On Reflection...

We didn't quite have a white Christmas - but a white Boxing Day is close enough, right?

Leaving from onceuponalastyear on 8tracks Radio.

I mentioned in my last post that I'd been looking for work, and while I was in Belgium and France on that coach tour I found out that I'd been successful in getting a job, starting the day after I got back to Liverpool as the Site Administrator for an installation event in town.

I was over the moon, and way less apprehensive than I thought I would be. Because I've always been scared of first impressions, and then I barely cared, all of a sudden. Bizarre.

As it would happen, I ended up meeting some of my best friends in my last three months away.

I don't know what turn of events led me to that particular job at that particular time, but I'm forever grateful it did. I did a little bit of everything, from being a PA to Neil, the technical director, to right hand woman for my right hand woman, Natalie the site manager, to handing out skates and dealing with a bunch of Scouse mums who were very mad, fixing leaking antifreeze on the ice with an Indiana Jones style slide through some barriers, working with the City's event manager - literally everything.

It was quite literally the time of my life, meeting and getting to know those lovely eggs. They taught me how to have a good time again, and it made me so so happy to slide right in along a tight knit group of people and feel like I belonged there.

October was a strange time of year for me. I'd started to run low on money so I was looking for a job, I took a lot of walks out along the shore by the lighthouse just to get out of the house because Grandma and I were adjusting to it just being the two of us.






But early in my stay I'd booked a coach tour to see the Battlefields of the Western Front (if there's an area I'm forever a history nerd about, this is it)

That trip was amazing. As per usual, I was on my own, but everyone else was paired up. Instead of being isolating though, I found that they were all interested in why I was there, and more than happy to sit and talk for long stretches of time.

I even won over the tour guide who I think was under the impression that I was some kind of whimsical moron wandering around with a DSLR around my neck just there to take pictures and not someone who soaks up history knowledge like it's going out of fashion - he found out otherwise when I was wandering around the bookshop at the museum in Poziers with so many books I couldn't see over the top, complaining that I had to leave some behind because they wouldn't all fit in my suitcase.

I can't find the right combination of songs to make a mix for this one, so this will be another picture heavy post. but I hope I can convey the absolute awe I experienced visiting these places, and the way it made me feel especially in the context of my own 'struggles' at the time. They were so insignificant when you could see the scars left on the land from over 100 years ago.

So this is a little condensed, but I went down to London a couple more times while I was in the UK. One was actually the first time my second cousin and I met after talking on and off for years - we only realised this after planning the whole trip and meeting up at Lime Street Train Station. We got on really well and I'm so happy we met. She and her friends, who graciously put us up for a couple of nights, showed me London in a local way - her and I went to see Richard III with Martin Freeman at Trafalgar Studios, wandered around a few touristy sights, and then stumbled upon an old fashioned carnival on the Southbank - where we drank gin on a merry-go-round that was turned into a bar. And then they took us to a London house party.

 I think we rolled back home around 5am very tired and very tipsy - it was genuinely the time of my life catching the night bus across the city and it really exemplifies how I fell in love with London - slowly at first and then all at once.

Even now I have such a yearning to be there, nearly as much as Liverpool, which was effectively my home for 6 months (and might still be where I think of home as). We did some tourist stuff - Went on the eye, went to Baker Street (and Speedys Cafe from BBC's Sherlock) and that - but we also spent an entire day at the Warner Brothers Harry Potter experience. Later in the year I took my Aunty down to London for her birthday, where we saw Matilda the Musical, took pictures of Christmas lights, and did Madame Tussaudes.








                                       (the husbands)