What's Your Dundee?

We Dundee

 I've blogged before about the city I live in, and how it had a completely undeserved reputation as being...well a bit rubbish.

Things have been changing in people's attitudes both in and outside of Dundee and I'm so pleased that this is being recognised with Dundee's bid to be the 2017 UK City of Culture.

Love is a Verb

Please forgive the cliché in the title, I'm struggling with titles at the moment and there's not really much of a better way to out this. I'm 6 months into that supposedly tricky first year of marriage, and I've been thinking about love quite a bit of late. Partly because I've recently taken to using 'love' as a term of endearment and because of all of the life/relationship upheavals that I hinted at here. In that blog I mostly talked my way around the things that were on my mind, primarily because I'm no longer an even semi-anonymous blogger and I now need to take into account that my words have further reaching consequences than me ranting into the void.

Waking up alone again

It's late at night, or early in the morning...I can't quite tell because it doesn't feel like either. It's appropriate because I feel like I'm in limbo. It's FridaySaturday and in a few days I'll be back in this bed, but my husband won't be with me. I'll be leaving him behind in England and coming back home without him. I'll go back to waking up alone again. I've delayed the inevitable by taking time off work and forking out for the train fair back up north. It won't feel strange then, because I've travelled on my own on trains so often. Its familiar and routine and mundane and I think it will help.

Not that long ago I still lived on my own, and this wouldn't have seemed like a big deal. Up until very recently, on the occasions when we'd share our bed with the other, in the other ones flat, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and, dreary with sleep, wonder who this strange man in my bed was. At some point, after we moved in together, I stopped feeling like that. I even got so used to him here that I stopped waking up in the night. I'm wondering how ill learn to sleep, without him. More - how will I get up without him.

I've been talking a good game. Telling him and who ever else will listen that I can't wait to get my space back. That I'll finally have the space I need to write again, and that I've been stifled. The truth is, I haven't been stifled, I've been closeted and loved and held. I've felt safe and comfortable. It's contentment that has slowed me down, not suppression. I want to turn the clock back, tell my past-self that I won't miss my space, but that I will feel the empty hole that he leaves when he's gone. To enjoy it, because its all to fleeting.

I knew it would happen. We both did. We chose this life when we decided that this is what we want to do with our lives. It was inevitable. And yet I can't be rational or reasonable right now, knowing that this is almost over for who knows how long.

I joked about getting to watch BBC Four programmes at night again when he was gone. But I know that, even without him, I'll put on the rain noise app that he loves to fall asleep to. That I bought, just for him. Because I love him, and love changes you.
I hope that this change doesn't hurt as much as I fear.

Read the Books You Have

It might be the product of following so many book blogs, or perhaps the perceived challenge of a new as yet unfilled book case. It might even be the propensity to wander book stores when left unsupervised, or Amazon's 'recommended for you' section designed to separate you from your hard earned cash.