Liberty - Enemy of the Hoarder

My daughter Liberty is a first class declutterer. Nothing would give her more pleasure than entering into the home of a chronic hoarder and barking the order Get Rid of It! as she regards with disdain each and every one of your 'treasures'. She has been extremely brutal with my treasures and extremely useful.

I invited her round initially to help me sort out the massive collection of children's books that had belonged to her and her sisters and had been handed down and put away for my little ones. We are a book loving family but when there are too many to choose from, pages are yellowed, spines damaged and covers dated... it ceases to be a pleasure. With the efficiency of a school librarian (which she was, briefly) she worked her way through the mountain of books and sorted them into three piles: keep, charity shop, recycle. I did not question her judgement.

Once the charity shop had taken their share and the paper recycling skip was a little fuller, we were left with a manageable pile of lovely books that fitted neatly onto the bookshelf space available and seven year old Addy immediately dived in and began browsing the titles to find some bedtime reading material. Exactly the result I was looking for.

Actually, I did overrule one of Liberty's decisions. She was adamant that the complete Harry Potter collection was a keeper. She was of the generation that grew up with Hogwarts and hungrily devoured each new school year as it was published. Personally, I loved the first three books but found the later volumes a chore. I am happy for my little ones to watch the films when they are ready and will buy the books for kindle if they show any interest. Books 1-3 take up an acceptable amount of space on the shelf. The rest have now gone. Sorry Liberty.

The little ones 'help' sort out the bookshelves

Sorting the books for me served only to whet Liberty's appetite. My husband clung possessively to his Peter Tosh CD as she scorned his musical taste and emptied our CD racks! She had me close to tears as she made me choose just one bat biscuit cutter out of the five I had collected.

Actually, my biscuit cutter collection was an embarrassment. I had carefully organised them into three large tins, eight plastic takeaway food containers, a plastic basket and a few loose ones. They took up  almost an entire cupboard. Nobody needs that many biscuit cutters. As Liberty sorted through them with the speed of an express train, I found myself saying - that one can go, I can never get the cookie dough out of it in one piece or that one can go, the head always falls off when I take it off the baking tray or what is that one supposed to be anyway? An owl? A rocket? Seriously, why had I held onto so many 'not fit for purpose' cutters anyway! We reduced my Xmas cutters to the ones I use every year and the Hallowe'en collection to the best of the different types, discarding all the cats because the tails never work.

Shortly after the decimation of my biscuit cutter hoard, daughter Taylor and her boyfriend came home from Uni and cooked a three course meal here at my house for my husband, myself and the boyfriend's parents. They planned a Mexican themed dinner with the star of the show being a dessert they had created to look like nachos but with biscuit tortilla chips, chocolate sauce salsa and grated white chocolate cheese. When Taylor asked me if I had a triangle biscuit cutter I immediately said Yes. Then I remembered Liberty's work. Maybe. It didn't take long to look through my new improved streamlined cutter collection to find that  the answer was No - my triangle cutter had not been elite enough to survive the cull. I was ready to cry and question the sanity of ever throwing away anything that you had considered good enough to buy in the first place when Taylor picked up a square cutter that  Liberty had spared and brightly suggested she could use that and cut it on the diagonal. That works! Crisis averted and the nacho inspired dessert was magnificent.

My Solar Eclipse Run and the MD 10K

During my absence from the blogosphere, we were treated to the natural wonder that was the solar eclipse. My husband was heading off for a job interview and the kids were at school so I decided to experience the eclipse out in the countryside whilst doing something that has come to be an important part of my life - running. I called it (unimaginatively) my solar eclipse run.

It was glorious.

I love being out in the Shropshire countryside and this day could not have been better. I was thinking a lot about my husband's interview and what it would mean to us as a family if he was offered the job. As well as taking my mind off the inevitable pain and monotony of running, it also made me appreciate the countryside all the more. The new job would mean moving away from this place I loved so I was going to enjoy every hedgerow, every field, every cow, every bird... as if it were the last time. Enjoying all these things against the slightly surreal purplish quality of the light as the moon moved across the sun suited my mood perfectly.

There was a noticeable drop in the temperature and a blurring of the shadows but it didn't go as dark as I remembered from the last eclipse I'd witnessed and the birds never stopped singing like they had before. It felt slightly anti-climatic but I kept running and the moon kept moving across the sky away from the sun and life went on.

That was probably the last time I had a really good run.

The interview went well for my husband. He has been offered a job. We are moving. I have been thrust into a whole new world of busy as we try to prepare for this next part of our journey - a journey that began over ten years ago with a reunion of old friends from which love blossomed.

Putting the romantic stuff back in box marked Do Not Open Unless You are in the Mood for Romantic Stuff, my point is That was the last time I had a really good run because there has been so much going on and so much to do.

