Something is Changing

I now realise that life has been happening while I was waiting for it to begin again

As I sit here at our old wooden kitchen table, the same one I bought for my very first little end of terrace cottage in Old Beaconsfield, I find myself thinking about the young 23 year old George and wondering what on earth she would make of the woman sitting here now.

Back then, I had just left college after doing a degree in Business Studies and Finance and was working as a location manager on Midsomer Murders with John Nettles. I worked six days a week, often for more than twelve hours a day, and although it was a complicated and sometimes very exhausting job, I absolutely loved it. I spent my days driving around the Buckinghamshire countryside, exploring villages, knocking on the doors of beautiful old houses and searching for quaint locations where we could film the series.

Of course, because it was Midsomer Murders, most of these beautiful places would eventually become the scene of some rather gruesome fictional murder, but at the time it all seemed perfectly normal to me.

My father, Brian, was the producer at the time, having worked his way up through the film and television business from being a runner many moons before. Daddy and I have always got on incredibly well and, amazingly, we worked brilliantly together too. We were both working ridiculous hours and there was often a huge amount of pressure, but I loved working with him. Looking back now, I realise how lucky I was to have those years with him, although I am not sure either of us thought about it like that at the time. We were far too busy trying to get the next day’s filming organised.

And now, here I am, living in our flat above the beach, the very place I manifested as a child when I used to look out of my bedroom window across the fields and wish they were the sea. Being a Pisces, there is nowhere I would rather be than by the water. There is just something about the sound of the waves that calms me like nothing else does.

The sky is bright blue today and the sea is a deep, dark blue, and looking out at it all, I can’t help thinking how incredibly lucky we are that this place wasn’t taken away from us in a bankruptcy. There was a time when that was a very real possibility and I honestly didn’t know whether we would still be living here. Maybe my angels heard my prayers.

Thirty three years later, the same old oak table is still here too. I am sitting on the same chair, watching the waves crashing onto the shore below, while Charlie Brown is sprawled out on the same old gold carpet that we have never quite managed to afford to replace, despite the number of times I have looked at it and thought, one day that gross carpet is going.

It is so old now you can practically feel the concrete underneath it, which is why I invested in a good old pair of red Crocs to lighten the impact, I’ll have you know. Last week, I completely forgot I had them on and went shopping in Tesco. Nobody even batted an eyelid. In fact, I noticed one woman walking around in her slippers, so I actually felt quite well dressed.

The sea is a little choppier than normal today, which is why I didn’t venture in for a swim this morning. Strangely, despite loving the sea as much as I do, big waves scare the hell out of me. It probably goes back to when I was a child and got sucked under the water by a huge wave.

I can still remember being thrown around underneath it and genuinely thinking I was going to drown. Perhaps your body never quite forgets these things, because even now, all these years later, the minute the waves get too big, I am quite happy to admire the sea from a safe distance.

Preferably in my red Crocs.

But sitting here now, my eyes keep coming back to this old table and I can’t quite believe how long I have had it. Thirty three years. It has followed me through almost my entire adult life and God knows how many meals have been eaten around it.

When I first bought it, it was brand new and I was so proud of it. I loved having people over to my little cottage and hosting dinner parties around it. I have always loved cooking and feeding people, although I am sure back then I probably thought I was far more sophisticated than I actually was. There would have been wine, far too much food and me rushing around trying to make sure everything was perfect.

Since then, my children have eaten at this table. My parents have eaten at it. Friends who are still very much part of my life and others who have long since disappeared have sat around it. There have been Christmas lunches, birthday dinners, ordinary Tuesday night suppers, glasses of wine that turned into bottles, laughter, tears, rows and probably hundreds of conversations I have completely forgotten.

I have filled in forms at this table, had scary Teams meetings at it, opened horrible emails at it and, more recently, written at it. I have sat here worrying about Jamie. I have sat here worrying about Tim. I have sat here worrying about money, the hotel and what the hell we were going to do next. I have probably spent an extraordinary amount of my life sitting at this table trying to solve one problem or another.

And yet it is still here.

And so am I.

There are scratches and marks all over it now. Little dents and imperfections that I couldn’t possibly tell you the story behind, but each one must have come from somewhere. It has been moved from house to house, taken apart, put back together and dragged along with me through every different version of my life.

And I suppose, in many ways, I am not so different. I have my own dents and imperfections now too, marks left by everything I have been through, each one with a story behind it, even if I can’t always remember exactly where they all came from.

I wonder if a table can have a soul of its own.

Because if this one could talk, my goodness, it would have some stories to tell.

And that is when I start thinking again about the 23 year old George who bought it. What would she have thought if someone had sat her down at her lovely new kitchen table and told her what the next 33 years were going to bring?

That she would have a disabled child who would completely change the way she saw the world and teach her more about love, patience and fighting for someone than she could ever have imagined. That motherhood wouldn’t look quite like the version she had probably pictured in her head, but that Jamie would shape so much of the woman she was going to become.

