Sunny Days and Snow Storms

Having grown up in England, Christmas in Australia never really feels 100% right. This may well explain the introduction of the tradition of “Christmas in July” although frankly even in the midst of winter, Sydney never quite gets cold enough for me to hear the faint whisper of sleigh bells on a chilly Southerly wind (see even the winds are the other way round, Northerlies are the chill-bringers in England).

Saying that, and before all the Australians I know tell me to pack my bags and go home, it doesn’t feel wrong either. It is simply that Christmas is a very different experience for me here but it is still very much a season that inspires gratitude for the wonderful people around me. Whether sitting on a beach or rugged up in a London pub, the festive season is all about catching up with the people that make your life meaningful.

It isn’t just about those that are in the same time zone as you. I’m suddenly hyper aware of the Christmas developments back home. This makes me feel connected to my family and I’m really excited about calling them Christmas Day morning (Christmas Eve evening in UK when my predominantly Polish family gather together to celebrate Wigilia). Over the noisy background noise of 30+ boisterous members of my family the telephone receiver will be passed around so that I can catch up with my mum, my god daughter (who turns 18 Christmas Eve and is really the most wonderful young woman), my aunt, my uncle and my cousins. It may not be the same as being with them but hearing their voices is now an integral part of my new Christmas tradition.

Plus the reality is that even if I had been planning to go back to England for this Christmas, the odds would have been against my making it. The snow that made me vow last year to only visit in the European summer is back with a vengeance and causing no end of mayhem for people all over the world. The ensuing chaos means that the gifts I sent may or may not make it (my aunt updates me – I can’t actually track the pacakge as sending it recorded delivery would have pushed the postage north of $140 which is nuts). Since it is out of my hands, all I can do is hope for the best.

Now would be a great time to wish for some Christmas miracles though, so St Nicholas if you could please oblige here are mine:
- For my friends trying to make it home, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas with fabulous people even if it may not be exactly where you were planning to be.
- For my Wigilia-going family, I hope the snow allows you to safely make the trip to Berkshire so that you can all be together to share Opłatek as per decades of tradition.
- For packages that are currently in postal limbo, I hope that you find your way to your destinations and deliver the smiles the gifts inside were selected to inspire.
- For the Queen of England, don’t be afraid to experiment with your Christmas speech: I’d love to see you break with etiquette and tell us what you really think. Go on, you know you want to!

I’ll be spending a lovely Christmas Day with my big brother Guy, his wife Ann, my nephew Tom and their pets Alfie (puppy) and Joey (rabbit). Some might say that Guy isn’t actually my brother because he isn’t a blood relative but to them I’d answer “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck than it’s a friggin’ duck.” Hopefully Gertie Getz will get me there (she recently threw a strop, we’re working through it) ummm maybe I shouldn’t have used up my quota of Christmas miracles.

On that note I’ll sign off. Louis is sound asleep on the sofa in the most improbable position that means that his tummy is in immediate need to tickling.

Merry Christmas!!

Interim Post

It is Monday night and I'm feeling quite exhausted so I won't be doing my usual detailed post. I wanted to reassure my friend and family that all is good with me. My silence isn't some sinister reflection regarding my new job. I'm actually really enjoying it at ZenthOptimedia. They are a lovely bunch of people and I'm in the midst of a major information download. It is always weird being the new girl though, take a while before you feel fully functioning.

The only negative recently was an unfortunate bout of food poisoning that kicked in during the early hours of Saturday morning, knocking me on my bottom for the rest of the weekend. Fortunately between Louis and Indiana, I had plenty of felines checking in on me. Cats really are a lot more sensitive than people give the credit for. My boys looked after me.

I drove Gertie Getz to work this morning and managed not to get lost (this is a first). I have to admit, driving is rather frighteningly addictive. Bang goes the planet. I had my guitar lesson this evening which was great fun. Now I've been learning Wonderwall, Opportunity and Disarm which makes for a nice mix of tunes to mess around with. I'll be happy if I can play them and someone can actually recognise what I'm playing lol.

Louis is currently doing a fabulous impersonation of a big fluffy rug. Between the excitement of my guitar lesson (he loves them) and his dinner, I think he's exhausted himself ; )

Leah, the kitten from next door, just escaped which led to a fun packed 10 mins chasing her down the street. She is the naughtiest little ragdoll, not sure where she was trying to get to, but she does love making a break for it on a regular basis.

So it has been an action packed Monday night and I need to get a good night's sleep before my big day tomorrow. I'm off to see JayZ and U2 in concert tomorrow night. So excited!!

