anne1066-blog

[anne1066-blog]

More about Percy Dog

So I picked him up from Nicola in 2012 (just).  I was grieving a break up.  I had left a job and life in London to try cheesemaking in Cumbria which had reached its natural conclusion.  I had a deafening biological clock ticking away and I thought having a dog would help.  I had also seen Nicola’s dogs, made friends with my favourites and worked out which mum I would want for my ideal pup.  Naturally the time came around for her to be in pup.  Nicola was primed to tell me and I negotiated money off my wages to take him home.

‘Don’t get a dog now,’ my Dad implored me, ‘’your life is so up in the air and without stability.  It’s not the right time.  You don’t have a job.’

He was right of course.  In fact he continues to be proved right.  He is after all looking after my dog right now because I can’t.  Believe me that doesn’t make me feel any happier when I think about it.  I was adamant and my mum thought it was a lovely idea too.  She realised I wasn’t happy and that having a dog would help.  She didn’t really care about the practicalities or indeed even at that stage was prepared to step in and help because once a mum you’re always a mum and you never stop helping your children.  She just knew it would make me happier and she knew I wasn’t happy at the time.

Despite all pleas to practicality we got the dog and he was gorgeous.  He took barely any time at all to be house trained.  He was affectionate, he slept on our laps, in the evening as we ate, he used to lie and sleep on our feet.  He still does now.  Our hearts melted, even my practical father who had of course grown up with labradors as pets, and we all loved him to bits.  I didn’t rely on my parents to do my duties as owner, of course I walked, fed and took him to the vets but it would be insulting to say they didn’t help hugely.  After the loss of Ben the wonder dog, I think they also enjoyed having a dog in the house again. they had both grown up in doggy households after all.

Every home I have been in has been enhanced by having Percy in it.  Marple has always been lovely but it was even more so when he arrived.  When I moved away to Oxfordshire, he made it home for me.  Observing him find his favourite places to sit and watch the world go by, having him sit on the sofa with me to watch tv, finding walks for him were some of my favourite memories.  Michael first endeared himself to me by helping me walk Percy first thing in the morning while I had to make cheese.  Then when we moved away again and ultimately to Suffolk, he made it home again.  OK there was a traumatic incident when just as my 80 year old dog walk aquaintance was remarking ‘I am always wary of labradors, they can be clumsy’ he knocked her on her back into the river and I took weeks to recover in a small village with a lot of gossips in the community, but in general he made my life in a new place rather lovely.  H sat with me in the evenings.  He greeted me every morning with an enthusiastic wagging tail and he was my reason to get up out of bed on bad day.  Believe me I did not give him up lightly.  It was going to be better for him but I miss him very much all the time.

[anne1066-blog]

5th February 2019

Ok so I had a weekend off.  Sometimes you need one especially if you’re spilling your guts online.

So where were we ?  I was working at Mons and frankly I was strapped for cash.  Then we sold the house finally.  The money was a relief but of course I owed a massive amount of it before it was even in my account.  My uncle helped me buy the house.  My parents had helped me actually live on 2 days a week work while affording the rent of my house and you know, eating.  Until I had worked on the other cheesemaking business in Suffolk, I wasn’t actually earning enough to keep myself going.

Now I was earning a bit from hand to mouth but after selling the house I finally had a nest egg.  And so I continued to work at Mons but knowing it wasn’t a full time job.  Obviously Christmas (the money came through in December) was lucrative enough.  But in January and February it dwindled and I began to think what else I could do.

I had a few weeks away back in Marple to house-sit because my parents were away.  It was a chance to spend a bit of time back home again which is always relaxing and to spend a bit of time with my dog again.  I mentioned before that I hated being away from Percy the dog and yet it had been nearly a year since I’d been with him and properly looking after him.  There was a discipline to walking him twice a day that I missed.  I also missed his company.  Having a dog made a huge difference to my life.  I was lonely and sad when I got him and to be honest since I had been wanting a family since I was 28 and cancelled my wedding, looking after a dog who needs you for food and company and then gives you unconditional love in return, filled a bit of that hole.

Percy is a lovely, enthusiastic labrador dog who I bought in return for hours worked at Holker Dairy when I was making St James cheese.  I had been there for 8 months and as they breed dogs as well as making cheese, I had seen a few different litters born, be absolutely gorgeous and then of course go on to their forever homes as is the way.  Nicola who bred them would be happy to see them go once they were old enough.  The sheer amount of dog poo by that stage made the magic wear off significantly despite how adorable they were.  She made them sociable by having them in the house with her own children individually.  They were partially house trained already as a result and loved children, having spent time with her son and daughter and been cuddled and loved until they went to their ultimate home.