That she would go through a divorce and discover that sometimes the life you thought you were going to live isn’t actually the life you end up living. That she would have a completely crazy love affair with a man called Tim and eventually marry him.

That she would fall so utterly in love with him that, all these years later, they would still cuddle up in bed together every single night and choose to spend almost every waking moment together. Except, of course, when he is down in the basement fixing something, like he is now.

That she would nearly lose him when he had open heart surgery and spend five nights apart from him, the only five nights we have ever spent apart since we got together. Five nights that felt like a lifetime.

That together we would buy a 109 bedroom hotel as investors. A little note to my readers here: DO NOT EVER BUY A HOTEL.

That after three years of legals we would finally complete the purchase, only for Covid to hit literally a month later and the whole world to shut down around us.

That we would eventually find a way to take it over ourselves and throw absolutely everything we had into trying to save it, only to lose the hotel and millions of pounds with it, sell our family home and spend years dealing with the consequences.

And then, just when we thought it was finally all over, find ourselves facing the aftermath of it all again.

I honestly don’t know what that young George would have thought if she had known all of that was waiting for her. She might have run for the hills. Although, knowing me, I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

But do you know what? Over these last few days, after I wrote my last piece about being here but not actually seeing the sea, and I mean really seeing it for just how stunningly beautiful it is, I have started to feel something shift.

It is difficult to explain because nothing has actually changed. The problems haven’t suddenly disappeared and the aftermath of the hotel is still there. I know there may still be more difficult conversations, more questions and more things to deal with. Nobody has waved a magic wand over our lives and made everything perfect.

But I feel different.

Tim has been constantly down in the basement, welding, polishing and fixing the chairs for our little boat. He disappears down there for hours at a time and seems happier than I have seen him in a long time. Every now and then I take him down a cup of tea and he proudly shows me whatever he has been fixing, welding or polishing. I nod enthusiastically and make all the right noises, secretly feeling incredibly proud of what he can achieve, because there is absolutely no way on earth I would be able to weld something without probably blowing up the basement by accident.

In fact, I don’t think he would ever come up if it wasn’t for the fact that I set an alarm on his phone for the end of the day. He says he will be finished today and we can finally put the chairs into the boat.

Mmm. Let’s see!

While Tim has been happily hidden away in the basement, I finally managed to finish the bloody questionnaire. The questionnaire that has consumed almost every waking thought since it arrived last week with a two week deadline and turned me into a slightly obsessed woman surrounded by old accounts, bank statements, legal papers and emails from years ago. I have gone backwards and forwards through the history of the hotel so many times that I am amazed I haven’t started dreaming about it.

But finally I finished it.

Well, I finished my first draft, which is probably a more accurate description, and sent it over to our lawyer to check. I know there will be changes and questions and probably things I have got completely wrong, but for the first time in days, there is nothing more I can actually do with it.

So now I find myself sitting here alone at my good old faithful kitchen table. No kids here today. No husband, because he is somewhere underneath me in the basement, probably ignoring the alarm I have set on his phone. And for once, there isn’t anything urgent tugging at me. No one asking questions, no decisions waiting to be made, no crisis looming before lunchtime.

Just me, sitting at my 33 year old kitchen table, on my old chair, with Charlie Brown asleep on the gold carpet.

I can hear the faint sound of the tumble drier in the background, intermingled with the crashing waves below and the gentle sea breeze coming in through the patio doors.

And something in me feels different.

I wonder if it was the lovely message I received this morning from Patricja Rusak that somehow seemed to put into words exactly what I couldn’t.

She said, “I’ve been going through something very similar, and I kept on asking myself ‘when will this end’? But then I realised it wasn’t really about waiting for it to end, it was about who I was becoming while I was in it. That shift in perspective has helped me more than I expected.”

And do you know what? I think that is it. She hit the nail on the head.

For years, I think I have been waiting for it all to end. Waiting for the hotel problems to end, waiting for the financial mess to be sorted, waiting for the legal letters to stop arriving, waiting for the next problem to disappear. Waiting for the moment when Tim and I could finally look at each other and say, right, that’s it, we can get on with our lives now.

But perhaps life doesn’t really work like that.

Perhaps there isn’t a big finishing line where somebody hands you a glass of champagne and announces that all the difficult bits are now officially over and you may begin enjoying yourself again. Although, quite frankly, I wouldn’t say no to the champagne.

Perhaps life is actually happening while you are waiting for it to begin again.

And perhaps Patricja is right. Maybe it isn’t just about what we have been going through. Maybe it is about who we have become while we have been going through it.

Because when I really think about the last few years, I should be proud of myself and Tim for how well we have coped. We never once just gave up and walked away. Even when things felt completely impossible, we just kept going, dealing with whatever was put in front of us next.

