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.
New Beginnings... Well, Almost!
I didn’t realise how long it had been since I had written a post on here. It has been two years, bear with me, my writing is going to be super rusty. My last post was about my Arts Council Funding, I was feeling so motivated and creative on the back of my year long project, and as the project ended, I was already halfway through my EFT training, which was also really exciting and inspiring, but looking back, I realise I was also a bit knackered from throwing myself into new things, I also caught Covid for the first time, around the same time. I then still needed to work through my 30 hours of EFT practice throughout the following year. 30 hours doesn’t sound like much, but it is one heck of a learning curve. I did quite a lot of practice hours as swaps with other training practitioners, which meant an hour as a practitioner and an hour as a client, so as well as learning a lot, I was simultaneously processing all my own baggage at the same time, which could be quite intense… it was quite the ride, not regrets though, I now have a tool and a skill that can really help to support others as well as myself, and I’ve met some wonderful people.
It has now been a year since I became accredited as an EFT practitioner, and that year has also flown by, I started 2024 by taking another EFT course – PTT (Picture Tapping Technique), which as you can imagine, really appealed to me, it was a lot of fun, but my focus also shifted to selling the house. It was already on the market but at the end of 2023 we decided to change estate agents (if you ever think that isn’t worth doing because they are ‘all the same’, maybe reconsider, it made a huge difference for us).
2024 has seen me: trying to fit in a few trips to the theatre or to see bands with my friend before I moved away, find a buyer for the house, travelling up to Berwick-Upon-Tweed to look at houses, having an offer accepted on a house in Berwick, losing a buyer, finding a new buyer, spending far too much time rifling through boxes of nostalgia, selling the house, saying goodbye and leaving Conford for the last time after 9 years, and now waiting for my purchase to go through, while I stay with family in Norfolk.
There has been a lot of excitement, a lot of stress, a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, a lot of waiting, and a lot of living with boxes. I have continued trying to create in between the viewings and the packing, and the planning and organising, but it has been tricky, and now all my art supplies are in a storage unit somewhere. I am choosing to believe that everything happens when it is supposed to, but boy, has that been challenging at times. I’m trying to relax and enjoy the time I have right now, because before I know it, it will be moving vans and boxes all over again, but in reverse, emptying everything, and a new chapter will begin. Part of me doesn’t dare think about Berwick, not until I am actually there and moved in, it has been a long, long, road to get to this point, I often thought it wasn’t going to happen, it was like everyone else was living at a normal speed, and I was frozen in the space I was in. Even now it feels so near, yet so far.
I have a list of things I want to work on once I have paper, paint and desk space again. The website needs a serious overhaul, it is so out of date now. not quite abandoned but close enough. The last two years has seen me play and try various things out, I’ve found myself drawn to bright colours and patterns, but there is definitely more work to do before I can get the site up to scratch. I believe everything is happening as and when it should, and that is okay, it is not up to me to question it, it is just my job to start creating at full speed again, and hopefully I’m on my way to doing just that, soon-ish.