Passion for change

I woke up this morning, made my mother breakfast in bed and a cup of coffee, and then visited the Guardian website, where I read an article which started my blood boiling about parenting. The comments stream was turned off, so I tweeted the Guardian to ask them to turn it on, and made a comment and visited Facebook to catch up with the stream there, thinking how different this was to my life ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. How lucky I am.

On FB, George Barnett posted a link to the YouTube video below, of Jeremy Paxman interviewing Russell Brand. Brand is amazing - passionate, articulate and coherent - and he wipes the floor with Jeremy Paxman in a way that Paxman usually does to others. It's a sight to see.



We do need a revolution. The things I see happening around me are wrong, and it's time to stand up and say so. People with disabilities denied benefits, people who miss appointments they didn't know about denied payments, people with special needs children forced to go to work. It needs to change, and it needs to change now.

Lincolnshire bound

There's been a storm and torrential rain here.  The road was running with so much water, and is clogged with so many leaves, that I thought it was going to be necessary to swim to Chipperfield, which is where we are having lunch today.

I've been running through towns like it's going out of fashion, from Lowestoft in the east to Hastings in the south, through Long Sutton to north Lincolnshire.  I'm feeling superstitious about jinxing my house sale and house purchase, and feeling like I'm hanging on by my fingernails... waiting to exchange on the sale.

It's a weird thing, not knowing where you are going to be in a few weeks' time... not knowing how things will get from here to there, and what a new life on the edge of the Lincolnshire wolds will look like, day to day.

I feel excited about a completely new start elsewhere, anxious about my ability to forge new friendships and make a new life for myself and my children in a completely new town.  I worry about my mother... she's got used to having me around, I think it will be a big change for her. 

The leaves are falling, especially from the horse chestnut trees across the road, which are suffering from the virus which has attacked the chestnut trees here.  It's beginning to look very autumnal, and I have no idea what winter is going to bring for me this year.  Will I move before Christmas? 

I'm packing and repacking, trying to thin out the vast number of books... but then thinning out the books just as I buy a house which has the prospect of being able to house them seems like a false economy.  It will all depend on the timing and whether I have to put my stuff in storage between selling and buying.  I just don't know.

It seems like maybe I've been matched in heaven with my seller... they are emigrating to New Zealand and don't want to take their furniture... I don't have any furniture.  I'm hoping to go meet them in the next couple of weeks.

So... we're off to Chipperfield for a family lunch to celebrate the forthcoming 80th birthday of my uncle Ian.  Looking forward to seeing some family members who don't often get together, thinking of which I had better disconnect myself and get dressed!