I collected Percy at a little over the usual 10 weeks old.  Nicola had arranged for him to spend time in the house with her children so he could begin house training and be used to children.  I had friends with young kids so I definitely needed a dog who would be used to them.  I had considered a rescue dog like our much loved Ben the wonder dog who we acquired on my gap year before I left for university and who i adored from the word go.  When I took off for 2 months in Paris during said gap year I missed him more than my family! Dogs aren’t for everyone.  Some people find them too needy and attention seeking but I have always loved them and desperately wanted one in the house for as long as I could remember.  I read 101 Dalmations as a child and even had a porcelain pointer dog I called Pongo after one of the lead characters as a result.  Every time I saw I dog, I wanted to meet and stroke it. It was my ideal pet - some girls love horses, some love cats, I was always a dog person. 

My parents had both grown up with dogs.  When I was very little and we first lived with my grandma, she had a corgi called Megan.  Obviously Megan died when I was little and she decided not to get a dog again because she was less confident in how far she could walk.  Not fair on a dog really.  But we had friends who had lovely collies and maybe because of Megan, I was a dog magnet as a child.  I was taught not to just rush in and hug them which obviously was my childhood instinct but to respect their boundaries, let them sniff my hand and accept me and then stroke them tentatively and read how they reacted as to how much I lavished affection on them.

Ben the wonder dog was a prickly rescue dog.  He was exceptionally loving - we took him away with us on what was meant to be a reconnaissance trip because he flung himself at us, throwing himself into our arms and licking our ears.  He then threw up on me in the car.  I forgave him.  He also howled into the night for days.  We had to buy him sedatives in the end just to get him used to the house and to sleeping.  Somehow I slept through it  - despite my hopes, perhaps not a natural mum! My mother and sister were not so lucky.  He was a lovely dog but had his boundaries.  You could hug him only so far and then he made it plain he had had enough.  Not so Percy.  This was a dog that couldn’t get enough of his human companions.  Even now, he barks imperiously when you don’t wake up early enough.  He doesn’t need a walk - he just wants his company again.  When we lived together just the 3 of us, he would sleep on my bed or at the end of my bed.  When I return to Marple which is his home now and for the foreseeable future, the minute I sit in an armchair he asks to get onto my lap, something he hasn’t been the right size for since he was about 6 months old, but then sits looking happy, smug and promptly falls fast asleep.  He’s my doggy hot water bottle in cold weather and I love it.

[anne1066-blog]

31st January 2019

My last post did actually continue beyond the limit of what the post allowed so to recap:

Feeling rather unwelcome in Suffolk, I was happy to accept the offer of work at Mons Cheesemongers to work Christmas retail and also after that a couple of days a week working on their stand with the idea that after May when their new shop opened, this would be increased.  Timing-wise it should also have worked that I was honouring my initial commitment to carry out cheesemaking work until the friend I was working with had had an operation to relieve ongoing back pain. 

It was a relief to be back in somewhere as cosmopolitan as London after the rather Royston Veasey nature of Suffolk but it wasn’t without its complications.  I was staying with my partner in Maidenhead and commuting in to and from there at the beginning and end of the shifts.  Saturdays were particularly tiring as they are a standard 11 hour shift (since reduced actually on certain shifts) with an extra 2 and a half hours travel time a day.  Retail is working on your feet which is nothing new if you’ve been cheesemaking but the temperatures are a bit different.  A cheesemaking dairy is kept at a standard temperature for the drainage of the curd whereas market stalls are very much subject to the environment.  There’s a reason I didn’t pursue retailing and market stalls as a main career idea - extremes of heat and cold. However on the plus side, I’m working with people I’m genuinely on the same wavelength as unlike the cheesemaking work, biting my tongue as Leave voters expressed anti foreigner prejudices, myself included.  Even the main manager from Norfolk was teased for not being from Suffolk. The counties are right next door to each other.

