Hey Sister

N   I have written extensively about my own history but I haven't really commented on the history I have shared with others. I have a large extended family on both my maternal and paternal side and a small immediate family. I come from your standard mum, dad and two kids affair. I'm older than my sister by two years and she's called Our Lucy, but is often known as Luce.

 

   We all came out in celebration of Lucy a few months ago when she got wed to her now husband Jake and finally flew the nest lovingly crafted and maintained by our parents Ange and Gegsy. I don't have any other intimate examples of what it means to have a sibling other than the one set for me by Lucy and I think she's set a high standard of love and care over the 26 years we've been together, often separated by land and sea but always, always a pair. To me having a sister is all about the easy friendship you simply can't duplicate with anyone else other than a very, very close friend or cousin. Lucy and I are the only sisters in a family where everyone else has a brother and I've seen that the brother/sister relationships of my cousins are also strong and precious. I think a very large part of the reason for this closeness between siblings is because we come from a family of which all of our parents are one of seven - meaning that family is important and it has a stronghold within our identities, we were taught to look after each other and on occasion I've felt just as protected by my cousins as I have always felt by Lucy. I remember when a not so comradey comrade gave me a hard time on an idle Tuesday at high school and one of my female cousins, also in the same school and older than me by a year, took much umbridge at this treatment of me and proceeded to put the not so comradey comrade into a position of interrogation and saw to it that the uncomradey one didn't pull a stroke like that again. The cousin in question continues to be a close friend to this day and someone I've put into something resembling a 'big sister' column in my mind.

 

   I don't wish to represent my sister Lucy as being a little saint. A little saint she is not and our dad took great delight in revealing her past misdemeanours in the speech he gave with excellent delivery and aplomb at her wedding. It was of course all said in jest but everything that escaped his vocal box was the truth. We know so much about our sisters; we know why they're a little bit defensive, we know when they started paying a lot of attention to their hair and makeup. We know when they took off from us emotionally to 'find themselves' and we remember when they came back with a greater impression in their mind's eye of who they had become. A sister who is close in age is likely to have been our first friend, competition for parental attention, a yard stick to measure ourselves against and in my case someone who is always, always there, ready to take me in, dust off the day and say something which is unique to her, highly likely to make me laugh and cause me to feel grateful for the 30th April 1989, which is the day three became four and Little Luce began to make her first impressions on the world.

 I have a great deal of respect for and interest in the sanctity of sisterhood. My sister used to be a mucky little thing in the garden who was forever consuming mud pies and leaves, she still knows where they tastiest leaves are… she used to have tasting sessions during her morning constitution as she headed towards school and then inevitably diverted her route and went somewhere else instead. Lucy isn't a mucky little thing or truant anymore, she's just little now and I'm so glad that I've seen and been part of her journey from mummy and daddy's tiny baby to toddler, to my friend, to school, to high school, to A LOT of college courses, (one of which resulted in expulsion) and now to marriage. I'm expecting her with our mum and dad in three and a half weeks time for a week long visit… at the end of which we'll put on our red shoes, click three times and go back to our little town just outside of Liverpool city centre. As Dorothy always says, there's no place like home and it's all the better when you've got a full memory bank waiting to be woken up when you get back. You can stroll along the beach there with your sister who always walks a pace ahead and talks nineteen to the dozen but continually looks back to check you're still there as she mosies with her back straight, senses tuned in and serves to dazzle the world around.

Heart Healthy

 

 

It dawned on me yesterday that we're all living on the same planet but experiencing it completely differently. I was thinking about this and relating it specifically to languages, my flatmate and I have very different ideas about who the Friends characters are. How is this relevant?

  It starts with the fact that my flatmate and I are of different nationalities. I'm English and he's Spanish. I walked into the living room the other day to find myself looking at David Schwimmer's face, now I recognised his physical portrayal of the loveable oaf Ross Geller but I didn't identify with the voice coming out of his mouth at all. What have they done with my Ross? Is what I was thinking. I almost said, 'this is a lot more enjoyable in English yanno,' to my ensconced in his own version of Friends flatmate but then I stopped myself just in time. I stopped because I remembered a conversation I had with a different individual of Spain about how Friends only feels like Friends to him when he watches the American actors running about on the screen with their mouths open and closing but with their real voices hidden behind a Latino voice over actor. If you’re a Friends fan then you'll know that the six principal characters feel as familiar to you as your own friends do and the language you know them in is who they are to you. It seemed a bit mean to tell my flatmate that he was having a second rate Friends experience, he was having a nice time.

