The days of wine and cocoa...

Weeks 14 to 16

The days of wine and cocoa…

Weeks have passed in a haze of work, tears and drink.   Severe and frequent attacks of the Poor-me’s, If-only’s and Why-couldn’t-he’s were driving me mad. Keeping mindful and repeating affirmations, going to the gym and doing the “right things” weren’t cutting it. I added lunchtime meditations to the list of practices. So now I was starting the morning with hot water and lemon, whilst hot-penning 3 pages of whatever gobbledegook came out of my head. Trying to get the required 3 pages done I found myself  repeating things over and over again while trying to keep thoughts of breakfast and the journey to work and this and that and the other at bay.   Then positive vocalisations in the car on the way to work. (You get some strange looks at traffic lights.)  Meditation at lunchtime. (My colleagues took to eating lunch elsewhere). Then the gym on the way home. Dinner, talk to the fish, do the chores, go for a walk, have a chat. All the time wondering how things will work out. Then distraction with yoga, evening class, film on television, cheese and onion crisps, supper and wine, camomile tea and cocoa.

The bad feelings just wouldn’t dissolve in alcohol. No matter how hard I tried, and I tried hard. Climbing inside a bottle and hoping the world outside will look warm and fuzzy doesn’t work for long. Maybe if you could climb back into the womb you could make the world go away but otherwise you can’t.  You just end up in the morning dissolving painkillers in water, in order to make the hangover go away.

Solicitor Me wrote to say Document XYZ hadn’t been received back. Solicitor Him would be written to, as The Respondent was obviously dragging his heels in signing it and returning it to Solicitor Him so that Solicitor Him could then forward it to Solicitor Me.  This round the houses stuff drives me round the bend. So I asked The Respondent out straight, since he was sitting across the room from me; he had signed the document and returned it to Solicitor Him weeks previously. Back on the telephone to Solicitor Me to follow up… It seems he HAD done it weeks ago, and Solicitor Him’s  secretary had placed it straight into a file…So more legal telephone calls, emails etc. racking up the charges even though it was the fault of neither of us…

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

A group of us were sitting chatting at a wedding. “I need a break, a quiet place where I can just rest and think” I said. “But where can I go to get away from radio, TV, internet, noise, ‘phones, traffic, everything?  Apart from the moon?”

“I know the ideal place”, a friend of a friend said. He recommended a monastery in the country. “I go every year” he said. “Plus, I’ve brought each of my kids there for a few days before they sat their exams.”

I knew of the place. I knew they took women guests as well as men and that it was a safe place I could go to on my own. That night I googled it and emailed the Guestmaster asking if I could stay 4 nights, any time after 19^th July. He replied that certainly I could stay 4 nights, why didn’t I come and stay from the 14^th to the 18^th July?  Eventually we settled on an arrival date of 21^st.

I could now look forward to a quiet time of rest and reflection in a place with no distractions of any kind. Or so I thought.