How it all started

A couple of days ago I received a chatty email from Jessica down in the West Country. She said that she had looked through the blog archives to my very first post hoping to find a sort of "how it all began" entry!
Unfortunately all she found was a rather underwhelming entry about a walk on the beach.

So today I will tell Jess and you,  just how and why we got here!

At forty I was enjoying the bittersweet challenges of ward management in a busy Sheffield teaching hospital where as Chris was consolidating his career at the city's University. We had a busy city life. We worked hard ( too hard!) played too hard (Oh how I remember those boozy Saturday  wine bottled afternoons in All Bar One) and we didn't stop once to question a city lifestyle that kept us burning the candle at both ends.

Chris had always maintained a fantasy of us living in the country at some "future" stage; a wish that I poo pooed at every discussion. Why would I possibly want to live in the sticks? , I would say ,when after all I had everything I wanted in Sheffield.
But things changed.
and they changed subtly

I could waffle on about how increased managerial pressures from a pushed health care system made a career nurse like myself , a disillusioned burnt out middle aged old fart, and that is why a new life in the country was so important but I must say that just didn't happen. Ok, the daily pull of managerial duties versus patient contact did have a part to play in my wish to leave The Spinal Injury Unit, but I think that basically I had "seen it and worn the T shirt" and the time was right to move on to something new.

When I was forty, Chris bought me the best Birthday gift I ever received. He bought me a spoilt,emotionally needy, lovable and demanding Welsh terrier puppy called Finlay and he totally changed my life

Finlay in normal "Christmas" pose

I had never had a dog of my own before. and so was hardly prepared for just how much a "baby" of my own ( and in retrospect I realised that he WAS my baby) would change my life.
In a matter of a year Maddie joined our family and my focus continued to change from a workaholic lifestyle towards a doggy lifestyle, where something else than me and Chris needed priority.....Over a period of months, more and more time was spent up at the green and isolated Redmires and Rivelin, walking the dogs and enjoying the countryside.and less and less time was spent around the table in All Bar One!

Weekends for us changed. We spent more and more time at our tiny "weekend" cottage in Meliden ( a cottage that my sister used to live in) and less time city slicking........The pace of the weekend slowed us down, and relaxed us, until for me, the pull of  adrenaline from being a Charge Nurse was lost altogether.

And so we moved.
Two dogs increased to four and two chickens were housed in a tiny run in the garden and that was the start of a lifestyle I never believed we would ever have or indeed originally wanted
I would have laughed if you would have told me I would be the Chairman of a village Flower Show Committee...and I would have scoffed if you would have told me that the life of a single  rescue Ghost hen, or bad tempered turkey would literally take over my life.....
But take over they indeed did


How things do change