Just a few more weeks and I´ll be flying to Barbados where my son, and his lovely wife to be, have decided to marry.
They have spent a few wonderful holidays there in the past and decided it would be the ideal location for their wedding.
For me, it will be my first holiday this year after non stop work, so not only am I looking forward to the wedding, but also to two weeks in the Caribbean sunshine.
The nightmare of course, as all the ladies will understand, has been deciding what to wear! A beach wedding is informal, and the normal mother of the groom attire just doesn´t work. However, I think I have finally got together the outfit. A black, sleeveless, maxi dress sprinkled with pink and predominantly orange Japanese flowers. I have a tiny orange plume for my hair, an orange silk wrap, and very pretty, pink and orange flower flip flops. (no killer heels in the sand!).
The flight from London to Barbados is at 5.50 am, and I live in Spain, so I will fly from here to London arriving at 23.30, the latest flight available. I´ll be sleeping in the airport for a few hours unfortunately.
Butterflies starting in the tummy.
I work hard and love my job, though for the past few months I´ve been working Saturdays in addition to my normal Monday to Friday week. These extra responsibilities only come around a few times in the year during examination periods, and I do enjoy the variety of work it brings me, though I get very tired naturally.
I´m in a relatively new relationship and as has happened on other occasions, the man in my life isn´t too pleased about my working schedule. I don´t blame him, nor do I think his complaints are unreasonable, but I´ve been single for a good few years now and find it difficult to change, or reduce my hours, much as I would like to. Partly because I can´t afford to, I may be single for the rest of my life so I have to work for as much, and for as long as I can in order to secure a reasonable standard of living when I eventually retire.
I worked today (Saturday) after a long week, and was too tired to go to a mutual friend´s party so I´m in his bad books at the moment.
With a late..for me anyway onset of flu. Never have I had such a bout at this time of year here in Spain. The worst thing is that it is the holiday period. Semana Santa, fiestas in abundance, and I rarely have time off work so I´m mightily peeved!
I know who gave it to me too! I gave a three hour class on Friday to a young University student who was sniffling and coughing throughout the lesson. We were ensconced in my tiny office given that it was a one to one lesson, and those nasty germs flew to their next victim...me.
Tomorrow is a big day in the holiday period here in Murcia, Bando de La Huerta, so please send your prayers, good wishes, whatever that I may enjoy the final day of festivities.
I´m a patient woman, I have to be because I teach English and have done so to many nationalities for almost as many years. It´s not difficult for me, I love my job, and I think I have the patient gene if such a thing exists. However I¨m becoming increasingly less patient with twenty something wannabe travelling teachers under my wing with very little experience of either teaching or life, and who burst into tears at the slightest thing, or moan and complain about how little they earn in Spain compared to the UK and how their working hours are not 9 to 5.
Tis true, we are never going to be rich working as English teachers abroad, and our hours of work are not fixed, particularly teaching adults. I gave up an extremely well paid job in the UK to travel and teach, and I had to adapt to the Spanish hours, but there are so many other benefits. Who would not want to sit outside a bar on a terrace drinking red wine and eating Spanish tapas at 11.00 pm on a balmy evening? Who would not want to go to the many beaches here at the weekend and relax with friends? These things cost very little here and make my life the joy it is.
I did invite the latest young moody employee and her unemployed boyfriend to lunch at my house tomorrow after her weepy bout in work yesterday so I´m not altogether insensitive.
I mean I´ve always disliked the whole concept, (friends of mine actually put my profile here when I moved away from the UK and they were visiting me in Spain) and kept myself to myself other than friendly banter on the forums. I have few "friends" here and that´s fine, I´m not here regularly like many and have enough real friends offline.
I did come across a very nice man here last year, long distance, and we maintained communication which kind of fizzled out without animosity, and I still consider him a real gentleman and friend, but I realised that online dating was not my cup of tea. I prefer meeting people in the real world, and I trust few people here. However, my guard was down and a friendship started with another man for many months. I had my doubts, but that´s just me, and I persevered. All was going extremely well, it had even reached the stage where he was going to visit me....next month actually. Then, all of a sudden the almost daily communication stopped and I have no idea why.
I´m not heartbroken, after all we had never actually met, but I am curious as to why such loving communication stops suddenly, I would never have thought of him as a "player".
This experience simply adds more weight to my initial thoughts about meeting somebody online, and I´m feeling very embarrassed and disappointed in myself for being hoodwinked.
I´m not looking for explanations or maybe´s here as to why this happened to me, rather why sensible and intelligent people can be so stupid at times.
It won´t happen again though!
...communicate, and think there is something, but he/she lives a million miles away.
I think it´s all too difficult to maintain or pull off in most cases, and therein lies the question, are International dating sites a good thing or not?
Are we being hoodwinked here? Is it the impossible which attracts us and which makes these sites so successful and ongoing?
I was just 14, he was 16 when we met. I can remember his smiling face so clearly, his curly blond hair and his lean youthful body. I loved him, though we were poles apart in so many ways. He came from the “wrong side of town”, a little wild, and was always getting into trouble, nothing serious mind you, but he was definitely not what my strict father wanted for his daughter.
We had to meet in secret for the final months of our relationship. It was quite exciting in some ways, but sad too, as I knew without a shadow of doubt that we would eventually break up. We did of course, but our paths crossed occasionally during the next few years. I still felt something for him, and he told me he still loved me. He became a close friend of one of my brothers, so I did find out snippets of information about him from time to time. He had been married for a short time, and I learned that he cried the day I got married.
I moved down South with my husband and two babies and never saw him again, except for one brief moment when I was visiting my father in Liverpool. We were having a drink, and my father, much older and mellower said to me, “Do you recognize that man over there?” I looked over to the bar where a tall, middle-aged man was drinking alone. The hair was still blonde and curly, but the lean, hard body was now soft and paunchy beneath the t shirt and jeans. Yes of course I recognized him, even though his back was to me. My father told me that he had seen him many times, usually drinking alone, and once or twice they had even spoken to each other. I didn´t want to say hello and see his face, I don´t know why, but I did see his face as we were leaving. He saw my father first, and raised his arm to wave, our eyes met. He looked old, and his eyes were heavily lined and watery, the eyes of a heavy drinker I remember thinking.
A year or so ago he traced me on Friends Reunited. Did I want to meet him? No, I decided it would be foolish, and besides, he was not, and never could be a part of my life. In reality, and from the day we first met, he and I were walking the paths of our lives in totally different directions.
He died recently. His frozen body was found at the canal, an empty whisky bottle nearby.
JAN_is Blog (7)