Being Middle Class - Getting the wind up....

There's nothing like an impending emergency to get the old heart thumping or indeed in the case of us Brits to start talking to one another. Even better the impending emergency is all about the weather.
Normally on a Sunday I see the mummies and daddies standing in splendid isolation on the edge of the hockey pitch whiling away the hour or so until their children's training is over.
Every week they come and every week they stand alone together. Occasionally one may break ranks and try to start up a conversation. Usually it is a case of crash and burn not due to meanness or even being unfriendly just a case of chronic social ineptitude and acute embarrassment. I applaud the bravery but would of course never actually say out loud that I did, I mean that would just be embarrassing for all concerned!
But give us an excuse to talk, on a non personal level naturally, and then there is no stopping us. All sorts of secrets come out: like the fact that so and so's husband has run off with the local vicar's wife or that the reason why that nice couple are always up for meeting new people is that they are swingers...the mind boggles, really it does.
While this is all well and lovely but the startling nature of these Bon motes can of course render one speechless, so thank heavens for being able to move the conversation swiftly on with talk of the impending storm. Concern about ones' trees and the question of the probability that one may or indeed  may not get into work on Monday morning covering for the fact that you are now in a serious social dilemma regarding how you are going to gracefully decline the invitation for a cosy soiree next week from the nice couple you have just heard are swingers.
Maybe I'll be too busy clearing up after the storm...

Getting back in the Groove

Refusing to stick my head in the ground!

It's been a long time.
A very long time and no it's not about the blog, even thoughit has been so long since I posted that my rankings are now totally off the scale and I am in danger of being forgotten.
It's about work.
And I am in danger of being forgotten there too.
Not only forgotten - which may imply that I once was remembered - but there is also the realisation that for some I have actually never existed.
And now I am trying to get back.
Get into the groove.
I feel as if I have been in some kind of stasis - frozen in time like Austin Powers and totally without any mojo.
I haven't been doing nothing for the past 12 years. I have managed to keep my foot wedged in the door so to speak- while renovating our home and birthing and bringing up two boys - but the foot has been so long wedged that I think it has mortified.
I do have some work but lately it has been squeezed and I fear that because I am not in the office on a daily basis I am fading fast in everyone's collective memory.
Hence the need to rejuvenate myself; be reborn - faster, stronger, better than before.
And I feel an utter fraud.
I fear I may never work properly again.
Why on earth would anyone want to give me gainful employment?
I have forgotten how to do it.
Not that I have forgotten how to write, I can do that OK. I write 1,000 words a week and get paid for it. But I am beginning to fear that all my eggs are in one basket and if that magazine were to decide to close down my column - then what?
No one knows who I am!
I wasn't widely known when I was working full time but at least all the PRs knew where to send the press releases and would ring me up with useful bon mots and stuff. I'd get invited to functions and press days and the like.
Now I find I am having to scrabble about on line searching for stuff more and more and increasingly I am having to telephone PR Execs, begging them to put me on their mailing lists. They invariably mispronounce my name, get confused and then ask me again just who I am and why I am calling.
It's so scary.
Scary that I am going to have to risk rejection, ridicule and condescension from editors and publishers young enough to be my kids as I start all over again at the bottom.
I am going to have to prove, not just to them, but to myself that I can do it
I am terrified.
Can I make it?
Can I do this?