Category Archives: Lifestyle

New Beginnings

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Last week I finished working at the job I’ve been working at for 5 years. That’s a long time and a lot has happened in that time.

The postives: got another cat, got some new cars, made progress on my Mazda, visited some new places (Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg, various places in Wales, Cornwall), got married!

Negatives: Got Cancer (and covid); spent the last year working through a company that had gone through multiple acquisitions culminating in me going off on stress leave for around a month.

Enough is enough!

I’ve been engrossed in watching or learning about Cerro Gordo Ghost Town (see Ghost Town Living) and it’s been a really interesting experience watching someone who had no real life experience of living alone in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say he had the quick realisation that he was the only person who could determine anything that happened there, and he’s got some great philiosophical insights. One thing I’ve really taken away from that all is what he said and that is that if you don’t like something, do something about that. And that’s what I did!

Work got too much and after the big C, I have a different outlook on life. Making the most of every day and life in general is important, and I’m not going to spend it being unhappy, so I spent the time I had taken during the absence of leave finding a new job. Big priorities were ensuring it was another remote working role – I’ve been working remotely since around the beginning of the pandemic and I’ve enjoyed it. You do get lonely at times, but at the same time the pros outweigh the cons. Not having to get stressed in rush hour traffic and shout at other drivers is a bonus. That is one good thing that has come out of the pandemic really, and something that I could have done for a long time (working in IT) but it took that to wake a lot of people up.

Do you believe in Fate?

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So do you? I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. I’m not religious in any way but do feel that there is a purpose for everything and sometimes things are meant to happen in a certain way.

When I first moved to Northampton I knew no one, apart from the people I worked with, and unlike a lot of people, I didn’t really socialise with my work colleagues.

I got on the popular dating app Plenty Of Fish, and found the girl (now fiancee) I’m due to marry later in the year. (Coincientally, I have a history of dating apps. See What’s wrong with online dating? and Goodbye POF, hello Match.com)

As a part of meeting my girlfriend Annabelle, I now have several new friends that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. If I hadn’t hit up the dating apps that may never have happened. It is likely I would have found someone but would have taken much longer. I’m generally a fairly shy person and at the time certainly not very outgoing.

I’d always wanted to get a cat but it wasn’t until meeting Annabelle that she went out and got one… and so on and so forth.

I’d probably still be sitting with a living room full of car parts and an undecorated house too if I hadn’t gotten into a relationship so for those reasons I can only be thankful.

The same goes for the journey with my Mazda. The number of new friends and events I’ve been to and involved with since 2013 is tremendous. All because of one purchase on eBay following a night out at the pub. Hurruh for Dutch courage and trigger happy bidding fingers!

Life is relative

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I’ve done a lot of reading this year. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital, most of which was spent waiting and drifting from breakfast to lunch to dinner. So to make up for that I set myself a higher than normal reading challenge on Goodreads and made a concerted effort to read much more than I normally would.

I garnered a rather unhealthy obsession with the Vietnam war. A war often forgotten about because it was so unjust and for the longest time America wanted to move on and hide their shame. It is afterall, up to that point, and probably thereafter, the only war America has ever lost.

The war went on for nearly 10 years by the time it was all wrapped up and troops had all moved out. A lot of kids grew up in that period and a lot of politicians, and world leaders, came and went.

I have been comparing my experiences of that war and some other battles fought with my own battles this year. The  essence of this is, that there is always someone in a worse state or having a worse time. Vietnam basically has two seasons: hot and hot and wet. The climate is horrendous. Insane humidity that no one can train for. The training that troops in America undertook before shipping out, were nothing like what they were to expect. Nowhere in North America is as wet, hot and humid as Vietnam Jungle is for the most part of the year.

So you’re sitting in the jungle, it’s hot, you’re soaked through and you’ve not slept properly for a fortnight or more becuase each night you’re dug into a foxhole in the pissing rain with your boots disintigrating and your clothes rotting with no change because supplies have run out. To add to the mix your radio equipment is unreliable and you’ve lost contact with HQ and each night you’re bombarded with mortar shells and machine gun fire.

8 months of chemo, where I spent 3 weeks at a time for most parts in a hospital ward getting little sleep but getting fed 3 meals a day on a regular basis and as much tea or coffee (as bad as it was) as I wanted is nothing compared to what thousands went through in Vietnam.

So I compare my own experience with the things I read and decided it could have been a whole lot worse and it’s not worth complaining about. Afterall, it’s just a little speedbump in the road. I feel for the hundreds that didn’t make it back from Vietnam, fighting an unjust war that in the end no one wanted to fight.

I’ve also added in a second book below which tells the real life story of a 17 year old boy on the Eastern front in Germany (just in case you’re fed up of jungle and humidity) where he endured starvation and freezing cold, wearing inadequate clothing, and suffering frostbite whilst fighting for his life!

Cancer is bad, but these folks had it a lot worse!

You may want to read:

  1.  A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (Vietnam War)
  2. The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer (WW2, Germany, Eastern Front)

You may want to watch:

  1. The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
  2. The War, by Ken Burns

(YES, both bias towards America but believe they’re telling the whole story).