Meme...

This week I began, for the first time, to counsel on two days a week.   It feels as if I am going in a direction of travel;   Towards my new career.   I hope so.

This work, in a rural GPs' surgery, is unpaid.   I volunteer to do it.   I love it.   I hope, in time, once I am qualified, it will bring me a little bit of income.   I cross my fingers and my eyes and make a wish!

Poof!   The dry ice smoke lifts and my life is transformed at once.   I am in work, being paid for it and full of a sense of my own purpose once more.   Losing my job as I did was a blow to my self-esteem and confidence, sans doute.

I struggled for a time with who I was without a 9 to 5 to define me.   I was proud of the job I did, the career I had.   I felt it was a worthwhile thing to be occupied doing.   I was close to the chalk-face, making a difference to people's lives, helping them out of deprivation, creating a small impact on the region's child poverty levels.

Now I make a difference in a different way.   While we live in a different world, one that seems as if it is cracking at the seams, where our current politicians couldn't give a flying kipper's fart for us.

I hope, in time, to run together my counselling work with my little casual job as a marriage celebrant.

Next Saturday I shall don my civilized black suit, black heels and a white blouse.   I shall straighten my wavy hair, so Boho, you know!   I shall marry a couple I've never met.   I shall smile at their guests and beckon them in to the large room.   I will essay to calm their jittery nerves, to reassure them that they won't be tripped up by their vows, I shall talk them through the process and answer any questions they have.

Only last week a beautiful bride suffered 'a wardrobe malfunction' according to her smiling groom.   The zip of her divine long purple dress had broken while she travelled by car to the venue and she was in the ladies' toilet being safety-pinned together by her bridesmaids.   Thankfully, given the season, she had a cream fake fur shrug for warmth.   Slung artfully across her shoulders, it drew her guests' attention away from the hasty repairs.   Theirs was a beautiful ceremony.   They were gorgeous and so in love, so happy.

And so I sit at both ends of the spectrum.   Right at the start of joyous married-life plans, and where it all begins to unravel for some people and they feel anxious, depressed, sad, overwhelmed, fearful and frightened.

I see it all.   It sees me.   I am proud of myself.   I quieten my own fears therein...

For a while.

Have a fun-filled week, mes bloggy chums.   Watch out for the snows.   Please know that I care about you and thank you for spending time reading my rubbish!   Here's a picture of the inside of my mind to keep you playful today!

Bizarro!

I wish I hadn't just Googled all images relating to the word "bizarre..."

Oh dear, it'll take me some time to recover from that experience - Ooh, me eyeballs! 

Where's the scrubbing brush when you need one??!

And so, this weekend I shall be mainly avoiding our friend who's 50th Birthday it is and who is a long-time friend of GJ, but whose family remains totally influenced by Renaissance Sturm und Drang, so intertwined and fictional are their lives!

We are eating with said close family, and friends, (that'll be us, then!) on Friday at a ghastly gastro-pub sort of place that only offers one choice for vegetarians, but who cares about me?!

They are so a bunch of drama queens, never a dull moment, although lots of frustrating ones!


Truly with them, I should put the full brunt of my counselling skills into practice, but it wouldn't be ethical to do so, and therefore I suffer not entirely in silence but with lots of grumbling, grouching and growling under my breath as I clamp together my teeth and suppress my desire to say exactly what I think of them...

Yes, I am this awful in real life!

Anyhoo, on Saturday for his birthday, we are booked to go to the Sage to see Doctor Feelgood. This forms our present to him.   I don't know why we bother...

I know only one of their records.

It's going to be a fun gig!

On Wednesday my counselling course begins, with two new tutors to get to know, to boot.

On Thursday, we are travelling into Footballers' Wives territory of Cheshire, for my hubby's work... I shall keep you informed as to what I get up to there!   Wot larks, eh, Pip!   Incidentally I found that Knutsford was home for many years to darling Mrs Gaskell, of Wives and Daughters, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, and Cranford - Marvellous!

And on Friday I return to counselling practice in the rural Doctors' surgery, that I enoy so much.   Wish me luck!

By Sunday, I may well be lying in the cupboard under the stairs with my feet in a bucket of Epsom Salts, my head reeling from all the excitement, sniffing on smelling salts!

A toute a l'heure, mes bloggy wonders...   Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful!

I sometimes wonder about how bizarre our lives have turned out to be...   Rats 'n' all...

Tell me your news?   Bizarre, or no!

Meantime, je vous embrasse tres fort - Mwah!

Ode to Joy...

So proud to have my 350th Follower -Welcome fiends!


I have been a bit quiet this week.   Some deep therapy was done in class and I have been sitting mulling on it.   I was helped through my learning thoughts by a wonderful lady who lives in the close orthodox Jewish community here in the north.   She is to become a firm friend.   She exudes warmth and care.

I pick my friends carefully these days, having had my fingers burned and my trust not returned in the past.

More news - I've been staggered that more people actually want to come and see me at the surgery where I'm a trainee counsellor...   Wow!   I hope I can do some good work with anyone who makes the choice to step over my threshold...   Although clients can never become friends, I care about everyone I have the privilege to see and their stories form part of the richly coloured patchwork quilt that I'm sowing to keep me warm over the long winter nights to come.

This weekend, I'm also privileged to be attending three weddings - Yes, three!   This is the start of my training to become a casual celebrant of weddings, civil partnerships and general facilitator of baby-naming ceremonies...   What joy!

Finding joy in the small things, like the number of daisies there are to be found craning their heads along the roadside after rain and sunshine, is the order of my day.

Things are looking up, mes mecs.  

I hope with all my heart they are for you too <3

Discombobulated...

They say a week is a long time in politics...

It feels like I've been living through some long weeks of late.

I know I'm not the only one, as that's what others have been saying all around me since the start of the year.

How about you?

I said on Friday that I was knackered - In other words, cream-crackered, tired out, plum tuckered, shattered, drained, emotionally exhausted.

...I think it's because I'm finding the process of leaving one job this month, while trying since October to make myself indispensable in another post; At the same time, I'm attempting to write bids for the funding of said post, while also aiming to keep my new and very dear colleagues afloat; All this whilst undergoing training as a therapeutic counsellor, having to find a voluntary placement in a GP Surgery as a trainee counsellor, whilst simultaneously completing all the due assignments of said coursework correctly.

All of this is doing my head clean in.

...This, and starting Group Therapy, as a further requirement of the course, while undergoing supervision of my clinical practice with clients, obviously, and waiting to be matched to a suitable supervisor.

I didn't say I was complaining, did I?

And yet sometimes I get to feeling as if a wheel is coming off the wagon...

For me, it's probably down to having to open out the very core of myself to others, after sitting with it hidden safely away, as if inside the furled petals of a particularly recalcitrant flower.

The requirement to expose what has kept you going for so long, that which you have coped with, suppressed, stifled, quietened - Revealing to others the strategies and ruses that have kept me together for 47 years on this planet...

Rightly, or wrongly, it's difficult and discombobulating...

And being knackered is also about worrying whether I am going to be able to put all the pieces back together again, so I can be 'Adult' enough to offer therapy to other folk in need, when I do succeed in obtaining a blinkin' placement at a doctor's surgery!

Does anyone know of anywhere that might take a trainee counsellor - Nice smiles, only slightly used, dinted and sullied. One careful owner?!