Out with the old…

Well here we go again, a new year has started and I must say I am relieved. I mean we all cast out the old and ring in the new when we get to Jan 1st but I have never been more glad to see a new year in, in fact I’m usually in bed by 10 and barely flinch when the fireworks start.  This year I was up barking with the dogs and marveling at the coloured flashes as they exploded across the sky.  Well how can this year be any worse than last.

Seriously I’m not just talking personal stuff here, I’m still happily plodding along in my new life, largely oblivious to things going on around me, however some things are difficult to miss. 2017 provided a gigantic fruit salad of poo around the globe didn’t it.

Lets take a quick look!

The ‘majority’ of us (by that I mean the uneducated, mildly racist, easily-lead part of Britain) apparently voted to leave the European Union, the ramifications of which we (the educated, culturally-aware, well-informed part of Britain) are yet to fully understand.

Not to be outdone in the game of ‘our fuck-ups have to be bigger than yours’ the US then decided to inaugurate a Disney villain as President. Thank you America it helped to divert attention from the UK for a moment or two.

Despite these two disastrous decisions by the voting public (we really shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions without supervision), there is something even more worrying and that is the apparent ability for the French to take control of their own destiny. How scary is it that the one country we could rely on to make good quality, internationally recognised white material on a stick…are now the most respected European country left in the mix. (I promise a searched for a picture of Macron but….)

And to cap it all I don’t dare even comment on how handsome the new, dashing, young French President is in fear of being accused of sexual harassment. Is it just me that is a little tired of it all, I mean, I was OK until some one in their wisdom decided to ban grid girls. I know I said we should be allowed to make decisions without supervision but…really? Remind me, how much money have Saudi invested in F1 to make this happen? I digress…

Ok so enough about the world around us and more about my personal 2017. It doesn’t make any better reading as we decided it was going to be our year off….do not let me do that again! I wanted to see if I liked living here as well as working here and the answer is …meh…

Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but when the house isn’t finished all my brain can do is stack up jobs, create lists then stress because nothing is getting done.

I tried, I went out with friends (and embarrassed myself), I even went to the pool (and felt uncomfortable), I tried to put my efforts into a new business online (and wasted my precious time) and experimented with hydroponics …everything I tried just failed miserably, because it wasn’t what I came here to do…and I’m easily bored.

The only thing that worked really well were my raised beds, remember the things we built that looked like some sort of satanic alter, well they produced a great crop of everything this year…apart from peppers. I was gifted some pepper plants from a friend and they grew fabulously, they were green, healthy, tall and full of flowers, but not one, not one single pepper.

The peppers were the tip of the lettuce though as they were all eaten by some beastie too and I hope he is fumbling around somewhere feeling overweight and frumpy like I am, because he ate all my salad!

Then we come to the cars – we lost Betsie our trusty van and Dan’s source of income whilst out on a run, luckily not too far from home, and then I hit a wild boar on our way out to dinner in the Seat. Luckily we have a selection of cars to choose from, but of course none are legal, few are working and many are unfixable having been dismantled to fix others…so that is when Bertie the new van and Stan the new boar-beater joined the crew…good job we are building a big new garage to get these things fixed in hey.

Oh wait a minute, work has stopped, we have no room, the floor still needs digging out and levelling, then it needs concreting and we have gates to make and perimeter walls to build…stress, stress, winge, whine and so…

In amongst all this my Dad (whose 82) decides he might be superman after all and his failure was luckily discovered pretty quickly by his neighbours and he was whisked to hospital. Two broken vertebrae, a broken neck and another cracked vertebra in his neck, and a phone call to me to confirm a DNR (do not resuscitate) and a request to get back to the UK pronto.

Amazingly I am going back to the UK again in a couple of weeks and he will be home (with help, but home) so this is how I know that 2018 is going to be a good one, it doesn’t have to go far to improve on the last year but to save my relationship and to get my sanity (and body) back we are back to digging, building, creating and laughing for the foreseeable future.