Normally, taking a break from running would not be a problem but I am signed up to run a 10K race in my home town of Market Drayton on Sunday and I'm not sure I could even run for a bus at the moment.

This will be my third time running the Market Drayton 10K which has grown over the years into an event to be proud of - voted by Runners World magazine as Best UK 10K for three consecutive years and best UK race over any distance in 2014. We were even on the BBC local news yesterday.

I think I can safely say that there is no chance of beating my own personal best for the course. My husband has offered to run it with me and despite the fact that I know it is going to be tough to complete it without having put in the training to get my fitness and stamina where it needs to be, I am thoroughly looking forwards to it. I will run it with my husband at a nice steady (slow!) pace and am determined to enjoy every kilometre as it winds its way around familiar streets. It will be part of the ritual of saying goodbye to the town that has been a good home for me.

Having been up to London recently to support the wonderful Marathon runners, I feel almost embarrassed to say that the 10K will be a test of my fortitude. Watching the amazing individuals at around the 25 mile mark was quite an experience. A wide spectrum of human emotion was on display as people were pushed to the limit of their endurance. I will be running less than a quarter of the distance but still, to keep going will take a lot of physical and mental effort. I will have to draw on all the motivation I felt as a marathon spectator to continue putting one foot in front of the other until the finish line.

I will run it with my husband because with him at my side I can do almost anything. (I knew I wouldn't be able to keep the lid on the Romantic Box!)

The Start of a New Journey.

I feel as though I should be in the blogger's equivalent of a Catholic confessional.

Forgive me internet for I have not blogged. It has been two months since my last post...

In my defence, my lack of activity on the tiny speck of the cyberspace landscape that I call mine has been driven by the fact that my computer ceased to function. Having spent a rather long time being repaired by some genius whose skills make my head hurt, my computer is back where it belongs - on my desk and fully functioning (albeit with a slightly odd keyboard that may end up being to blame for some interesting typos).

I am back and so much has happened in the last couple of months that I don't know quite where to start. In the tradition of all good stories, I suppose I should start at the beginning.

For some time, my husband has felt dissatisfied with his current employment. A long commute each day bites deeply into the time available to try and achieve the elusive work/life balance. He is always ridiculously busy, sometimes overstretched and too often stupidly tired. On one such day when he decided to have a good moan about it, I was not in the mood to be sympathetic. I told him in no uncertain terms that he had no right to complain about the situation unless he was prepared to actually do something about it. He took my words very much to heart.

My husband is in the sort of job where head hunters periodically contact him with positions that may be of interest. He had responded to a few of these potential opportunities in the past but without the commitment of time (of which he has so little to spare) and energy (ditto!) or any real desire to actually change the wonderful bits of our life that we have built over the last decade,  these opportunities went nowhere.

Suddenly, with my words still bouncing around his head, everything went crazy. There were job applications, interviews and presentations to prepare. There were shirts to iron, suits to dry clean. There were long trips north and south to attend invitations to interview.

It came down to two strong contenders. A job in Yorkshire which I loved the sound of. I saw myself living in the Dales in a sympathetically renovated barn conversion with a big garden for me to keep my chickens and the kids to play. The property website RightMove fed my imagination as I perused suitable homes for sale within our price range. The job my husband favoured would mean moving to Sussex. Putting to one side for a moment that this was a great job, there were two compelling arguments in its favour. Firstly, my husband was born and raised in Brighton and has a strong affinity for the area. Secondly, it would mean we could see a lot more of his dad and be on hand should we be needed at any time. The major flaw in the plan was that our 'housing dollar' would have a really hard time stretching to any sort of accommodation even vaguely comparable to our current home. RightMove was no longer my friend.

My dreams of becoming a Yorkshire lass were put to bed when my husband accepted the Sussex job but before accepting it, a wild card was thrown into the mix. During the process of providing the names of referees for potential employers, my husband got back into contact with a man he had worked with in Switzerland. I have yet to meet this man but my husband describes him as inspirational and someone he would love to work with again. Contact with the inspirational individual generated the wildcard.

I am not a morning person. I can be slow to wake up and not worth talking to until after my first cup of tea. My husband brought me up my morning tea as usual and dropped the question out of the blue How would you feel about moving to India? It was many hours later that I actually responded, by text, to say that anything was possible.

Compared with reducing my belongings to fit into a trunk and packing my family off to another continent, downsizing to relocate in Sussex seemed like an easy option.

While my husband has been organising his exit strategy from his current employment, visiting India and preparing to start work in his new job (did I mention that he is a busy man!), I have been on a mission to sort out and streamline our life. We have accumulated a lot of 'stuff' over the years and comfortably spread out to fill our five bedroomed home. Taking stock of our possessions, breaking emotional ties and working out what we really need against what only serves to weigh us down is challenging. My mind is in a whirl with it all and I am very glad to have my computer back so that I can document the journey we are on. One step at a time. One post at a time. Here we go.