One's Own Company

  I have heard it said as I suppose many others have heard it said that you can't be happy with another person until you really like yourself. I think a very good test of this theory is to live on your own, that is without family and without flat mates. I have lived in various accommodations in my time by myself but never in a fully fledged and functioning home had I truly lived alone until August of 2014.

 I live in the same flat now as I lived in last year but this year I live in it without company. Last year I had the pleasure of two of Ireland's finest to share my living space with and when I returned to Spain after the summer holiday to the large, empty space I did find myself feeling a little bit lonely. Musings such as:

 What will I do with all of these rooms?

It's very quiet.
I haven't spoken to a soul all day.

Quickly turned into other musings along the lines of:

 I have a lot of fridge space now.

 I can have guests galore from home.

 It doesn't matter how loud I have my music.

  I will admit to finding myself quite pleased with the notion of living alone. Granted, it comes with a price. The bills are higher which leaves me with a little less cash and sole responsibility of the wi-fi, but I get over this when I realise that I have not one but two dining tables to choose from, a large TV at my disposal and a spare desk that I don't use often but do occasionally find use for. I also have 2 bathrooms. This means one bathroom for my own personal use and the other bathroom for flushing away cockroaches and dirty water from the mop bucket. It's really quite amazing how I have been able to utilise all of the space in a place where I only used to have 1 cupboard shelf, 1 fridge shelf, half a bathroom and 1 bedroom. I would now find myself feeling quite deprived if I didn't have an entire room which has one use and that is to dry the laundry because I don't want to have to look at it in the living room when I'm watching Coronation Street (now minus Deidre Barlow).

  Living alone has helped me to change my mind about my own company. I don’t need a person in a room down the corridor anymore because I do just fine by myself. I don't need to know someone else is coming and going around me because not having someone else coming and going around me makes me want to come and go myself. I am significantly busier now that I live alone than I was before. I also enjoy taking responsibility for doing all of the cleaning and I feel happy in the knowledge that the floors will sparkle until I do something to make them unsparkle and then I don't have to wait for someone else to sparkle them up again because I am entirely responsibility for the sparkliness of my own floor. There's no tension as regards to the cleaning of my environment because I'm the only one who's going to be doing it anyway and I find myself feeling quite proud of that. Almost like a proper grown up!

  It's nice to live in your own company, it's nice to have space you can call your own and it's a relief to embrace and enjoy the peace and tranquillity which once made you nervous. It's as lovely to open the door to your own place after a long day and stick the kettle on as it is to open the door to friends after languishing in the bath on a rainy Saturday whilst reading something witty. Today, or indeed this week in actual fact is just one of those weeks when my world feels right. Everything is all slotted into its rightful place. There are portions of homemade soup and Bolognese in the fridge, the dishes are all tidy in the cupboards, the washing is done and put away, Mr Muscle has done his best on the work surfaces, the mirrors are shiny, the admin for work was completed and forgotten about last week and alls I need to do is to sit back, relax and enjoy the equilibrium I have created for myself with a nice cup of coffee and nutrition filled strawberry. I'm not saying I have such an organised life every week, but this week I do and I'm making the most of it.

My Tale of 2 Cities

  I am currently sitting in the airport coffee shop I always sit in having the coffee and breakfast roll that I always have when it's time to return back to my not-so-native-yet- most-of-the-year-residing-place of Seville. I generally always fly from my actual native Liverpool between 6 and 7am depending on the season. It is January now so the flight is later but experience tells me that this will change to 6am soon enough and will be the service I use in subsequent journeys, otherwise known as 'viajes.' I will still have the coffee and the breakfast roll, it'll just be a little bit earlier.

   The journey or 'viaje' from Seville to Liverpool is something I have become rather accustomed to over the 17 months I have been travelling to and from the two cities or 'ciudades'. Various friends and family members have also partaken in it and they pretty much always arrive at Seville's Santa Justa train station suitably exhausted but very much always relieved to see the dazzlingly blue sky that awaits them as they leave the confines of the interior of the building.