Before Christmas I had been helping both cheesemakers in the dairy which turned a job of 2 days a week into something workable.  I actually helped finish training their cheesemaking manager and frankly he acknowledged wholeheartedly that I had helped him make the cheese better and gave him some of his first successes. It was gruelling.  I would work from 6am to 9 or 10pm regularly albeit usually with a break mid afternoon to walk the dog and eat something but it was all subject to the acidification of the curd of my friend’s cheese and that was sometimes a law unto itself.  In November, my parents had come to visit and take the lovely dog Percy, a devoted and affectionate Labrador who made me smile on the roughest of days just by his tail wagging enthusiasm back to Marple.  It was only fair on him.  My partner’s house isn’t well suited to a dog and I would have been working such long days that he would barely have seen us.  My retired parents would give him company and could walk him at regular times and play with him and he had lived in Marple before I moved to Oxfordshire so for him it was just another place he felt was home.  That is not to say that my house didn’t feel extremely empty without him.  My partner’s house felt less strange being dogless but I still missed him and felt and frankly still feel guilty at having had to leave him with someone else even someone I trust absolutely. 

After their Christmas rush, it was made clear I wasn’t needed anymore on the second cheese.  Although it had been manic as they had had staff shortages and I had worked extra hard in order to cover that, I was very sorry not to have the chance to actually turn this into something more permanent.  The manager explained on various occasions that if he had to choose his dream team to make cheese with, I was absolutely part of that and indeed integral but to no avail.  The farm manager wanted someone who knew less about cheesemaking than him.  He felt a little threatened and as such couldn’t make the decisions he wanted to and learn from his own mistakes.  I had contacted him about working there before and he had turned me down for those reasons at the time.  I hoped that the experience of what i could do to help the cheesemaking might have changed his mind but unfortunately not.  I was pretty gutted to be fair and my friend who had invited me to make cheese with her was very disappointed too and thought he had made the wrong choice.  No matter, the choice was made.  It did feel like a kick in the teeth and it also meant my future was definitely in London.

After Christmas we rationalised the time I would spend cheesemaking so I could commute from Suffolk to London and work 2 days a week retail then 2 days a week cheesemaking.  My hours making the one cheese only had spread out over the week - even if only a couple of hours a day to try and fit something close to what she had initially proposed but it was a struggle when the orders just weren’t there and milk problems, starter problems and maturing problems weren’t resolved quickly enough to increase the sales during my time there.  This was rationalised to a couple of making days a week after which I drove to Maidenhead (5 hours each way) and then commuted in to London to work a retail shift.  In retrospect I am not sure now how I managed it without collapsing.  It was a ludicrous situation in terms of practicality.  I suppose it shows you can do more than you imagine when there’s no other option.

After April and my friend’s operation, I had begun to move things to Maidenhead and some of my things were moved back again to Marple.  There was a frustrating tussle with the landlords of my rented property in Suffolk but ultimately it was resolved if not entirely satisfactorily and I got most of my deposit back.

And so I worked retail, I learnt about French & Swiss cheese which kept me interested and I was among longstanding friends and obviously family who have known me for a very very long time.  This has its good sides and bad sides of course.  People can know you too well sometimes and they may make exceptions for you (paying me weekly for instance where no other consultant is paid that way) that eventually become a trial for them.  And when I was living a bit hand to mouth until I could sell my house in Yorkshire, there were some nasty moments where I had to get my lovely partner out of bed at 6am on a Saturday to come and lend me enough money to travel to London on a Saturday so I could earn the money I would need to pay him back!  Consequently I was badgering to be paid as soon as possible and my sister who was in charge of the payments and was extremely busy found this situation frustrating.  It’s not nice when you aren’t getting on with family and it’s worse when there’s nothing you can do about the behaviour they are finding extremely annoying because you can’t fulfil your obligation to work unless you hassle the hell out of them.  Continued tomorrow,,,,

[anne1066-blog]

30th January 2019

This is a new idea that Jane suggested because I have various things niggling at the moment and I can’t quantify them.  So this is a very private blog diary just monitoring how I’m feeling and where I’m at.  I might share it with friends or I might not.  Why put it on a public platform?  Well pressing post makes you really feel you’ve set the feelings free and put it out there even if no one actually reads it.  It worked for me before when I was getting a load of stuff out of my system regarding a failed engagement, cheating and a pretty intense relationship with a much older man who had 3 children.

Where am I at today?  Bloody knackered.  I’ve basically called in sick all week with a recurrence of a cold that didn’t have major symptoms but made me feel crappy and subhuman.  I’ve fought through it a bit to work in extreme cold and also to go an a weekend with friends in York which of course I did enjoy but I also didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.  It felt way too short.  I need a get away from my life at the moment.  There are a lot of hard decisions to face and I know I’m not managing them all that well.

