How we came to This. (Again)

Well.
It’s been a long, long time since I posted anything on this site, and soooooo much has happened that it feels almost impossible to begin again. But here, by popular demand, is the resurrected blog, designed with the intent of keeping interested parties (and my Wise Friend in particular) up to date with our newest life endeavours, and of reminding people that Dreams can and do Come True, (more than once).

Maybe I will fill in some of the more interesting details of the back-story later, as and when it seems appropriate, because if I try to do that now, Life will keep marching on, and my blogging will never catch up with it. Suffice to say that, after having all my wishes come true a decade ago, I discovered that wishes are sneaky things – partly because humans are a bit crap at predicting what will actually make them happy, but mostly because Things Change. Unlike dogs, it turns out that wishes aren’t for life.

The making of the wish that brought us to where we are now began way back in The Days of France, when, after getting the house and life of my dreams, my daughter had her first baby, and introduced a whole new dynamic to the situation. Suddenly there was something else that I wanted, that couldn’t be achieved within the existing set-up. I still wanted to live a life of rural bliss, but I also wanted to be The Best Granny in the World. And the second part of that required much more contact with grandchildren than occasional trips to the Motherland would permit.

It was my second grandchild’s birthday a week ago. He is nine years old! The year he was born was the year I moved into the house in Derby, so as to be on hand to look after the grandchildren when my daughter went back to work. Nine years of babysitting and sleepovers. Nine years of school runs, and after-school shenanigans. Nine full-on, full-time years of being The Best Granny in the World.

But also nine years of putting up with the not-so-greatness of urban living so I could Do Grannying (and of course Mummying) properly. And nine years of Simon backwards-and-forwardsing between The House of Yes in Derby and the house of Rural Bliss in France, (except his frequent absences from the French house meant no animals, no vegetables and no proper settling down to anything).

Time passed. Hairs greyed. Bones broke (and mended). Parents died. Age grew and fitness shrank. Mortality got louder. Questions began to be asked about what we should do with the Rest of Our Lives.

Then Greta Thunberg happened, and suddenly my oldest grandchild became painfully aware that the planet was Really Not OK. And I became painfully aware that, despite all our climate-change-protesting, bee-friendly seed-sowing, and crisp-packet recycling, there was very little the Best Granny in the World could do to make things better, or save the children from the disaster that was unfolding, Except perhaps Build an Ark.

Well, not so much build one, as buy one. And not so much an ark, as a far-away-from-it-all house-with-some-land. But not as far away as France. Because this time it wouldn’t be for just me and Simon. It would be for my whole family.

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