Category Archives: Sophie is

Just need to stay focused…

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I started this year with such grand plans. Not resolutions, exactly – I only really made one of those. But so many different things I wanted to do. I was raring to go, in fact – after two weeks of not doing anything particularly constructive over Christmas I couldn’t wait to start ticking some tasks off my mental to do list.

As well as my goals around my novel and blogging, I really need to find some time to get our increasingly messy house in order. And then there’s Arthur – as he gets older I’m starting to feel like I want to structure our days together a little bit more closely. He’s with me pretty much all the time, and whilst we do get out to a few excellent groups over the course of the week I want to ensure I’m giving him the opportunities for a whole range of different types of play, not just the ones that are easiest for me to facilitate. I’ve got lots of ideas for all of this – I know pretty much exactly what I want to do in fact, at least in my head.

But actually, in reality, it’s felt a bit like the universe has been conspiring against me getting very much done.

Arthur’s sleep is still all over the place since he’s moved out of his cot, and this has coincided with a particularly busy period for my husband (he has his finals at medical school this year, so the academic pressure is being ramped up alongside an increasingly challenging schedule of hospital shifts). I am, to put it plainly, knackered. And that does not do much for my productivity.

There also seems to be lots going on in Arthur’s ever-growing social life. I’d sort of forgotten that following him turning two at the end of December we would have a very busy few weeks of birthdays with NCT and baby group friends. This is all great fun of course – but does add in a whole other layer of things to organise!

I’ve found myself collapsing on the sofa after seemingly endless days barely able to recall what I’d managed to achieve since I’d got up that morning whilst listening to the whirr of things I still needed to do and wondering when my mind would ever be still enough to focus on them – let alone make a proper start on editing that novel…

And then it struck me. I didn’t need to keep all this stuff trapped inside my head. I needed in fact to write it down, to make some lists, to see it all there plain and simple so I could begin to tackle it. I needed to get a diary.

I’m not entirely sure why I stopped using a diary – a paper one at least. In the ten years I was teaching I would never go anywhere without my planner. Every thought and task relating to my professional life would be documented in there somewhere – and it was an important ritual at the beginning of each week to go through and get my goals clear in my head. I kept a separate diary for my personal tasks – a pocket moleskine one for years, with space for notes. This gradually transitioned onto my phone, and once I was on maternity leave that electronic method became the only one I used.

That seemed ok, for a while. Especially once Arthur arrived so much of what I had to do was so ‘in the moment’ that it seemed a waste of any precious spare seconds to write it down. Things have got increasingly complicated since those early days, but I’ve generally managed to muddle through, hanging the thoughts and tasks in my head onto our simple routines and frantically making the occasional list when it all got too much.

But I’ve realised that the time has come when I need more structure. There are so many balls I’m trying to juggle now that if I try to do it by the power of my mind alone then I’m going to start dropping them. So last weekend I ordered a diary. A moleskine, for old-time’s sake, but one which encapsulates what I loved about my teacher planner alongside the conventional day by day approach. It’s called a ‘professional taskmaster’ (even the name makes me feel more organised), and it’s pretty awesome.

When it arrived on Tuesday I sat down and filled in our plans for the week ahead, spread clearly over two A4 pages. Then on the next two, in the bullet pointed spaces for ‘actions and projects’, I decided on my non-negotiables for the week. There were quite a lot of them, but seeing them there in black and white made it all seem possible.

And as the week’s gone on I’ve been taking great pleasure in ticking off the things I have achieved. I’d forgotten quite how satisfying simple,everyday lists are. I’m still playing catch-up a little, and I’m still exhausted, but I’m getting there. I’m looking forward to reflecting back on my week on Sunday, celebrating what I’ve done and setting out what needs to happen next.

None of this is rocket science I realise, but they are things that somehow I had forgotten in all the changes I have lived through in the past couple of years. And I’m hoping, as I fall back into the routines left over from a very different life, they might just help me to keep the one I’m living now more focused.

 

mumturnedmom

 

The lost art of letter writing

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I had several very late nights last week. Not just because I was on a mission to get myself organised before the craziness of Christmas sets in, but because of what I found in the process.

I have always been a bit (a lot) of a hoarder. This is generally something I chastise myself for – resulting as it does in me being surrounded by piles and piles of stuff that I have no idea what to do with. But this week, as I sat on the floor surrounded by these pieces of paper dating back twenty five years and more, I was very glad that I find it so hard to throw anything away.

There were letters from friends I have not seen for many years, and from those who I still count amongst my very best. From boys I was once in love with, or who were once in love with me. From my brothers, who it is hard to believe were ever so little, and from older family members who it is hard to believe are not around any more.

They were written on pages torn from files, on embossed notecards, on the backs of envelopes, on handmade paper, and collectively they transported me back to a very different time. A time before email. A time before text messages. A time before Facebook. Or WhatsApp. Or Twitter.

There are so many ways I keep in touch with people now – and probably if there weren’t I would find it hard to keep in touch with as many people as I do. But there is something incredibly touching about those fading and dog-eared pieces of paper, about the effort of writing out a message by hand, of finding a stamp and an envelope and a postbox.

