So This is 2025...So Far
Life update.
I finally made it to Berwick-Upon-Tweed. As I sit and type this, I have been here two months today.
I said goodbye to Hampshire in the middle of October, suddenly a little sooner than I had planned, which included scrambling to find a different removal company that could do an earlier date at short notice, and then trying to find storage insurance, which turns out is slightly trickier if your stuff is going into wooden storage in a warehouse instead of metal shipping containers, and then trying to work out how me and some of my stuff were getting to Norfolk - as I don’t drive.
After around six weeks at my mum and dads in Norfolk, taking walks and eating far too much cake, things moved, or rather I did, although I didn’t know it was definitely going to happen until the day it happened – that wasn’t stressful at all!
On December 3rd my dad dropped my mum and me off at Peterborough station and we took a train to Berwick, still not having exchanged or completed on the house after having to wait for last minute confirmation that the boiler and electrics had been checked, it all finally happened while we were on the train.
Moving to a new place at the beginning of December is strange, there is a busy energy in the air with the run up to Christmas, normal life feels obscured somehow, like it is all a bit of a novelty. Everyone kept asking me if I had settled in, and I just kept replying, no, I just feel wonky – not like anything was wrong – just wonky, plus I think it can take quite a long time for a new place to feel like home, especially when you have only previously spent a total of 10 days there. Why do we always assume that we can settle somewhere immediately, why do we never allow ourselves to pause and take the time and space we deserve, to adjust?
I threw myself in emptying boxes, and trying to catch up on Christmas shopping (which I still haven’t completed). Days flew by, but in the first month and a half, the Christmas tree went up and went down again, I visited Alnmouth beach, and I’ve started to explore the area I now live. I walked down to and along Spittal beach, walked the Berwick walls several times, walked down to Berwick pier to see the lighthouse, and taken a walk along the river to find the remaining parts of Berwick castle. I’m finding Berwick wonderful, it has all of these small pockets of beauty and interest scattered around a busy, built up, little town that has so much character. I have to remind myself that this is still all new, that really I have barely been here any time at all. I am slowly starting to note the normal, the mundane, the everyday, like the noises my boiler makes, that there is a spot where I step on the floor in my bedroom and it makes one of the other upstairs doors open, that there is a man who walks his four tiny dogs twice a day, that around 3 pm someone with a red backpack drives by on a moped. All these things slowly contribute to things starting to feel less wonky and more settled, more like home.
Starting to draw and paint again has taken some time, Christmas and new year were distracting enough, but then when it comes to my workspace, whilst I’m not the tidiest person, I can struggle to work in complete clutter, and my new room is proving to be a challenge. I have finally managed to clear my table so I have started painting, I have even entered a competition, not to win, but to back myself as 2025 begins. I still have to find homes for so many things throughout the whole house, but it is slowly getting there, it feels like everything is, very slowly, getting there.