  My point here is that we're all watching the same things but from varying angles. I step onto my yoga mat and look forward to thirty minutes of peace and calm, someone else steps onto a yoga mat and looks forward to thirty minutes of boring poses. We then meet in the pub and have a heated discussion which results in someone being called 'snotty.' I feel that as groups of populations we have become very aware of what we think and how we feel but are not very aware of the person sitting next to us at work, we're all on the same planet, we're in the same office but they're in their universe and I'm in mine and we won't meet in the middle until we accept that we must travel to a middle ground and talk things out. It is of my entirely insignificant mind that we often forget to communicate and to empathise, we forget to do the right thing because we're so focussed on what's happening in our individual universes and more often than not in today's cut and thrust world we're forgetting to live, we're also forgetting that other people are capable of enhancing our lives, not everyone is out to hinder things for us.  

 

  I sometimes find myself feeling tied to a career clock, must do this, must do that, mustn't swan off to another country, must start saving for a pension by the time I hit my 30th birthday. The only tick-tock-tick-tock I'm really tied to is the one beating inside my chest and that clock likes action, it likes movement. It likes to be understood and cared for too. My heart, like hearts everywhere in all of the billions of universes millennia wide has on occasion forgotten to empathise and to understand its heartly counterparts, but, but, but, but I am making a pledge to carry about an understanding and forgiving heart. This heart of mine will not screech out 'eeeeeeee ya snotty you' when it doesn't understand another heart beating all alone in another chestly confinement. My heart will opt to communicate instead and by doing so will allow its best friend and close neighbour, the brain, to release nice heart healthy doses of dopamine and serotonin whilst it's support network, the arms and legs, walk around showing the eyes all of the magical sights along the way as the ears take in tinkling, pretty music signalling a story that is just about to begin - with the most colourful and stunning set of lights guiding the way.

 

 

Conscience and Confidence

  My name is Helen Edwards (totally know that you already know what my name is but I'm about to make a declaration and I've heard that announcing oneself is the correct protocol in such situations) and since I learned how to think I've been having unhealthy relationships. I've experienced unhealthy relationships with food, alcohol, men, women, my body and also my mind. I shall outline them forthwith so hold onto your seatbelts…. white knuckle ride coming up.

  When I was a child I was afraid of the other children at my school, they were all a bit rough and ready and I was undoubtedly the studious type so I got rather used to my own company and I befriended a cat called Simba. Best friend a cat aged 11? Yes, I can hear the alarm bells ringing in your head. Primary School finished and on I moved to High School, well that was a joy, NOT. I cried every day for approximately three years of my high school schooling, the fact I didn't dry out altogether was a small miracle. I had pencil sharpenings tipped into my hair, I was always the last to be picked for anything, people would try nice and hard not to invite me to things but always be very careful of making sure that I knew all about the social activities of my peers and one very pleasant girl passed a note around the class with the question Who Hates Helen? written on it and asked all of the yes voters to sign accordingly. My crime? I was quiet, unassuming, unconfident and my face was as miserable looking then as it remains to be to this day when in a resting position. It was an unfortunate sequence of events and I was glad when I was 16 and could walk out without looking back.

  Should have all ended there shouldn't it? Theoretically, yes, and that would have been ideal, but theories don't always work in practice and this theory didn't work in my case. The rot had set in early, damage had been done, rusty nail was already well in place and it was contaminating everything around it. I would walk into a room and expect people not to like me, I had come to expect to fight  my corner before anyone had gotten to know me. I was defensive, I expected the worst of everything and I was incredibly negative. I developed anxiety, OCD (no I'm not a little bit OCD - how I loathe that phrase. I suffered with fully blown, crippling OCD for a rather long time), depressive episodes, I drank too much, I ate too much and I didn't believe there was a happy future out there for me. This up and down fiasco carried on for years and years and it plagued me. I gained weight and I didn't want to go out, I'd feel so uncomfortable when I was out that I'd get too drunk, then I'd feel uncomfortable about being so drunk when I was in the same company again but in a more sober condition. I'd lose weight, I'd gain weight, I'd feel good and then I'd feel bad. It's been the most sickening roller coaster you can possibly imagine but with the added effect of being not one bit imaginary and very, very real. So real that I can remember it because I've lived it.

  I've had some relationships, all of which have failed. I believe these failed relationships can be divided into two camps. My inability to function in a rational way when the chips were down and because I made some bad decisions regarding the other partners in the relationships. My weight has been a massive factor, I just haven't felt very confident for large parts of the last 10 years since my first relationship ended.

   This upping and downing has been ruling my confidence and consciousness for far too long and it is going to STOP. It is going to STOP once and for all. I've fought against the urge to swap newly learned healthy behaviours over the last few weeks, I've been keeping a diary and I make lists for myself about what I must do the next day, I've been practising yoga each day and I've become a vegetarian. I've lost 9lbs (yay me - weighed myself this evening) over the last while and I can feel something changing inside me. The lazy, lethargic, soft and comfy casing surrounding me is falling away and revealing someone with the drive and ambition to make things happen. The slim, bright eyed, confident young woman I was in my early 20s is on her way back and when she gets her foot firmly back in the door, she's back to stay. She'll fit her hourglass figure into a pair of size 10 jeans, let her blonde hair fall over her shoulders, pass her bloody driving test and then she'll buy another pair of size 10 jeans to celebrate.

