Apologies

It’s been a while, I know. There was a time when I used to go to the internet café dutifully every Saturday, generally just after phoning home, and file a thorough report on the activities of the week. The Saturdays melted into Sundays, and eventually even into weekday evenings, until eventually the whole game puttered out (with the exception of one marathon session in an airport hotel in the rain: the best imaginable context in which to blog). Some of you have mentioned. I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better.

So anyway, shall we start with some updates? I went through a brief phase, after easter, of profound enchantment with this country, and started to make long term plans, and imagined the conversation in which I’d try to convince simp to come live here from October. It’s a beautiful beautiful country, and I have a good life here. Good friends, fascinating job, pleasant lifestyle. Hot weather. Use of a swimming pool whenever I need it, and where people I know turn up and gossip. That’s really all you need, no? On a good day.

The bad day came when our house in Dublin was broken into (Big sister, could you not mention this to our brother? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read this. Thanks!). Although nothing of mine was stolen, and the break-in was clean and unthreatening in every way, psychically it had an effect from which I’m still recovering. Work got hard again. All my friends announced they were moving back to their respective countries. I wasn’t going to the pool that much anyway. And simp was so so far away.

Suddenly I had no idea what exactly was the point of this whole carry-on. Why would I choose to live in a different country from my life partner for a year? For a job? What, really, was I expecting to come out of this? I was baffled.

And that’s the thing about this whole set up: when work is going well, it’s the perfect life, and I’m a blessed, spoiled brat, as I always have been. But when work stops working out, or reality invades via a worrying email or bad news from home, Honduras seems like a silly indulgence that doesn’t quite make sense.

This isn’t the entry that I’d started out to write, but now I’m writing it.

I feel as though I’m living two completely distinct lives. One is that of a development worker just starting on a career in which she can live anywhere, have adventures and learn millions of things. Which has, more or less, been my fantasy since I stopped fantasising about being a queen of Narnia (though I’d still quite like that too: I’d be an archer, and unlike in real life, I’d be very good at it and not at all clumsy). The other life is the one I started creating 5 years ago when I met simp, discovered a Dublin full of strange music geeks and gloomy bars with people who make me laugh until I cry. And stuff that I didn’t believe real people used, like art galleries and theatres.

Now the upshot of all of this is not problematic. I have to choose between those two lives, but only geographically. I hope to continue working in development, and I intend to remain with simp. So really, the only tricky part is where. It’s a decision I make categorically from time to time, only to change my mind, so my advice to you, reader, is to take no notice whatsoever.