   I never fail to feel proud as I push my guests into the front door of my nice, big, airy flat which will serve as their new home for the next couple of days. I feel even prouder when we emerge from the Puerta Jerez metro station into the bustling city of Seville itself after something tasty to eat and cold to drink. My heart practically bursts when we walk towards the 'magnificent gothic cathedral' and venture behind it into the enchanting streets of Santa Cruz. I tell them about all of the different places we will be visiting, just you wait for the Alcazar I say… just behind that wall it is. I point out my favourite square which is permanently situated and unlikely to move from outside of said Alcazar. I always take visitors to Las Setas/Parasols/The Mushrooms when the sun has gone down and I like to go to Plaza de España in the sunshine, followed by María Luísa Park. I recount the stories of when two friends and I had to go to Plaza de España nearly every day for a week in order to get a little green card displaying a very special number which seems to open up the door to Narnia for those who live in Spain. Plaza de España somewhat lost its charms after the first visit and bureaucratic week which followed but it has regained the magic factor since.

   Seville is chockablock with things to see, watch, smell, eat, drink, listen to, enjoy, walk to, bike to, drive to or simply just enjoy. Orange trees literally do line most of the streets and they're as fabulous as you've been led to believe they are; you can't eat them though. They're not very nice so don't decide to up your Vitamin C intake and collect a few, you would be greeted with a very bitter taste in your mouth. Seville however, has not left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I am coming round to the fact that I am at something of a life juxtaposition and my ambitions and dreams will probably take me away from Seville for some time, maybe not forever but some time at least.

   I went to Seville as a fairly knackered young woman. I was tired and I was drained, but somehow the city of orange blossom worked her magic on me and I slowly came back to life. I didn't realise how full of promise the world is until Seville showed me what I had been missing and I think I will remain forever grateful to her for just being there and shining her lovely sun on me. I know the streets of a different city to Liverpool now and I have a local pub outside of my hometown. My eyes are open so much wider than they were before to the possibilities that the world I live in holds.

   I know that I can stand up in front of a classroom of people and teach them something they didn't know before. I've taught some people how to speak English and they in turn have given me the pleasure of their city. I don’t know if the people I've taught would find my city quite as charming as theirs… for Liverpool is neither tree lined nor sundrenched. The pavements are not windy and the coffee is not as good as it could be. Liverpool does do a decent bowl of Scouse and red cabbage though and you might struggle to see them through the drizzle but there'll always be someone there saying, 'come on in love/lad/girl/Queen and get those wet socks off, you'll catch your death out there you know.' It's a different sort of culture, it's gritty and it doesn't make allowances but it's rich and it's kind. Liverpool is somewhere I have traditionally run from but always feel a huge sense of relief when returning to. Let's not turn Liverpool into something she isn't though. Upon entering my delightful place of origin you are likely to see women who have eyebrows like caterpillars, they just might be wearing their pyjamas and if it's a Saturday daytime they could even be sporting a headfull of rollers. Yes, you will be very surprised but I urge you to look beyond the fake tan and alarming eye related foliage and remember that they are a product of their time. Fifty years ago these women would have been the ones who were dancing about in the cavern club alongside John, Paul, Ringo and George but the changing times and over use of media in every facet of life has them parading about like peacocks instead. You will also see many 'goths' in Liverpool. I had a brief stint as a 'goth'/'skater' type. I was never decked out soley in black, it was more about the people I found myself hanging around skate parks and a lovely arrangement of shops called Quiggins with. I liked the alternative genre of my peers… I'm afraid the 'eeeeeeeeeeee ya dirty skank' ones didn’t do it for me. They still don’t do it for me, I like hanging around Seville with a young lady who wears tent like attire and the majority of my friends are of the guitary/bandy/writery variety. Nice and acceptable both in Spain and in England.

  I am passionate about Seville and I love Liverpool. Seville offers sun, warmth, culture and low taxes. Liverpool offers familiarity, personal history and the roots of my family tree. Both of the cities provide things I need and both are of considerable value to me. Quite honestly I’d like to go to work in Seville during the day and then go home to Liverpool at night because I'd get the best of both worlds but I'm not Bono and I don't believe in excessive air travel so that won't be happening. I just really like both places and feel attached to them both, for some time things have been definitely swaying towards Liverpool and England in general. I sometimes feel like a yellow fish in a pond full of green fish in Spain. I feel like a yellow fish in a pond full of blue fish in England as well to be perfectly honest with you but it's my pond and that makes all of the difference. It's not pretty, it's not perfect and it's definitely not quaint. It's big, it's loud, it's in your face, it takes no prisoners or mercy, the cold will bite through your skin and attack your bones but once it's got you it won't let go and you probably won't want it to. Having said that (the bit about not letting you go and you not wanting it to), I could say exactly the same about Seville.