Love never leaves, even if it was only shared for just a moment

It has been quite some time since I last wrote but I felt myself feeling gently urged to enter back into the blogging sphere and so here I am. I have been grieving for a couple of months and perhaps that it why I chose to disappear for a little while for you see the grieving process has taken me quite by surprise. In March of 2014 a lady whose impact and influence on me and onto my general being has far surpassed that of most passed away, her passing had been expected for many years and yet came as quite the surprise because no one truly ever expected her to actually die, it didn't seem like the sort of thing she was going to do having never done it before and she was a creature of habit. Pass away she did and I have been feeling a little strange about it ever since, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't here and sometimes she really isn't but then sometimes she is and it's an odd fact and something I can't explain but I know when she's here and I know when she isn't.

Feeling Fruity

 

 I heard once that it takes 30 days to make a new idea a habit, so I'd like to congratulate myself on my recently developed but now stable habits. I have, after many years, managed to develop a routine that really seems to suit me. My routine is of course centred around food and eating the right food at the right time. I have finally started to really understand the benefits of fruit and have over the last few months begun to eat a lot of varying fruits, not only fruit but I have also invited many different types of vegetables into my daily life by way of balanced and nutritional soups.

 

  Why is she making such a song and dance about this you may be asking yourself. Welllllll dear readers I am making a song and a dance about this because I have spent my life yoyoing from one weight to the next but I haven't yoyo'd anywhere for a few months. I haven't gained weight and I haven't lost weight. I've stayed at the same weight, the heaviest I've ever been but also the healthiest I've ever felt. I've got more energy, I've got more drive, I've got more of lots of things so now that I know how to maintain weight and I also know how to lose it I'm going to get on with the losing it bit. Gone is the toast when I'm hungry, goodbye to the beautiful croquettas, adios to the delicious yet incredibly sugary café con leches that definitely spice up my afternoons a bit. No more vegetables cooked in copious amounts of olive oil and the alcoholic drinking binges are over. Hello to fruit salads during the long break between lunch and supper, fruity herbal teas while I study Spanish during a break at work and a warm welcome to vegetables sautéed in their natural juices. Had I made all of these changes in a day, they wouldn't have lasted and I knew that so I spaced them out and now they feel rather habitual.

  I decided to kick off my new ways by focussing on what I consume. I'm satisfied with that now so I've moved onto exercise. I do some simple stretches before bed, the idea is to improve my muscle strength so that when I purchase a road bike I shall find cycling through rough terrain pleasurable. I've started to think about yoga and just found myself a nice 30 day training course on YouTube. I'm going to start it at the weekend, I shall have to go about finding my centre for this new venture. I'm looking forward to it.

  I had a bit of a moment at Christmas you see, I always have moments over the Christmas period and I've been opting to live a calm life ever since. I thought that it might be nice to start living a very natural life, I've been learning about the health benefits of foods and spices. I really quite fancy being a bit spiritual to be honest with you. I've come to accept myself for who I am you see and who I am is a bit scatty, a bit spontaneous and a bit moody. I'm also a dreamer with a careful side, I'm a worrier, I often compromise my dreams for the sake of feeling safe. I'm a natural risk taker but I've stopped taking risks and I don't think I'll ever be punctual. I watch Coronation Street and do cross stitch patterns 90% of the time when I'm awake at home and I spend the other 10% whatsapping my mother. I really like doing my washing, particularly towels. These are my ingredients, they make me who I am and every now and again I add a new ingredient, sometimes I keep it and sometimes I decide it doesn't flavour my cake properly.

  I think I'll stick with fruit salads, fruit teas (I'm even going to get myself a nice tea glass) and stretching. I think I'll carry on watching Coronation Street while I make nice soups and whatsapp my mother. I daresay that I'll enjoy yoga and I'm looking forward to getting myself a decent pushbike. I can let the towels dry whilst I go out for a nice bike ride. To be quite honest with you, my focus is to remain nice and calm and fill myself up with good stuff. Katy Perry made a relevant point when she put her Roar video out there. Katy doesn't go storming board rooms or making herself well known in her Roar video, she doesn't make a fuss. Katy just gets very good at living in the jungle, she enjoys it, she makes friends with an elephant. It struck me while I was watching Katy Perry be fabulous in the video to Roar that she dedicates her time to living in her environment and with such dedication to embracing life and all of the things in it comes contentment and with this contentment the ability to say goodbye to the past habits that once repeatedly brought you down and a happy reunion with the supple, flexible size 10 that was hiding inside all along.



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.