A new adventure...

I’m just about getting some sense of order back in my life after the stress and upheaval of selling my mother’s house (the family home of forty years) and finding somewhere else for me and the dogs to live, since that had been our home for the past 18 months. In finally sitting back and breathing a sigh of relief this evening, I realise that I haven’t actually told too many folks that, in the end, having said I was going to stay living in Oxford, things changed with two weeks to go to completion on the family house (a long story which I haven’t got the energy to go into), and instead of Oxford, I’m now a resident of Eastbourne on the south coast. So far I’m really loving it – I had friends here already, it’s great to have a whole new music scene to get involved in, and I’ve found a fabulous flat ten minutes’ walk from the sea, in a lovely part of Eastbourne and at a fraction of what it’d cost in Oxford or London – and Silva and Chilli seem delighted with their new surroundings too. All fantastic – apart from the embittered elderly couple we encountered this morning on our walk along the seafront… The man seemed to deliberately stand in our way as the dogs and I came to the top of a narrow pathway leading up from the seafront, and then, despite my muttered thanks (not sure why I even did that now, come to think of it) as the three of us struggled past him, the wife made a big thing of saying ‘THANK YOU’ as if I’d been rude to them as she brushed past me on her way down. I told her that I HAD thanked her, to which she replied, ‘We don’t like dogs.’ WELL!!!! I naturally then saw red and yelled down at the crabby pair, ‘You rude, hate-filled people!’ – only then to become embarrassingly teary when an angel of a woman came past seconds later, admired the dogs, and was incredibly sweet when I poured out to her the whole horrible encounter with the gruesome twosome… There may well be a song in this in the near future...

Anyway, that was but a minor blip, and I continue to be amazed at how much I’m liking Eastbourne – even my encounter with the dentist this morning was a delight! Exhaustion is setting in now, but stand by for more tales from the sea...