So to recap what got me to where we are today:

In 2014 I moved to Oxfordshire to set up a cheesemaking dairy.  It was a brand new start for me and had the promise to be an exciting chapter in my life.  I learned a lot from it  - how to plan a new building specifically for a cheesemaking facility, how to find the site, plan the layout, source the milk, decide on a marketable recipe, build a brand (not the first time I’d been involved in branding to be fair) and not least but troubleshoot a recipe which ended up being the achilles heel. As it turned out the milk production standards weren’t really up to the recipe we wanted to make.  After months of cheese we didn’t want to sell, I was made redundant. I don’t want to be bitter but I feel there were some bad commercial decisions made by my business partner who was meant to be in charge of sales.  She charged ahead with full scale production when the cheese wasn’t good enough to sell at full price and she also gave away vast amounts of cheese which could have been sold for at least a price that covered costs.  All of this lead to a financial crisis and that was it - I was gone.

Before that happened, I had what had was a life changing holiday around the world which happened just as the cheesemaking dairy was opening and needing to go into production - it was 6 months over schedule. It was a revelation though.  I flew to countries I had never visited and had to negotiate them by myself.  I had a couple of days in Dubai, flew through Singapore (never left the airport to be fair so it doesn’t really count), flew on to Australia and from there to New Zealand after a very brief overnight stay in a hotel near the airport and from there after driving solo around South Island to Sydney, the Cook Islands, Santa Monica, San Francisco and then home.  It took 6 weeks and it really made me feel confident; not least because after years of being invisible to any guys out there but I got attention in every place I touched down in - some rather more meaningful than others to be fair. In Dubai, I connected with our desert tour guide who was a worker from Pakistan living in the UAE (not Dubai it’s far too expensive but the more restrictive Sharjah where women’s rights are quite seriously undermined).  He was an outsider but loved the desert and remembering the way the Namib desert had made me feel many years ago, so did I.  Our fellow travellers were good time tourists so there seemed a contrast between them enjoying the desert safari tourist activities and me just enjoying the culture of the country and the stillness of the desert.  i know that makes me sound extremely up myself but I can’t think of another way to describe it.  He asked me out on a date which never happened and in retrospect that was a good thing.  I would never have realised that things like holding hands with a potential romantic partner are forbidden in Dubai nor would I have realised that normal activities like kissing a first date can actually get you taken to prison.  After Dubai, I flew to New Zealand but happened to talk to my co passenger on the flight to Adelaide and have a very interesting conversation about colonialism and England’s position in Australia - not heavy - we joked about it - food for thought all the same which s the point of travel after all.  In New Zealand, I met up again with lovely friends I hadn’t seen for years and also met up with my sister and her boyfriend and my friend Cathi’s family who welcomed us as part of their big, lovely family too. It was an amazing time to feel so incredibly accepted and welcomed. And again I connected with someone, my friend’s older brother (also the only other single person there - I may have decided unlike me to flirt a bit with him as we were the only singletons there).  He was a lovely, funny, warm guy who as a chef was a great person to cook with and this was an area we had in common.  After the wedding ended and we moved on to normal life (him) and the rest of my holiday (me) we stayed facebook friends and he often is one of the first people to like my posts even to this day because he’s a genuinely great person. In Sydney, i went out to dinner with my uber glamorous friend Cristiana and because she’s open, chatty and lovely we ended up on a communal table in a restaurant when we went out for a meal and she got involved in conversation with a noisy group of guys sat to our left.  One of them was looking at me and when I went for a ‘comfort break’ he actually approached Cris to say I was lovely and ask who I was! From Sydney I flew to the Cook Islands where I met a lovely lady (not in thet way) who invited me to go swimming with her family after the kids got back from school and who took me down the road to my hostel to collect my swimming things on her motorbike.  My first time on a motorbike and frankly a bit terrifying.  I also get ogled which hadn’t happened in let’s say about 20 years in London.  In San Francisco, a waiter who I had quizzed about local cheeses and wines slipped me his telephone number on my bill.  I didn’t find it until I sorted my receipts back in the UK and hadn’t fancied him anyway so just as well but all helps the ego doesn’t it?  Especially when you’re over 40 at the time and have resigned yourself to no one finding you attractive anymore.

