Thinking back to that time, the time when we bought this house, I was trying to explain how I was feeling and what led up to it all. I can’t remember where I’ve got to in my narrative, and I never go back and read what I’ve written previously before starting to write in the mornings, so hope this makes sense. Guess I can always edit after.
He rang up one day, and began with ‘You’re going to hate me…’
He had been offered a job in Derby, and he was going. That was it. I never saw him again. This circumstance, however, had more to do with the fact that a year later, when my first journal article was published, he accused me of plagiarism (which was complete rubbish), threatened to sue, it all got very nasty. Twice since then he has tried to get in touch with me – I have received emails from him out of the blue – he must have googled me and found my website. He wanted to get back in touch, but I didn’t reply to either of them.
Well, that is what happened to him.
Over the next 12 months or so, summer 98-summer 99, lots of things happened, and I don’t remember any of them being good. I was still applying for jobs, academic jobs, non-academic jobs, full time jobs, part time jobs, any kind of jobs which might give me some kind of meaningful employment. The result was always the same, the reasons, I concluded, probably similar – I had been away form the conventional job market too long, there were too many gaps in my CV, I’d done too many different things, I didn’t have the right experience, I was too old for anyone to take a chance on. I did various temping jobs, via word of mouth, but nothing that really stuck, that led on to anything else, that built on anything or gave me any kind of satisfaction. The dream of making an independent life for myself stayed just that.
I lost touch with my old social circle at the university, if I saw them again I knew I didn’t belong any more, everyone had moved on. Those years now seemed like a bubble, a dream that I could be a different kind of person with a different kind of life, here I was now, back to being a middle aged housewife, nowhere to go each day, nothing to take me away from home and family, except for the occasional conference papers which I still kept trying to write. Life drifted into a strange kind of limbo.
And during all this, I was coming to terms with losing my parents. Not to mention dealing with a broken heart which I wasn’t able to share with anyone, but had to keep locked away inside.
So that was my life at that time, a life which had run into the buffers, into the sand, which was going nowhere.
It was around this time that we started talking about moving house. It became a big issue for me – a dream that this would be the way I would make life different, make a new start, find something better. I don’t think I thought about it in those terms consciously at the time. But it became the focus of everything.