Normal blogging will resume this weekend. Take care all

Escaping the Box

I struggled with the title of this post because all the options that I came up with didn’t quite work. It was almost “Love what you do”, flitted to “Be free to be”, hovered over “Escaping your inner demons” and finally ended up being the rather odd “Escaping the Box”.

So what do I mean by “Escaping the Box”? I think the rejected titles should give you a pretty good idea but we’ll start with what has inspired me this week.

In my current visa-less stasis I have the luxury of time, something that I frequently lack (or feel as if I do). This would be the perfect opportunity to dedicate time to my passion of writing. Actually I lie, my real passion is storytelling and writing is the means that allows me to explore that passion (I have limited creative abilities outside of my way with words). I actually find writing very hard and sometimes even torturous. While I am getting some drafting of concepts done, I have suddenly become extremely shy of writing and am nowhere near as prolific as I thought I would be given the circumstances. There is a great big wall blocking me so that my ideas rattle around my head in growing numbers but I’m increasingly reluctant to commit them to paper. I’ve tried knocking this wall down but it is strong, I should know, I built it.

I have very effectively created a box around myself and I’m finding it hard to stretch outside of its confines. I had help building this box, but while I could point to society, education, other people, time, work, money, stress as providing some of the building blocks, the reality is that as the architect I need to take responsibility for it. I keep waiting for the stars to align, for everything to be perfect, so that I can begin work on my masterpiece. This alignment of celestial influences is the code for opening the box, so that I can explode outwards and fulfil my potential. What a load of bollocks!

The ideas are sitting inside me, like anxious children desperate to get out, explore and have amazing adventures. Instead I’m keeping them locked up blaming everything BUT myself for my reluctance to set them free. There is no code for opening the box. I just need to reach up and push open the lid and the thought scares me. What if I free these ideas, this creative potential and it disappoints? I’m paralysed with the fear that if I set these stories free, they’ll become flat, two dimensional, lifeless words on a sheet of paper. I’ve been germinating some of these stories for so long, that for them to die in the outside world would feel like a still-birth. I would feel as if I had failed them, better to keep them locked away until a better time comes.

The truth is that a better time will never come. I need to set myself free from my own crippling fears and self-imposed limitations NOW. I suspect that I’m not alone in needing to escape a box of my own creation. How often do you stop yourself from doing something because you believe you will fail? What is so bad about failing? Never trying is surely 10 times worse, but we can hide our dreams and ambitions, while often our failures are more public. So is it public opinion that we are afraid of?

Have you ever caught yourself whispering your true dreams to a friend, almost embarrassed by them? Our hopes can feel impossibly vulnerable and this can trigger our need to protect them. But instead, what we are really doing is stifling and repressing them. I think the most successful people we admire around us are those that never felt the need to build their own protective box. They embrace their dreams, learn and grow from their failures and see where they take them. How can we enjoy success if we are good at everything we do and never fail?

The next time you speak to a friend or colleague who has recently spectacularly failed at doing something, don’t feel sorry for them. Congratulate them for trying, for getting involved, for not holding themselves back. You should admire the people that try to live their dreams. I sometimes think that there is a small mindedness in many of us, which would have us holding others back because of our own fear of failure.

One of the aspects I really like of Australian culture is that of giving everyone a “fair go”. There is an inherent optimism here that is lacking in Europe. An example I’ll give is of a French man who has set up his own company doing wine tours in the Hunter Valley. When he told his Australian friends what he was doing, they were really pleased for him: very encouraging and supportive. When he told his French friends, they started to list all potential problems he might face, the many ways it could go wrong and why he was crazy to give up a stable income for the unknown. Well, last time I saw him (as one of his customers) he seemed to be doing just fine, thank you.

My problem is that my inner dialogue seems to be very French and not particularly Australian. I don’t give myself the support and encouragement I need. I feel surprised by how much I get from my family and friends (from all around the world), which can make me feel like a phoney because they seem to have more faith in me than I have. I was speaking to some friends about my novel idea: they seemed so genuinely engaged with the concept that it was a phenomenal boost to my confidence. It was after this boost that I truly felt the claustrophobia of living in my self-imposed box. The very next day I wanted to write and I found plenty of other things that were suddenly urgent to do instead. The day after, I read an entire novel from start to finish. Finally, several days later, I’ve realised that I’m never going to let myself write until I destroy the box and fully put myself out there.

