliches; the guy who buys a fast car, the lady who gets friendly with the pool boy. But for most of us, it’s not that obvious or clear cut.

I was born somewhere around Generation X and Y. I’ve not researched into them much but when I read the traits of both I see lots of things I empathise with. I think Gareth and I are certainly like Generation Y, in wanting to have jobs that have a greater purpose, beyond just making money. And that would certainly be evident in our salaries over the last twenty years! When we moved to Christchurch we were inspired by the roles we could play in the rebuild of this post-earthquake city. For the first three years we worked our butts off in our respective jobs to give as much as we can for the good of the city and the people that we live amongst.

Now we talk endlessly about what is our purpose for the future? Why are we here? What do we want to do with our lives? Where should we be? What is best for our family? How can we make a difference? We’re really struggling to answer those questions as it’s not as clear as it has been in the past. And perhaps because I am older and a mother of two children, I want more than just a gut feeling before I throw my all into something new.

It says in the Bible, ‘the purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out’.

This resonates with me so much at the moment. I feel like my purpose is buried at the bottom of the sea and I don’t know how to draw it out. Can I even be the one with the insight or do you need special qualifications?

I know there is a purpose in me still. It is a treasure I want to find, I’m determined to find it. Maybe it’s actually staring me in the face, maybe I see it but don’t recognise it. Maybe it’s going to float by me randomly one day or maybe there is someone, somewhere in the world that has found it and is writing it on a piece of paper and sending it in a bottle to me right now? Maybe I’m all run out of these “deep water” scenarios…

This is a crisis. It’s not a despairing crisis. It’s ‘I know I am going to get through this and there will be something awesome for me if I can just go through this the right way’ crisis.

I know I’m not alone, I see people all around me going through their own crisis. I also know tons of people who have worked theirs out and they’re doing amazing things. These are the people I want to spend time with – they are my heroes right now.

Is anyone else in need of a really long fishing line???

*I’ve numbered this blog because I think the deep waters are going to take a while to wade through and I reckon I’ll blog along the way…

Grimsby

Published by thethingsnotsaid

Gareth and I don’t get many dates these days, so when we have them they are precious and not to be wasted. To say the last one was wasted on Grimsby would be harsh but if I had my time over I would probably do it differently.

The choice of film came down to Grimsby or Deadpool. We looked at what was on and these two were the films most likely to hit the middle ground between what we both enjoy. Action comedy is our safe zone. Sometimes on a Friday night we can spend an agonising hour watching trailers of films on iTunes in the hopes of finding one we are both willing to try. I think there has been a couple of times when after all that it’s got so late we give up and just watch James Corden in cars with famous people on YouTube. It’s like searching for the Holy Grail finding a film we’re both going to equally enjoy.

We watched trailers for both Grimsby and Deadpool and essentially Grimsby won because it was on 10 minutes earlier (new babysitter – didn’t want to keep her up late), it had a plot starting in a northern city in England so we’d enjoy the cultural references and the trailer looked funny. Gareth isn’t much into comic book films so this was a big point against Deadpool, despite Ryan Reynolds and Graham Norton professing that this one is nothing like the rest of them…

I’ve just re-watched the trailer and although it does remind you that Sacha Baron Cohen made Borat, Bruno etc. it doesn’t show any of the scenes that are exactly what I dislike about all his previous work – that really cringe worthy, so uncomfortable to watch, way over the line comedy that is just downright offensive. I forgot, or maybe I hoped it was going to be different. My bad.

The trailer shows it as a funny action movie that makes fun of all those spy movies we love so much. Sort of like Austin Powers. Well I suppose in a way this is that, but just so much harder to keep your eyes open for!

In the words of Mark Strong, the premise of the film is “idiot crashes spy movie”. Two brothers in care when they were young boys are split up. One is adopted by wealthy benefactors and evidently has been given all the opportunities in life to become a top assassin for MI6. The other left in foster care in Grimsby, grows up to be an uneducated, obsessive football fan, father of about 10 children, living in squalor and yet very content, save for missing his younger brother.

Somehow the older brother, Nobby tracks down his highly undercover younger brother Sebastian and all the fun and antics follow. It is funny, I did laugh several times but Gareth and I both had to look away so much at scenes with testicles filled with poisonous darts and Nobby and his girlfriend getting it on in extremely inappropriate settings.

If you are a Borat fan then I think you will probably love this. I personally felt violated by the end of it and wish I could un-see some stuff. It is really funny and Cohen is a clever writer, but it just goes too far over the edge for me. Apparently I’m not alone as it’s his least successful film so far, which is sad. Would love him to write a comedy that doesn’t have all the extreme shock stuff in, I reckon I’d love it!

I’m giving this 5/10.

Change Is As Good As A Rest

Published by thethingsnotsaid

You may have noticed that I have had a little blip in writing a blog everyday over the last three days?

This was mainly due to me moving office and my computer being turned off for two days. And also sticking my hand up at the last PTA meeting to help with a cake stall for school on Sunday … when will I learn???

I probably could have carried on with the blogs but when everything was boxed up or midway between rooms my brain just couldn’t find space to think creatively.

The office is now upstairs in what was Jackson’s bedroom and the wee man is enjoying a more square shaped room with actual walls.

I’ve been banging on to Gareth all summer, when the children have been rioting together upstairs until 10pm most nights, that we need to get Jackson into my office. First of all we’re splitting the terrors up. Jackson gets a room that he might actually like to play in on his own sometimes. And the Lego and cars that have literally taken over our living room since Christmas can be tidied away into boxes and shelves in his room, thus making our living room a more all-family-friendly space. Yay!

The bonus is that my office is now amongst the trees. Two thirds of the room is filled with the original leaded windows, which makes for such a pretty aspect. Sadly I am going into the Winter so I’m not going to be enjoying warm breezes and birds singing for very long, but I’ll be able to watch the change of season and stare at passers by on the street as I brew up a new subject to write about.

I’ve been so busy making the move, organising it and ensuring the rest of the family are on board with all the reasons why it’s the best thing to do (Minnie being the hardest to convince!) that it’s not until now, as I type about it, that I realise how much the change of situation is good for me. I love change, I find it invigorating.

This is the first time I have sat at the desk and it’s night time so the curtains are drawn, plus Minnie is making the most of the french doors that divide our rooms and is chatting away to me in the background, and yet still I have a bubble of excitement and expectation bouncing around inside.

Making changes peoples…