Like all the problems and challenges we have had thrown our way, we dealt with each one with truth, honesty, integrity and determination. We answered the questions, found the paperwork, sat through the meetings, read the horrible emails and tried to do the right thing, even when we were absolutely exhausted by it all.

That doesn’t mean we have sailed through it with huge smiles on our faces. Far from it. There have been tears, sleepless nights and days when I have wanted to pull the duvet over my head and never come out again. There have been times when Tim and I have looked at each other and genuinely wondered how much more could possibly be thrown at us.

But somehow, each time, we got up the next morning and carried on.

And perhaps that is what Patricja meant about who you become while you are in it. I am not the same woman who sat at this table at 23. Of course I’m not. But I am also not the same woman who walked into that hotel believing that if we just worked hard enough, cared enough and fought hard enough, we could save it.

I have learnt that sometimes you can give something absolutely everything you have and still lose it. I have learnt that money can come and money can go, and believe me, ours certainly did. I have learnt that you cannot control what other people do, what they say about you or what they choose to believe.

But I have also learnt that losing everything you thought made you secure doesn’t mean you completely fall apart. Although God knows, there have been times when I thought I might. Perhaps it is only when so much of it has gone that you start to work out what actually matters.

And when I think back to that little cottage in Old Beaconsfield and picture the young George hosting dinner parties around her brand new kitchen table, I realise just how far I have actually come and how much life I have managed to squeeze into those 33 years.

I have loved enormously. I have had my heart broken. I became a mother and discovered very quickly that motherhood was going to be nothing like the version I had imagined in my head.

I have fought for Jamie, loved him with every part of me and learnt more about life through him than I could ever have learnt from my Business Studies and Finance degree.

I have watched my beautiful Maria grow into the young woman she is today and felt that strange mixture of pride and disbelief that comes with realising your child is suddenly an adult.

And I have helped bring up Tim’s children, Tom and Sara, loving them and treating them as my own, because to me they are. Somehow, between us, Tim and I created this slightly complicated, blended family that I wouldn’t change for the world.

And I still have my dear parents, who have been there through all the highs and lows of my life. Daddy, especially, has stood beside us through the loss of the hotel and everything that came with it, supporting us when I know he was going through his own pain and losses too. The same Daddy I worked alongside all those years ago on Midsomer Murders is still here, 33 years later, helping me through yet another chapter of my life. I don’t think I will ever be able to put into words quite how much that means to me.

I have left a marriage and fallen completely and ridiculously in love with Tim. I have built businesses, made money and lost money. A lot of bloody money. I have sat beside the man I love through open heart surgery and known what it feels like to be absolutely terrified that the life we had built together could disappear in a heartbeat.

I have owned a hotel, walked through its doors as the owner and watched it disappear from our lives. I have lost our family home and the financial security I thought we had built, and learnt that money really can come and go. Losing it is incredibly painful, of course it is, but it isn’t actually the thing that makes you who you are.

And since losing the hotel, Tim and I have explored so many wonderful places in Bennie, our motorhome, with Charlie Brown squeezed in alongside us. We have woken up in places I would never have imagined visiting, sat outside with a glass of wine looking at mountains, lakes and beaches and driven for miles without really knowing where we were going to end up next.

We lost our passports, accidentally drove along the narrowest cliff top roads and were accused of absconding, but what I realise now is that those times when we were free and travelling wherever we wanted to go next were some of the happiest moments of our lives, and we would never have experienced them had we not lost the hotel.

And now, having been through one of the most stressful times of my life, I find myself doing what I truly love. I write. I read tarot. I meditate. I walk along the beach with Tim and Charlie Brown. I swim in the sea, although obviously only when the waves are behaving themselves. And I have time to sit here at my old kitchen table and actually think, something I am not sure I have ever really given myself much time to do before.

Perhaps the life I kept waiting to get back to doesn’t actually exist anymore. Perhaps that is what I am finally beginning to understand. I have spent so long wanting everything to be sorted, wanting the aftermath to end and wanting us to be able to say, right, now we can start living again.

But we already are.

We have been living all along.

Maybe I am not meant to go back to the person I was before the hotel, before the loss and before everything that came with it. Maybe I had to go through all of it to become the person sitting here now.

As I sit here at my faithful old kitchen table, writing this, listening to the tumble drier turning away, the waves crashing below and the occasional grunt from Charlie Brown as she sleeps beside me, I realise that I don’t actually know what life is going to bring me next.

If the last 33 years are anything to go by, it probably won’t be boring.

But I do know this. Whatever comes next, I will deal with it when it arrives. I have spent far too much of my life worrying about things that haven’t happened yet.

For now, I am still sitting at my old kitchen table, wearing my bright red Crocs, with Charlie Brown asleep on the old gold carpet beside me.

Thirty three years later, my table is still here.

And so am I 🌹

Love George x

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