After finishing Christmas Day on a high. Thanks to a two hour chat with the one person in the whole world I wanted to speak to, I set about looking forward to the new year with positivity. After all he’d messaged me, surely that must mean he had wanted to chat with me. Let’s be clear here, I’m not hankering after a love affair, no this is just a very special person from my childhood. Apart from the miles between us making meeting up again a near impossibility in these Covid times, I could not bear the thought of spoiling what has already proved to be rather a rocky road.

So, we were back in lockdown. Life went on much as it had for the last year, but I decided that we were going to take a trip down to Nannies with 7 yr old. We’d not seen her in person since the summer. We loaded up the car with Christmas presents and rain coats and headed down. She was over the moon to see us especially little one. We chatted for an hour or so, through her bedroom window before the rain became really heavy. On the way home I vowed I would visit more in 2021. Lockdown or no lockdown.

What I needed to do right now though was find something to occupy me on a day to day basis. I had started to drift. I didn’t feel as if I’d done anything the last four months of 2020. I had started writing another book, as yet again I had failed to finish my Christmas novel in time for Christmas! What I should have done of course was finish writing the Christmas novel, but that would have been far too sensible as option for me to consider though.

As the winter months eased away and spring came into view I started to spend more time in the garden. Before I knew it I was hooked on gardening. Everyday I was either scouring garden centres for different types of pots, or searching the supermarket plant section for reduced specimens to nurse back to health. Slowly, but surely my little pot garden took shape. Not everything grew. The rather expensive boxes of wildflower seeds returned two cornflowers and a few poppies. Nothing like the wild meadow of mixed flowers on the box. Likewise with the veg, not one sweetcorn seed made it through the soil. I had success with mint and sage, but the thyme, coriander and parsley refused to play ball. I filled hanging baskets with trailing nasturtiums and hung them on the bare branches of the dogwood bush, dreaming of cascading colours during the summer months. Unfortunately the dogwood bush had other ideas and hid them from view, but overall I was pleased with my efforts. I decided to resurrect my blog and share my garden with the internet.

I was now spending all day everyday outside, I was feeling so alive, so different from 2020 when I just hid away indoors fearing for my life. I’m not sure if it was because I had grown accustomed to being in Lockdown, or whether it was the little flower world I had created, but I was much happier than I had been in a long time.

It was around this time that I started my detox. Not a faddy detox of drinking liquid grass, no a real drive to stop loading my body with toxins. I sustained a spinal injury during my school days which was becoming more painful and more debilitating the older I got. Nothing I hadn’t been prepared for, but I was taking more and more medication, yet still being in pain. I got to the point where I was being prescribed drugs to take to protect my body from the other drugs I was taking. I decided enough was enough and just stopped taking everything. Most probably not the best thing I’ve ever done. I then experienced the most painful two months of my life. I had also cut out sugar, gluten, caffeine and dairy from my diet. I was going to stop drinking wine as well, but that only lasted a week. I needed something good in my life.

Slowly, but surely despite the pain, some days the stairs were literally a step too far, I gained back control of my body, instead of the meds being in control. It wasn’t easy, I had some pretty dire moments which really do not need to be expressed in words, ever. I don’t know whether the pain I was experiencing was natural pain from my injury, or my bodies reaction to the lack of pain relief, but by late May, not only had the worst of the pain subsided, I had lost the weight I’d gained the previous year and seemed to be on a permanent high. I had also started to bake again, something else I’d stopped doing in 2020. Life was truly tasty again.

Sadly though my high was not to last. I had what I now refer to as an ‘incident’ on the duel carriageway in late April I won’t go into details, but basically I took drastic avoiding action to allow a speeding car to squeeze between me and an overtaking car. Amazingly I returned to the carriageway without damage. I was shaken to the bone and experienced an immense pain radiating from my chest up to the top of my head. It was the next day I heard of the crash resulting in the death of 3 people. A care assistant on her way to a client and two passengers in the car that hit her head on. Debris from the crash was spread all over the road and the adjacent field. The cars were unrecognisable. A description of the car was released and an appeal for information launched. It turned out to be the car I’d driven away from. By saving my own skin, I had caused the death of three others. To be continued…………