The Glorious Destination

“Can you think of a single other person you’d rather be? There. Doesn’t that tell you something? Your own situation may not be ideal, but at least you know your way around it. You are travelling a road that simply has to lead to a glorious destination. There’s a point to what you are doing and there’s something positively poetic about the way things are changing. Be glad that you are who you are- and allow a positive cosmic climate to fill you with the enthusiasm you deserve to feel…”

My horoscope.

I rather like life in a positive cosmic climate. While I consider most astrology to be a lot of mumbo jumbo there is nothing quite like a scrumptiously happy little horoscope to throw a little rose coloured light into our day…

It is Spring. Glorious, gorgeous, lime green Spring. The bin men are outside again whistling a happy tune and I am here, wiggling my bare toes and waiting for the pain d’epice to finish baking in the oven. The weekend passed in a flurry of chichi bars, a lovely birthday party and a Spanish omelette to sell your granny for. Though I do say so myself. Today I have been down on my hands and knees pulling up weeds in the front garden and tomorrow Finn will attend a starter session at the primary school he will eventually attend. All of a sudden there is clarity. Mud splattered clarity but clarity all the same. Mud splattered my darlings, because as I kneeled in the soil this morning gossiping with my neighbour John, Finley saw fit to pull back the elastic of my trousers and tip a spade full of dirt down my knickers. Whoever said children are a blessing obviously didn’t have any.

It is said that cosmic shifts happen in seven year cycles. When I was twenty two I finished university, bought a titchy green car, and started my decorating career. When I was twenty nine, I grew so tired of the horror that is working in other peoples living rooms, I took a no-stress job as a hairdressers receptionist, bought a house and got engaged. I danced a little polka with normality, two up two down and one day, two and half kids. And now seven years later, now I’m thirty six, now when the world is upside down, I can feel it happening again… all change please. Time to get off the bus and board the train to a whole new kind of bliss m’lady.

Of course things happened in-between each seven year period. First time round I lost a business, put on three hundred stone, and taught colour scheming to women with little else to do. Then second time round, I lost three hundred stone, had a baby, started Brocante and lost a relationship. (I’m downright bloody careless aren’t I??) All these things happened but they weren’t planned with any real sense of shaping my destiny. They were getting through, the time is right, oops how did that happen, must be done things. The universe didn’t line itself up and say the time is now Alison. Not like it is now.  Whether you want it or you don’t, your life is taking on a new shape and you’ve got no choice but to re-invent yourself and shake off yesterday. Including for heavens sake, mindless meandering towards goodness knows what, spending entire weekends feeling all shook up by a voice from the past, chasing tired out dreams and waiting for miracles to happen. Time for a plan Missus. Time to recognise that change has come knocking.

Ooooh noooooo: change is terrifying, so lets talk about gardening instead.

So there we were, Finley and I, all decked out for a bit of green fingery. Me in a pink pinny, hair piled up in a spiky, scary pineapple, lavender gloves and the quintessential blue gardening clogs, and Finley dressed as Doctor Who, complete with mini sports jacket and a stripy tie. I of course had mud in my knickers but let’s put that aside and concentrate on the matter in hand. Namely that he who I adored as a teenager works in a garden centre and the fact that my postage stamp is a mass of weeds is a cause of great embarrassment that had to be addressed before his next visit. And so there we were, me on my hands and knees, dragging out a complicated tangle of weeds and Finley running in and out of the house, bringing out a concoction he reliably informed me would kill the weeds: something I clearly wasn’t paying the required attention to as I tinkled along to Carla Bruni piped from inside the house, dwelled on the forbidden bowl of pesto pasta I was planning for tea, and sniffed in wonder as it struck me that the tiny little hydrangea bush hiding under the bay laurel smelled almost exactly like Obsession, my favourite perfume in the world.

I sniffed again. Bizarrely the camellia bush smelled like Obsession too.  And the over-sized unidentified bush by the door. Curiouser and curiouser. In fact the whole of our lane stank of me.

I ran into the house, resolutely ignored the trail of diddy muddy footprints up the stairs and down the landing to the bathroom and caught my very own little mad scientist in the act. The act, my friends, involving tipping the last of my Obsession body lotion into a can full of Aveda shampoo and cold water and stirring it with a Spiderman toothbrush.

Clearly the child needs to be in school.

And there’s the rub, because he will be won’t he? In just a few month’s time I will be shoving my child into a blue uniform and handing him over to a lovely woman called Mrs Carr, while I hopefully attend the Masters Course I have applied for, run the 5k for breast cancer (stop laughing Dad), write with reason and walk determinedly towards the glorious destination I’ve been casually meandering towards for the past two years.

It’s a plan. Of sorts.

You see Jonathan Cainer was right: there isn’t anyone else I’d rather be. Now is not the time to wander off my chosen path.

So bring on the next seven years. I’m poetry in the making Baby.

(P.S: I’m an Aries in case anyone else feels like boogieing in a positive cosmic light with me. Heck come if you are a Sagittarius. A Gemini or even a naughty Scorpion. Let’s face it, it’s all in our pretty little heads anyway!)