Do people still read?

 It's been a really, really long time since I last added an entry to this blog. 

And so much has happened in those many years.

The children became old teenagers and started dipping their toes into their 20s. GCSEs A'levels Degrees. First jobs. Driving tests. Renting in London.

Grey hair. Wrinkles. Health 'issues'. A dog. The back yard awash with human turds after multiple floods. Some kind of semblance of a career.

The world muddling along with climate crises after violent regional wars after bit coin after social media horrors after unsettling elections. It goes on.

Quite a lot of death.  

Death to pets. Death to plants. Death to the environment. Death to it raining normally. Death to people we love.  Death to collagen filled skin. Death to the brick phone (although this may well resurrect to halt the onset of a world filled with fake news and tiktok addicts). 

I don't have the same material as I did 10 years ago when two young daughters provided much to mull over and laugh about. And with the death of a parent another step up the Adult Ladder is made with a devastating chasm opening up betwen those halycon days of fishfingers, discussing how puppies are made, and being allowed to sit in the bathroom while a child splashes carefree in the bath. It's a weird homesickness for something that passes so quietly and steadily. I wake up one morning and my daughters are 19 and 22. 

I'm not going to dabble too much in cliches. 

But shit a brick WHERE have those years gone? 

How many bottles of rose-wine and packets of Kettle chips have been dispensed with? 

I overhear friends asking our young What do you want to do when you leave school or uni? What do you want to be when you grow up? And I wince... Because I know that I still don't know myself. My time spent trudging along muddy paths with the dog don't reveal the answer and neither does the bottle of wine and neither does my horoscope (horrorscope). When will that lightening bolt strike and the future reveal itself? It'd be a shame if it literally struck me and I was found on the South Downs Way like a piece of badly cooked gammon, never knowing... always assuming the grass was greener on the hill across the way. Those sheep over there, they're way happier.

In restarting Mothers Ruin I'm going to have a think about this voyage into real life adulthood. It might veer on the existential occasionally. Will definitely involved the dog Kiki (my unjudgemental therapist for the last 10 years). I can't avoid the topic of death. And there may also need to be some fantastical thinking to counter the potential slide into gloominess. 

See you soon.