Friday, November 2, 2007

Turkey

Hi folks

Well here we are again. I seem to talk to you late at night when I have taken alcohol (medicinally you understand)

I am still looking for moorings but.....  have spoken to a lovely French man about a boat which is moored in Turkey. It will need a little (I hope) work to make it seaworthy and some time and love to refit it internally. But... it is a good price and I will have no problem with volunteers to help crew it home to England and best of all it is a motor sailor which will help considerably with cost of fuel. So if the house sale ever completes (time warp, time warp) I may well be making a sea trip from Turkey. My children are concerned that I may not know what I am doing, (role reversal) but I intend to ensure I am seaworthy also!!

Life is too short ....

Last night I had dinner with a couple of girlfriends from my life in the corporate mainstream and they were talking about their jobs. Away from them I have no feelings of inadequacy or guilt because I have become a "non-achiever" but while we were together I found myself trying to justify my decision to "opt out" and I talked about things I was considering doing. What is that about? My view is life is too short to commit to a role or circumstance that is against your essential nature or harmful to you and I am fortunate, my children are grown and I am selling my house. The idea is to lower the essential monthly costs as much as possible so that there is no enthrallment to the man because you have commitments...this allows a much greater freedom and choice....it is not about wanting to do nothing but about being able to choose what you do because it doesn't matter what you earn.

Surely we should all aim to be able to choose what suits and gives pleasure rather than what we can sell to the highest bidder.

Look where an investment in property has got many of us!! Before that it was pensions! If we can accept that there is no surety for the future, no way of fixing the odds so that we are safe our whole life through we would accept the twists and turns that fate deals us with more eqanimity.

And get pissed more often, fuck a lot and work to live not live to work!!!

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Where Grace came from

They say life begins at forty! Mine did!

University, necessitating a move of 150 miles from home alone but for my son. We did okay.

Proved to myself that I had what it took to get a degree, then I got a "proper" job, in the NHS.

Wow, I had arrived, I bought a house and thought I had found a career. Big mistake!!

They tolerated my unconventionality and colourful clothes and hair (red hair with black tips and spiked, my firestarter phase) but did not enjoy my honesty (some would call it bluntness) or understand my values. They were equal opportunity employers (look we even employ hippy types with nose rings)I in my turn became so disillusioned with the targets and the bullshit, that got in the way of the real objective of my work, which was to improve the service patients recieved, that when they asked for volunteers for redundancy I volunteered.

I had broken up with my partner and the plan was - sell the house, get the redundancy and go visit friends in New Zealand. Look for a new way of life that got the work/life balance right.

Got the redundancy but... house didn't sell straight away, redundancy money (not much, I hadn't been there long) got swallowed by the mortgage.

House is sold (except it is taking unconscionably long to complete the process) and am looking for a boat to live aboard and also sail around the med, earning what I need as and where I can.

Have found boats of the kind I want (de-commissioned fishing trawlers, particularly the Scottish wooden ones) but finding a mooring that is not on a marina full of gin palaces and people of the type I would not feel comfortable with and who would hate to have dirty dreadlocked hippies around is proving very difficult.

I need a river mooring, that is cheap and that is residential.

Anyone reading this who knows of a mooring please let me know.