Very few of the letters contained anything of much import. And yet in their banalities and ramblings they said more than a carefully considered few lines on a special occasion ever could. And often, hidden in the clutter of the everyday, there were flashes of the souls of those who wrote, of what I meant to them – and them to me.

I often look back on my later childhood and teenage years with feelings of sadness and regret. I struggled with depression and anxiety – the degree to which came across starkly in the tortured diaries I also discovered. But my memories of that – blurred themselves by my reluctance to fully transport myself back to the waves of misery I felt at the time – have clearly clouded the reality of the very good times I had in between, and the very, very good friends I had around me. How they put up with me I’ll never know; I fear my demons made me incredibly selfish at times.

As well as this quiet self-reflection, this archive from my past got me thinking about something else too. Letters are going to be very important in my third novel. It was a letter from that world, a particularly significant one, which was initially going to form the basis of this post. But that was before I found my stash. And what those letters have reminded me is how different communication was in life before the internet.

I’m looking forward to reading and rereading the letters that were sent to me so many years ago as I continue to unpick the lives of my main characters. So much of their friendship – and their love story – will unfold as they put pen to paper. The waiting for their letters to be read and answered, the delicious anticipation when an envelope addressed with familiar handwriting falls through the door, the peeling open of that envelope and becoming immersed in that contents for a few precious moments: all that will need to find its way into my novel.

And I think also it needs to find its way back into my life. I have so many friends and family who are not as geographically close as I would like them to be, and whilst the internet has brought with it the wonderful ability to keep up with what they’re doing with their days it will never replace the simplicity or the complexity of a letter.

So whilst I’m not normally one for new year’s resolutions, I can feel one simmering here – one that will mean that pile of letters from my past may still have the chance to grow.

 

Thank you to Sara over at Mum Turned Mom for inspiring this post with her prompt: a letter…

mumturnedmom

The Q&A meme

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Just as I was thinking I was ahead of the game with my blogging this week Renee over at Mummy Tries goes and tags me in a meme… That’s ok though – have you seen the weather out there?!

Here are my answers to Renee’s questions whilst I try to work out what information I’m going to wheedle out of my chosen targets:

Where was your first holiday sans parents?

I went to Malaga in Spain when I was about twelve I think to stay with one of my school friends who’d moved out there. I remember being given special treatment on the plane as an ‘unaccompanied minor’, and being ridiculously jealous when I got there that Sarah had a pool. We lost touch not long after that. I often wonder what she’s up to now.

How old were you when you had your first kiss?

I would have been about the same age I think. I went to the cinema with a boy whose name completely escapes me, but who looked a lot like Chesney Hawkes. He was shorter than me too, so it didn’t last long.

What are your all-time favourite starter, main and dessert?

This is a tricky one, as my favourite food is Vietnamese or sushi and that all kind of comes together. But if I’m at a starter-main-desert kind of restaurant then… Maybe scallops? Followed by a really nice rare steak? Then tiramisu. Or maybe eton mess. Though with my nut allergy there are very few places I trust to serve me dessert.

What are your thoughts on climate change?

I think it’s a bit of a no-brainer that we’ve been mistreating our planet terribly over the past couple of centuries. I get that the world’s climate goes in cycles, so not every shift in temperature is necessarily to do with us, but with the amount of rubbish we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere I think we’d be terribly naive to think we weren’t having an impact. What to do about it is a whole other issue. I think the Western world has a huge responsibility to clean up its act, but when there are other huge nations at a different stage in their development it doesn’t exactly seem fair to say they’re not allowed to follow a similar trajectory to us. It’s all very complex and I could go on, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Do you self-reflect?

Yes. Probably too much to be honest. I think self-refelction is absolutely vital and can be an incredibly powerful tool – I used to drive kids mad with it when I was teaching. But if it’s allowed to go unchecked then I think it can become unconstructive – my mind just doesn’t stop sometimes and I’m not sure that’s entirely healthy!

Adrian Mole, love or loathe?

I have to admit an ignorant indifference. I was too busy reading Stephen King and John Grisham when I was a teenager and have never actually picked up an Adrian Mole book…

Tell us three things about yourself you usually do not share!

There’s actually not all that much I don’t share, especially since starting this blog! Though whilst it was one of the first things I blogged about, I’m often reluctant to admit I went to private school when I meet people, as I feel like they’ll judge me because of it – especially since it’s so contrary to my politics. I have a guilty addiction to Casualty and Holby City that I very rarely talk about. And increasingly, depending on who I’m talking to, I’m becoming nervous to admit that I’m still breastfeeding my almost two year old. Which is bonkers really because it’s a personal decision that I’m very happy and proud about!

So there you go. Thank you, Renee, for the tag – it’s always actually quite fun doing these things, and your questions have definitely got things out of me I haven’t written about elsewhere…

I would like to invite the following lovely bloggers to answer my seven questions which are listed below:

Jocelyn at The Reading Residence

Iona at Redpeffer

Hannah at Make, Do and Push!

Merlinda at Pixiedusk

Dean at Little Steps

Louise at Little Hearts, Big Love

And those questions are:

Where in the world would you most like to be right now?

What do you love most about having your blog?