So this post is me taking a sledge hammer to this box. I want to tell you I’m working on my first novel. The protagonist is a rather wonderful lady called Mrs Millicent Daily and she wants her story to be committed to paper. I am promising to do this for her and one shouldn’t break one’s promises, even if they are given to fictional characters that currently only exist in one’s head. The only way that I can truly fail in this endeavour is if I don’t write this book. Even if I write it and am dissatisfied with the results, I’ll still have succeeded. I don’t want to not try. I don’t want to cage up my potential and treat it like some valuable but easily shattered gem. I want to set myself free, escape the box, embrace the fear and write my book.

What action are you going to take, to make your dreams reality?

Pictured above: Louis knows exactly what to do with a box lid: flatten it!

The Waiting Game

I often joke that my lack of patience comes from my French genes (have you ever seen the French try to queue? It doesn’t come naturally) but putting joking aside, I’m very bad at dealing with uncertainty. As someone who is trying very hard to learn to live in the “now”, I struggle not to be preoccupied with the “later”. You must know the feeling: that distracting knot in the base of your belly that does the occasional back flip to ensure that it keeps churning up your worries about what is coming “later”.

My current overactive belly knot relates to my still to be approved new 457 visa. As I’m changing companies I’m getting a new sponsorship visa. The downside is that I was due to start work yesterday but can’t because the visa still isn’t through. So my Now looks great, I have extra holiday time. Except I find it hard to enjoy it as the knot keeps churning up questions about “how long will this holiday be?” and “how long can I afford not to be working?” It’s crazy, I’ve missed 2 working days so far and am fighting the urge to panic already. Saying that, we’ve had a little progress with the lovely folks at Aussie Immigration (love your work guys, really do, honestly am not just kissing butt in hope you’ll speed up my visa approval, that would be cynical) so it is looking hopeful that approval will be through in the next few days.

The reality is that as I can’t control when this will happen, I feel a tad cranky. Don’t misunderstand, I’m loving the extra time off. Today I’ve been writing, took Gertie Getz out for a spin and bought some yummy healthy goodness from Harris Farms and Fourth Village (going to stuff myself full of raspberries later) and watched a rather mediocre rom-com that I’d recorded (Did you hear about the Morgans? = spot on for a lazy rainy day but not a film I’d go out of my way to watch).

Does this make me a control freak? The more I think about it, the more I realise it’s when I’m relying on others (and particularly if those others are some kind of bureaucratic organisation) that my belly knot does Olympic level acrobatics and I get a major case of the cranks. Don’t I trust other people to get it right? I know I had to work long and hard on my delegation skills but I thought I’d cracked that particular problem. I don’t think it’s about my needing to do everything myself, it is more about the lack of control that I have over others to do what they need to do. After all, if I picked up the telephone to call immigration it would have zero influence on them.

Government departments and similar organisations are structured in such a way as to ensure that you feel as impotent as possible. I suspect that this is why they get so much rage directed at them. People don’t like to feel helpless. Like a cornered animal, they will fight back. Is this something that organisations need to do more about? After all, it will make the lives of their staff much more pleasant if the majority of the people they deal with aren’t frothing at the mouth with rabid frustration. Banks, governments, telephone companies, energy companies take note: your customers (and governments please don’t forget that your people are, to all intents and purposes, your customers) need to feel they have some level of control to prevent explosions of anger.

A perfectly happy, calm person can transform into Cujo (after he has contracted rabies) if they face the following:

• Endless recorded messages that send them circling around without reaching a real person


• Speaking to a completely disengaged person (or empty vessel) who has no power or control of their own and therefore their only interest is to transfer you onto another empty vessel


• No news, no commitment, no timelines: seriously how can there be no one who can give you clarification re when you are going to get the answers you are chasing? Why hide these magical oracles from us?

Admittedly businesses are getting wise to this and there have been improvements but not enough. In this age of social networking, you can’t afford to be sending out Cujos to infect the rest of the population against you.

So to answer my question, I don’t think I am a control freak. I think I’m a pretty normal person, prone to higher than average levels of anxiety, who just wants some kind of reassurance that things are happening and moving forward. While I’d love to have a couple of weeks off, sadly my landlord equally loves to be paid rent (weird I know) so it isn’t controlling to worry about when I’ll be able to start working again. But it does mean that my focus isn’t as in the Now as I would like. After all it is a warm evening, Martha Wainwright’s fabulous voice is serenading me via my Yamaha speakers , some beautiful aromatherapy oils are burning, Louis is off prowling and once I’ve finished this blog post I’m going to work on my novel outline. Life is good at this particular point in time. I’d feel quite serene if my tummy knot would just calm down.

Any anxiety fighting tips gratefully received, I’m all about self improvement. Never forget that we’re all works in progress, it’s good to help each other through.