FIVE YEARS’ TIME

I wrote this piece for my old blog and for a magazine I edited at the time, under the theme of Five Years' Time. It's beyond that five years now - so how many boxes have I ticked?!

SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 2006

Wherever I Lay My Hat

As a child, I thought that by the age I am now, I might be just-about married and would be spending my days filing a newspaper column from an untidy spare room - chained to a computer and chain-smoking. 

Although some of that rings true, I never expected that I would already have nearly ten years of marriage behind me by this age and that I would be spending my days looking after two young sons as a freelance journalist living in Portugal. How did I get here, and where will I be in five years' time? 

It sounds a long way off now, but the first thing I have realised is that it isn't. Because only five years ago, I was living in a cottage with a six-month old puppy and an even younger baby, on a steep hillside above a beautiful creek in south east Cornwall. 
While on maternity leave, I realised that although I had known my job back-to-front, I was very much a learner when it came to motherhood! 

Learning experience number one: Not good to get puppy when pregnant! 
My dog-loving husband thought a furry four-legged creature would complete our growing family and give me some company while I wasn't working - especially as he was often away. We bought him from a woman who lived just up the hill from us. As she was also expecting, Alison and I became firm friends. I suspect that she and my husband deliberately didn’t tell me how lively and attention-seeking a Springer spaniel would be! Meanwhile, my hormone-addled brain envisaged an utterly obedient dog trotting beside my well-oiled, pristine pushchair which contained a similarly obedient child, thus enabling me to get some exercise to reduce my post-baby bulges! The reality entailed mud; a very disobedient, disappearing-into-every-bush puppy; howling winds and rain; more mud and heaving my protesting body and similarly squeaking pushchair up the aforementioned steep hill.  (This was just before the era of designer buggies made by Land Rover and co., you understand!)

Seeking respite halfway up this hill on the return journey, I popped in to see Alison. We had tea, her ever-present, home-made biscuits and anguished chats about how little our sons seemed to sleep. None of this helped to reduce our waistlines and nor would she have her puppy back! But I hugely valued the friendships I made with her and other new mums.  They were my equivalent of the village elder, imparting their wisdom on child-rearing.  As we get older or move home, there seem to be fewer opportunities to make close ties with people because we have already experienced many of the life events that can bond us.  I'm hoping that in five years' time, I will have made more close bonds with other mums - and dads!  And maybe I’ll have a more obedient dog too.

Learning experience number two: Multi-tasking doesn’t matter. 
If you are used to accomplishing several things in one day at the office, you feel like you have not achieved very much when you are at home and all you have done all day is feed and change a baby – and, given time, yourself. In fact, you have kept a whole other human being alive for twenty-four hours – despite its smells and its inexplicable screams – which is no mean feat! Nevertheless, you try to do lots of things at once so that you have a sense of achievement. So, even when I was feeding the baby I made sure I was eating a snack at the same time (another waistline-inflating tactic), or tying myself in knots trying to read the paper too, so I wouldn’t be ‘wasting time’.  With hindsight, I wish I had been lazier! But as soon after the birth as I felt able and while my mum was still around to help, I was out at the shops or in the park, road-testing shopping trolleys, car seats and all the other baby paraphernalia I had acquired. I was excited and also thought that if I wore out the dog and gave the baby lots of fresh air, I could then have a restful day. Instead, I wore myself out; the puppy grew bigger and stronger each day and my son habitually slept in his papoose during dog-walks in the daytime and not much at night! If only I had conserved my energy for what lay ahead. Namely, his brother!

Learning experience number three: Oops!
Just as I thought I knew what I was doing with number one son, the telltale nausea of pregnancy set in! Another thing that didn’t quite go to plan! We had wanted a second child but thought a good age-gap would be about four years. Besides the obvious lesson in contraception, now I had to waddle around with a bump, a toddler and a dog. So going back to work and letting someone else do most of that seemed the lesser of two evils!  After I fell at home while my son was in his highchair, I realised I was very isolated. No one would have noticed if I hadn't left the house for a few days if I’d hit my head, say, instead of injuring my leg. Alison was busy and we met irregularly.  So, we decided to move to a the military 'patch' while we looked for our dream home at some point.  Second Son was unintentionally born at our new military house in a bit of a hurry – but that’s another story! 

Now

After six months off, I went back to work part-time and things got back to normal. Life was a blur of nursery drop-offs, walks round the park, slow cooker meals, leaving notes for the dog-walker or childminder - and ocasionally getting them the wrong way round!  Before long, both boys could walk, talk, sleep quite well and, delight of delights, were nappy-free! I even had the energy to resume a social life, of sorts. Then along came the opportunity to move to Portugal….. To stay or to go?