Feeling The Fear

  Well it's NYD of 2015. NYE hasn't traditionally been my favourite day of the year and I don't really love its following day counterpart. I do like the twinkling, heady lights of Christmas and all of the different things there are to do during Christmas Week but then once we arrive at NYE I wonder what will be any different about NYE of the next year. When I look back at the year just gone I see it as important but nothing really changed with regard to work and my lifestyle. It was a mirror year of the one before it, but without a spell in the mental health facility of a hospital and I learned about loss in the March when a special relative died and I learned to adjust to life without her. I spent 2014 taking little steps towards bigger steps and I've entered 2015 thinking about bigger steps and I can see myself striding at some point in the not too distant future.

  I think to truly make the best of a new year or indeed a new day it's very important to look back and see what we can and can't do differently in the future. Over the last few years I have had a weight problem, I lose it and then I gain it. I eat chocolate and ice cream, I go to Burger King and then I feel much worse about myself. I do these things when I am fed up, I don't have the energy to cook or get up so I eat rubbish and ultimately turn the inner sanctum of my body into a rubbish heap. 2015 is the year that this dangerous and destructive pattern stops and it must stop for good. Quite frankly, I've had enough of it and it's just a silly way to live. Yoyo eating habits and myself separated our partnership in 2014 and I very much hope that we don't meet again.

   I've also spent a long time living in fear and I've made my home in the shadows. I made myself afraid of the world around me and the different things it offers but during the transitional moments of 2014/15 I decided that I just don't want to live like this anymore. I watched a programme called Marvellous and it was all about a man called Neil Baldwin who states he's never been scared of anything and as such has made friends with premiership footballers, high end members of the clergy and he's also received a fellowship degree from Keele University after spending some time pretending to be the local vicar. I watched Neil's story with a keen interest and realised that nothing has ever held him back, he simply wasn't born with the fear factor and as a result he's achieved so much and well and truly lived his life to the full.

  I think that my life could be so much more marvellous if I wasn't so scared so I thought I'd start doing new things. I did something new today and I'm feeling quite pleased with myself about it. I often thought I might like to have my eyebrows shaped but I'd already reached the conclusion that I would be lost in such an environment. I was letting my fears about stepping into the unknown take over me again and I was being silly. I won't fit in I thought to myself but today I stepped into a 'brow bar' and went through the excruciating process of having my eyebrows shaped with a thread thing for the first time. I've got the red eyebrow area and the headache to prove it but eyebrow threading is now something I feel capable of having done to myself.

  I'm heading back to Seville soon after Christmas at home here in the UK and I'm going to rejoin the gym when I return to my Big Square sanctum. I'm going to join the expensive gym close to where I live because there's a pool there and I plan to step into a swimming costume and allow myself to be seen by others in a public place because I really like swimming and it's a type of exercise I'm happy to dedicate myself to. I'm also going to finally force myself to learn Spanish in a proper classroom because I don't understand anything in the country I live in and that's really, really thick of me and I shouldn't have allowed it to go on for so long. Spain is an excellent place and best experienced long term with a knowledge of Spanish in one's arsenal. I want to really know and understand another language regardless of whether or not I live there.

  I'm eager to make my dreams come true in 2015, I want to learn how to make my writings sellable in the commercial market and teach others how to speak English. I'm going to tie up loose ends in 2015, GCSE maths and driving licenses must finally be obtained and a path into the future must be cleared. I'm not planning to change the world in the next couple of months but I'd really like to make my world a better place to live in. Starting these new habits isn't the tricky bit, the beginning is easy, it is the keeping up of the healthier habits that are more difficult. It's time to fly, fly, fly away from fear and into the unknown land of optimism and maybe a little bit of adrenaline rush skydiving.