Forty Years - by Theo

Yesterday my parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. An epic achievement that is just one of the many reasons why we're all really proud of them.They had a lovely garden party for friends and family in Cirencester. The sun shone, the bubbly flowed, and the cake (made by my talented sister) was cut. Friends arrived from nearly all the stages of their lives - school, their early married life in Cheltenham, their time in Kenya and Tanzania, and the nursery school my mother now runs in Cirencester. A testament to the affection that so many people have for them. Kate and I can only hope to do so well.

Kate's cooking - by Theo

Since we returned to Bristol a strange thing has happened - Kate has started cooking again.

It's not that she never cooked in Madrid, but I would say 95% I did, especially after Rosie was born when I would usually make lunch then leave something out for Kate's dinner as well. It was just our dynamic I guess, and my way of trying to make motherhood easier for Kate by allowing her to concentrate on that without feeling she needed to be in charge of feeding the two of us as well as our daughter.

However, with my new job I leave for work at 8am and get back around 5pm; our Spanish timetable, with Rosie eating at 5.30ish and ourselves at nearly 9 after she had gone down just wasn't working any more. So four times this week I've walked in to the smell of delicious cooking and a hour or so later we've been sitting down as a family to an early evening meal.

A man could get used to this!!

Limbo

This week has been a kind of limbo for me - I finished work last friday and have had very little to do. Not that this has stopped me from busying myself. I've been writing, cooking (I've really got into baking cakes), cleaning, going to Spanish lessons, socialising and trying to spend as much thime as possible in the swimming pool without turning into a human prune. But I haven't been able to feel entirely 'on holiday' as the prospect of having to work again has been looming large on the horizon. Tomorrow I start work again, this time on a Holiday Camp for 8 to 12 year olds at a Hotel near to Portuguese border.

This is daunting for three reasons. One) the holiday camp is in English but the children are all Spanish. Having experienced this year just how hard it is to get 8 to 12 year olds to speak English for an hour and a half, I'm dreading the prospect of trying to get them to speak English for the whole week! Two) a week will be the longest time Kate and I have spent apart. Ever! Right from when we first got together I don't think we've ever spent more than a couple of nights apart, let alone since we've been married. I'm going to miss her a lot. And Three) there's no internet at the Hotel!

I'm not sure my facebook/e mail/guardian online/wife addicted psyche will stand it.

Six Months Today

Kate and Theo have been married for six month today!!!!

Yay!!!

things I have learnt about my wife (part 1)

Strangely, given the excellent job she did sewing up the holes on my favourite pair of jeans, it turns out that I am more comfortable behind a sewing machine than Kate...

Crippled Black Phoenix/On the Road

Last Night we went to see Crippled Black Phoenix at Pole Etudiant in Nantes - they were great and it was lovely to see Joe; Chipper, Matt et al. I reviewed it for The Fly:

"With eight people on stage there's a huge capacity for chaos, but instead this strange brew of old rock hands, Bristol noiseniks and a teenage drummer called Crippled Black Phoenix are carefully controlled. Justin Greaves' grand compositions weave their way around Joe Volk's pastoral lyricism, cutting from choral interludes to majestic, textured riffs to great washes of feedback with sympathetic ease. If The Fly was Art Monthly we'd make some apt comparisons to renowned painters of somber and portentous landscapes, but we're a music mag and know shit about art. We know what we like however. We like this."

It's a strange sensation being on the road. I figured originally it would be a little like being on tour and in some ways it is of course, but there are some rather crucial differences. For instance, you don't know where exactly you are going, what your itinerary is, or what you are going to do once you get there.

For a former tour manager, always used to setting out on the road with a firm route, timetable and ultimate aim in mind, this has been quite an adjustment to make and I don't feel I have yet made it. For instance, despite the fact I'm driving a mobile home that we can sleep in at the drop of a hat (or, rather, shift of some cushions) the idea of not knowing where we are going to stay goes against all my instincts and makes me quite edgy. When I was inter-railing around Europe aged 18 accommodation was always the first thing I sorted out upon arriving somewhere new; on this trip, partly because we've got our own bedroom on wheels, but also I suspect because we rarely seem to hit the road before 12, we've often been turning up to places without the first idea about where to stay/park. We're currently in a Cafe in La Rochelle, a very pretty old town that seems to have been Broadmeaded rather comprehensively, with a vague idea that we will find a campsite on Ile de Re but the lack of exactness in our plans is making me slightly tense. The fault here is entirely my own - my control-freakery refusing to be jettisoned along with the other remnants of the rat-race the we left behind when we quit our jobs. Hopefully it'll fade in time.

On the plus side, being away from everything that we know has made things more interesting for Kate and I; we are rediscovering each other again. When we were living in our cute little flat in Bristol, our understanding of each other was defined in part by our relationship to each other but also by what we did and who we were. Kate is no longer "Kate who reads the news" and "Kate who does Fine Tuned" or "Kate who sings in Hot Flush" or even "Kate who meets friends for lunch" or "Kate who makes my lunch for work" - Kate is now "Kate who is my wife and co-traveller". It's a whole new Kate who only I know and that makes me feel very special indeed.