“ The unexpected can take you out. But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life.”
~ Ron Hall
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In a nutshell…
The blogging stopped because of that one thing which causes indolence in
people of all ages: as Ovid once wrote, ‘If any person wish to be idle, let
them fall in love.’ Having spent the
greater part of my late teens and early twenties blanketing my belief in
notions such as true love and forever – and even, to some extent, the one –
under a shroud of stolid scepticism and cold impassiveness, I had decided to
take some time out in Australia, away from the distraction of failed
relationships and comically disastrous first dates. In fact, my post on
February 5th last year pretty much sums it up. My plan was to trundle down that
road to self-discovery along with all the other wayward, hopeless,
directionless, jobless young twenty-somethings. What I unintentionally discovered
on my little journey, despite my mulish refusal to ‘‘fall in love’ in such
impractical circumstances’, was my one.
If I didn’t have eyes for Damien when we first met, my younger (male)
cousin certainly did, noting the unusual colour of his eyes and his potential
as a model. It wasn’t long before those
steps which lead to a committed relationship began to take place. First there was the Facebook friend
request. I sat in my room with they cursor hovering over the ‘add friend’ button, before
eventually dissuading myself from clicking – it was far too soon, we had only
just met, it would make me appear desperate and a bit stalkerish. But at least he
didn’t seem to be in a relationship. I
closed my laptop and decided to sleep on it, which turned out to be a good idea
as I woke up to a friend request from Damien.
Next was the casual invitation to play Words with Friends. Before the days of Facebook and MSN Messenger
and ICQ chat, boys used to have to make that nervous first phone call or shyly suggest
‘grabbing a coffee sometime’. Now they make
their interest known in black and white through 13 bytes displayed on my
screen: ‘Fancy a game?’ Why, yes I do quite fancy a game, actually. As it happened, my lexical abilities were
proven to be far superior than Damien’s.
I can now confess that I did, from time to time, turn to an online
anagram solver to secure my victory. Sorry, Damien. For me, it was all about
the game; for Damien, it was only about that little chat window in the corner
that allowed him to message me all day and through to the early hours without
even having to request my mobile number.
So one round of word play led to another, and eventually we went on our
first date. He took me to a steak house,
and won my love for him through my love for large quantities of rare meat. It has since been made known to me that Damien did not listen to a thing I said that day. He merely nodded cluelessly in response to my every word, and it would seem our relationship continues to progress with my speech constantly falling in vain on his deaf ears. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before we got serious, and I
brought him home to England so he could meet my parents. 
With my dad’s blessing we got married in
January, on a warm Australia Day, and spent our wedding night blissfully eating
KFC and Nando’s in our deluxe hotel suite. On May 31st, our gorgeous baby girl
came into the world and immediately began to fulfil her filial duties of
providing us with sleepless nights, dirty nappies and moments of helplessness
as we were thrown into parenthood.
Ok, so those who can do maths will have realised by now that, no, Eva was not exactly planned. Two little pink stripes on a pee stick led to a hurried ‘proposal’, and four months later I was walking down the aisle, only days before my protruding tummy became obvious. A year ago, who would have thought that I would now be sitting here typing with one hand and cradling my sleeping three-month-old with the other? Things did not happen as we had planned, but sometimes reality is better than dreams, and sometimes these unexpected situations are just what we need to mature.
So, here I am after all these months, ready to share my day-to-day life
with you once again. It’s good to be back!