Anyway so that’s my trip and there was so much more too that I don’t have time to write about. The key thing is that I came back feeling much more empowered and confident.  I had travelled the world by myself and not only that but after years feeling invisible I had finally felt attractive again.  Boosted by this, I decided to take action, try internet dating again and this time I actually met someone.  I was a bit concerned about meeting him - he was openly into kink and sexual things I wasn’t experienced in but as well as that he was warm, made me laugh and I was interested.  I wasn’t openly attracted to him when we met.  There was certainly something there - we had been very open when messaging and honest and I fancied his personality but as usual on a first internet date, the nerves kicked in and it was difficult when we first said hello to feel anything much.  I knew that would happen though so when I couldn’t think of anything to say to him and he moved in for a reassuring hug, I decided to turn it into a chemistry test and effectively snogged his face off for about 90 minutes until our table reservation was ready.  That certainly broke the ice so conversation flowed more easily afterwards and I made moves to go back with him to his place after the meal where I could test the theory further.  I was relieved and rather pleased to find that the attraction wasn’t just based on text messages and being a gentleman he also drove me home and stayed in touch afterwards.  We met up a few times and eventually decided to get together.  I would never have had the courage to do this if I hadn’t had my empowering holiday and since we’re still together despite the odds 4 years later it was definitely a good move.  

However this was all very new when I was made redundant. He assured me he wouldn’t be going anywhere but it was too soon to move in together so I moved all my 3 bedroom house’s worth of belongings back to my parents’ house in Marple and looked for a job. I emailed anyone I could think of to explain I was looking for work and found somewhere in London that seemed a great match.  It was with a Spanish importer looking to improve their cheese maturation and whose owner I had worked with before  when setting up Borough Market in London.

Unfortunately although the interview went well, the owner wanted to work with me and my references thought it was a given, I failed their HR tests and I have to be honest it knocked my confidence extremely badly. I took another job that seemed exciting and had been a second choice due only to location - north Yorkshire, a long way away from the lovely new boyfriend.

I worked with them for 3 months before again, redundancy. This time, they great ideas they had had for expansion which I was a key part of, had to be put on hold because of a disastrous Christmas in which various storms flooded large parts of the north of England and cut into their sales. By this time, I had bought a house nearby and now had to find a new job and work out what to do with a house I had hoped to make a home.

Initially I had looked to resurrect the house which had at the time all the hallmarks of having been owned by an elderly couple who loved it and had also done nothing to it since probably the 1960s in a way i would live in.  The plans changed to make it something that could be sold or rented and without wishing to be dramatic, with that a little bit of me died at losing my home.

I didn’t wallow though, there was work to be done.  The house needed substantial work including rewiring, replastering, a new kitchen and new decorating and floors throughout.  By the time it was finished it was actually rather lovely.  I felt sad that i wasn’t going to live in the results of our work and sad that I wouldn’t be living in a beautiful part of the country. Actually I felt very sad not to be living in a house whose renovations I had initially begun with a view to making it my home. But again I had been looking around for another job although with a heavier heart this time.  Being knocked back 3 times will do that to you. This time I had a message from a friend who makes cheese in Suffolk and her cheeses are extremely well regarded so helping her albeit on a basis that wouldn’t be full-time seemed like a great idea.  We tried it out and she reckoned I could work 2-3 days a week although with some big changes to the recipe as she was currently making cheese at midnight and cat napping to accomodate the make schedule.

So I moved to Bungay in Suffolk.  It was different - flat lands where I am used to seeing hills, but it had an artistic, musical community and I  started to look at property prices again wondering about living there if the job worked out.

I had been there a month when Brexit happened.

My constituency was a big Brexit voting area.  I saw people in my local co op looking afraid when their children spoke polis to them.  I began to feel much less welcome myself.  It seemed there was a big difference between the artistic fringe in the area and the locals who resented anyone who moved in whether they were Polish or just from Marple.  I stopped feeling welcome.  I actually felt observed, scrutinised and as though I didn’t belong.  iI felt like Roystn Veasey.  ‘You’re not local are you?’

The vote itself upset me more than I realised it could.  I spent months watching the 2012 Olympics ceremony which was a celebration of multicultural Britain and crying my eyes out as racist hate crimes increased across the country and in he wake of right wing extremists killing the pro-Muslim MP Jo Cox.  During the football in the Europe that preceded the vote as violance and yobbishness hit 1908s levels among chants of ‘We’re leaving the EU and we don’t care’, I could see what the results of the vote were going to be.  An MP was murdered and my worst fears were confirmed.  And yet 52% of the country still cast their votes with a racist ideology and Nigel Fargae’s openly racist campaigning.  If I had been concerned about EU corruption and taking back control, his anti muslim poster and the rise of race crime before the referendum empowering racists to openly abuse people in public in a way they had not felt able to for over 30 years would have convinced me this vote was not going the way I hoped and I would have changed my mind.  I respect anyone who did this and I can not forgive anyone who didn’t.