Hello to you!
It's not good to start a new blog with Writer's Block, I don't suppose.
Fortunately for me, I'm writing this on my phone which kindly suggests words for me, which is handy for just such an eventuality. The next paragraph will be buttons I press from the selection of words it offers me.
The first one is the most important thing in common with you and your sanity. When I was just a little bit of a new car and the kids to the top right hand corner of the best raid on your website is not the intended addressee. If you are looking for a bit of a sweetener aftertaste to be able to facilitate the best of all ages and abilities on the calendar.
Not entirely sure that will work for longer term treatment. But it fills a gap.
I should probably introduce myself. I'm Mrs Minxington but you can call me Minx. I have been some form of Minx ever since I was allowed to play on the internet, which is quite a while now. I have three kids, a husband, a handful of cats and a puppy that's a handful. I have been gainfully unemployed for a long time due to various reasons for some time now. More about that later.
This blog is for me to dump the innermost workings of my mind into. I envisage this to be something useful for me and not that interesting for the passing reader. Names will be changed to protect me from getting a punch in the face but all anecdotes will, to the best of my recollection, be true.
Some Facts about me:-
1) I am half Scottish and half English. This causes me to have more angst at the moment as Scotland are heading towards a referendum to determine whether they wish to become independent from the rest of the UK. While I can see their point, I at times feel exactly the same, but I kind of like the fact that my blended nationality is all still part of the same body. It gives me a geographical proximity to the part I don't live in.
And yes, I am well aware that if Scotland should vote for independence they aren't actually planning to saw through Cumbria and Newcastle and shove themselves 100m further north, using those poles that gondoliers use to lever the United Islands of Scotland into position.
But it feels like they are. It's the same thing but just on paper. And with a need to apply for a dual nationality passport.
2) I am unusually tall for a lady. Or at least, I was when I was growing up. I think the generation upcoming behind me have been hitting the bovine growth hormone a bit hard.
3) I am a self-taught expert at being estranged from various family members. Current estrangement totals are 1 biological father and 1 stepfather. One of those was an absentee until virtual adulthood and has plagued my life ever since due to his ongoing problems with alcohol and being a self-obsessed gobshite.
The second one is a more complicated story but the short version is "got bored of being his go-to for lengthy tirades against people who didnt deserve them and gave up."
It's a shame for them because they are missing out on some amazing grandchildren and it's a shame for me because I could have used an actual father figure at various points in my life but lucked out there a little bit. Never mind.
4) In the not too distant future I will be turning 40 and this is really what fuels my desire to start doing a bit of writing stuff down. The first of my friends that I made at secondary school turned 40 the day before yesterday - she was in the year above me but was one of the youngest, and lived 3 houses along from where my mother, younger brother and I moved to when she separated from my brothers father. (Aforementioned Stepdad 1. I had 2. Not concurrently although I have always secretly had suspicions about quite how narrow the gap between the two actually were but that's old news and not really relevant.)
Anyway, so she turned 40. She's one of my oldest and dearest friends and other than one minor blip where some exaggerated teenage shenanigans blew up and relegated us to snipy little notes through one another's front doors for a while - have been constant friends since we met nearly 28 years ago.
Unfortunately for me, she lives abroad now so we rarely meet in person, but it is one of those friendships that endures and picks up from where it left off. Of course social media helps - the world has never been so small - but its not the same when the coffees are a thousand miles apart. (That's a guess, don't get out there with your wheel on a stick and start measuring the route and come back and tell me I'm wrong and its only 970 miles. It's. Just. A. Guess.)
I always give her a little bit of grief during the two months where she's officially older than me. Obviously she's always older than me, but for about 10 months of the year we have the same numerical age, the other two are my chance to really capitalise on being smug about being younger.
I've known that I am going to be 40 this year, pretty much since I was old enough to count in tens and worked out when those milestones would occur - curiously they seem to happen every ten years since 1973. However the significance of that has only really become more prevalent in my mind since I turned 39. I don't know why it even matters - I can understand 16 being important, and 18, and 21, as 18 used to be the new 21 a long time back. 40, it appears, is celebrated because you are half way through your four score years of life expectancy. Woo! Half way through! Yay!
For someone looking forward to the grave with as much anguish as I do, it's less of a reason to party, and more an attempt to keep shaking your head to rid yourself of the tinnitus that insists on forcing you to listen to the occasionally "clanging chime of impending doom" that is your life ticking by, second by second, minute by minute, day after day. Cliché by Cliché.
When I was little (in age, I was a lanky strider from birth pretty much) and I was grumpily wishing to do things that older kids or grown ups did, my grandmother would look at me and say "Don't wish your life away, it's shorter than you imagine it to be." I would always think that was a bit odd because she was practically as old as the world itself (she was actually 54 when I was born so probably barely into her sixties when she was advising this). A child's perspective is amazing.
She was right though. Those ridiculously long drawn out days when you are a child quickly turn into compact and bijou (Mostyn) fragments of life that pass by in a blur as you crash in and out of bed over and over and over.
So she (my friend, not my grandmother, unless she's a time traveller and not dead after all) might be 40 now, but the summit is coming for me, as surely as the dog will smack me in the face to wake me up tomorrow morning, and it scares me. So im going to document it - and me, and not really bother giving her a hard time about it, because shit just got serious.
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