I had moved around a lot as a child, because of my father’s job, so the plan was for me and the children to stay put. Wasn’t it? But then that seemed boring. Giving up my job, home, network of friends and moving yet further away from my family was a huge wrench and a big risk on many counts. But the thought of the climate, learning a new language, mixing with dozens of different nationalities and working as a freelance was very appealing.  Part of me still wanted to cling on to good old Blighty and my old identity.  But here I am now in a kind of Gap Year (or two!) enjoying this idyllic setting, the virtually constant blue skies, the social life and some “pre-occupations” – a term I use to describe the things I am having a go at in order to prepare myself for the ‘real world’ back home.  I have also decided to use the move as an opportunity to realise my ambition of working on national news in London. So I was interviewed by ITN and am now on their list of freelancers, getting week-long stints of work every month or so on their news planning desk.  It is unusual but hugely satisfying to be able to do home things and career things without the pressures of both combined – even though it means flying in from Lisbon, worrying about leaving the children behind with scribbled instructions to my husband magnetised to the fridge and scrounging accommodation from whichever London friend will have me!

So, looking ahead to 2010/2011, the plan is for me to leave Portugal with a fluent accent; that still unattained trim physique and an address book full of multi-national new friends. The idea is that I will work in London and that we will somehow be able to afford to buy our own home – a home that we will lovingly decorate because we will be staying in it for the next ten years.  But don’t hold me to that! If the past is anything to go by, I will have been as idealistic as ever but will be perfectly content whether I get halfway there or head off on some other tangent!

As published in 'A Janela' - March 2006.

POST SCRIPT:  
Fluent accent? Not quite!
Trim physique? Fitter than ever, thanks to www.britmilfit.com but there's still work to do!
Multi-national friends? Tick!  Don't you just love Facebook?!
London job? Well, half a job.  Half a tick.  
Our own home? Tick!
Lovingly decorated?  A work in progress...! 

REMEMBER WHEN….?

Certain things really stick in my mind easily but, I think because of information overload, someone can tell me their name or I'll just have read something and minutes later, it's gone. I used to know all my family's phone numbers but now they're on speed dial so I have no need to recall them. I write lists and set my iPhone to remind of things - like the fact that I need to be in my son's class in an hour to help with reading.

So why aren't memory techniques taught in schools?  Less and less is learnt by rote these days but children still need to know the names of Henry VIII's six wives in the right order and their six times tables.

Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein was a freebie I picked up at work after his publishers sent it in in the hope we'd interview him about it in exchange for a free plug.  In it, journalist Josh becomes fascinated by mnemonists who spend days cossetted in ear muffs with blinkers on trying to memorise sequences of packs of cards or lists of binary digits and other numbers.  They then face it off to win competitions held in darkened halls, like a secret society.  They've developed varying techniques, some simple, some complex, to enable them to retrieve information they've only briefly glanced at from their brains.

The one that I think should be taught in schools is where you've got to memorise a shopping list or to-do list of, say, 12 items.  The idea is that you visualise a journey that you know really well like walking round your childhood home or to your local shops.  In your mind's eye, you place the objects you have to remember at certain points on that journey.  The more vivid the colours and whackier the scenario, the more likely you'll remember them.  And because you're placing those objects on a route that you will always be able to recall, you remember them in the right order too.

For example, Josh's friend Ed dreams up a bizarre list of things he needs to remember and gets Josh to try to memorise it: Pickled garlic, cottage cheese, peat-smoked salmon, six bottles of white wine, three socks, hula hoops x 3 (spare??), a snorkel, dry ice machine, email Sophia, skin-toned cat suit, find Paul Newman film "Somebody Up There Likes Me", elk sausages, director's chair and megaphone, barometer.

I've just rattled that list off easily because I was able to do it too. I've memorised placing those objects around the house I lived in when I was seven or eight. The whacky scenarios I've invented are assisted by the fact that the objects are so unusual. So I've got a large jar of pickled garlic being picked up by a Frenchman at the entrance to the driveway. Then Brad Pitt is in a bath of cottage cheese! Opening my front door, I turn right and my brother-in-law, Pete, is laying out slices of salmon on top of the piano where it's being peat-smoked. There are six bottles of white wine on the sofa under the window having a dance, bizarrely. And the brightly coloured odd socks are on top of the lampshade as I walk out of the dining room towards the kitchen. That's where there's someone snorkelling in the sink. I look out of the window and it's all foggy in the garden because of a dry ice machine. I walk outside and Sophia Loren is sat at a computer checking her email. Walking through the French doors into the lounge, Cat Woman is on the TV in a flesh-coloured all-in-one. But Paul Newman is lying on the sofa holding a remote control and he changes channel, then looks up at the ceiling and smiles. On the way to the door, there's a set of antlers on the wall (something we'd never have had at home, but there you go) with a string of sausages dangling off it.  Finally, my dad is sat in a director's chair at the foot of the stairs belowing into a megaphone. Above his head is a barometer.

Odd, bizarre, whacky but incredibly effective. 
Try it!

LONG TIME NO BLOG

Simply too busy.
Having to type this in shorthand too.
Hugely envious of all those people who manage to blog daily.
Most of them are at #blogcamp today.
Wish I was too but would have been fraudulent if I'd attended.
Have lots of ideas but they're still in list form.
To be converted into 'proper' posts when life resumes a more stately pace next week.
Unless it doesn't.......