Who is the person that you most admire?

What keeps you awake at night?

What is your all-time favourite breakfast?

Which song makes you smile every time you hear it?

If you could go back and give one piece of advice to your fifteen year old self, what would it be?

And now it’s over to you!

 

M is for mummy

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We’ve made the transition this week from ‘mama’ to ‘mummy’. It sounds so much more grown up somehow, but more deliberate too. A definite naming, almost an act of possession: you are mummy, and you are mine.

I am his, too, there is no doubt about it. He has transformed me, consumed me in the best way possible. I was always a little afraid, before he came along, that I would find the presence of my imagined child stifling. That I would no longer be able to be me, to have the time I thought I needed to myself, to do the things I thought I needed to do.

Turns out there was another me lurking somewhere deep inside, waiting to be awakened. This me has different priorities, different values. She’s not so different really, but different enough to deserve the name ‘mummy’. And she does not feel stifled, not at all.

When I wake in the morning and hear him turning our names over in his mouth, articulating the little family that marks his place in the world – ‘mummy, daddy, baby’ – my heart sings. I am his, and he is mine. Together there is little we cannot do.

M is for mummy.

 

Joining in with The Alphabet Photography Project over at PODcast. 

L is for love

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On this day three years ago, I was not yet married. After a whirlwind year and a bit of unexpected romance I was hanging out in East London with the man I’d fancied since I was seventeen who was to become my husband the very next day.

This was not the wedding we’d been planning for months, the one where all our friends and family would be helping us celebrate. That wedding would be happening two weeks later, by which time we would have upped sticks and moved to Devon ready to start a new life together.

But the humanist celebration that was still to come would not make us legally married. We’d thought we’d just get that bit out of the way in a registry office initially, but when we discovered we could have a legal ceremony in Shoreditch House – where we’d ended up on our very first date – it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

We stayed there the night before, enjoying dinner on the rooftop and shunning the convention of spending our last unmarried night apart. We giggled nervously as we lay in bed looking over the night glow of London, realising rather late that whilst this wedding was not the one we’d poured all our energies into it was still the one that would make us married.

The next morning we were brought a pile of newspapers to mark the date, and I disappeared off to my favourite hairdresser Taylor Taylor where I’d made an emergency appointment a few days before. My dress had been a bargain from Very, and I’d splurged a little on blue shoes from Joules, but I’d realised rather late that a ponytail might not quite cut it.

Our immediate family joined us for the ceremony, held in a little side room off the bar with bare brick walls and music cued up on Leigh’s iPhone. There was a delicious lunch after that: I couldn’t tell you what exactly, but I know it was good. Then Leigh and I left everyone behind whilst we went for a walk around the surrounding streets with Leigh’s friend Kamil, a photographer, in tow.

I love the pictures he took to capture the afternoon after we got married. We were so in love, and just a little bit tipsy, and found ourselves caught up in a wave of surprise emotion on the day we had thought we were just satisfying legal requirements but were in fact cementing a bond that had been slowly forming over so many years.

When we were done we went back to join our families, had piggyback races in the pool and drank a few too many espresso martinis. It was a pretty awesome start to married life.

Tomorrow is our first third wedding anniversary. I’m looking forward to reflecting on how much has happened over the past three years, to drinking wine and making plans for our future. But most of all I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my husband, whom I love.

Joining in with The Alphabet Photography Project over at PODcast.

Word of the Week: Offline

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Last weekend, my family held a party. Not just any little party: 400 people descended on my parents’ home in the South Hams, with about 200 of them camping. It was spectacularly fun, but as you can probably imagine it took just a little bit of organising. There were ten of us in the organising committee – my parents, me and Leigh, my three brothers and their partners. Emails have been flying between us for months to make sure everything was in place, but still as the weekend approached there was lots that had to be done on the ground.

We moved over there a few days before to help set up – in the house for a couple of days then migrating to our bell tent as other guests arrived. I had a few moments of rising panic as I realised I was never going to manage to keep up with the blog as well as everything else – internet access was sporadic, and there just wasn’t any spare time! And then I paused, took a breath, and reminded myself that this is my blog, and I’m writing on my terms. The world wouldn’t fall apart if I didn’t post for a while, and people wouldn’t hold it against me if I missed a few linkies.

So for a while I focused on just living life instead of documenting it (I only just managed to remember to take a few photos…) But now that things are getting back to normal I thought you might like to know what we’ve been up to!

We had a bit of a mission making sure the camping area was all set up and ready for people to arrive, and were glad for the sunshine as we traipsed up the hills and through the woodland, Arthur in the sling or running free.

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We set up our little camp down by the estuary, and Arthur got very excited about the new house we were building.

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He had so much fun playing in the open air – the weather was perfect, and a sense of magic began to pervade the air.

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We set up a kids activity tent (our priorities for camping parties are a little different than they used to be…) where everyone got throughly covered in glitter.

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By Saturday evening, we were well and truly ready to party. The tutus came out, the wings went on, and anticipation was building.

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Arthur seemed to love his costume, and was in his element with so many other people to play with!

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He was most excited when the music started though. In fact I think everyone was – my brother had managed to get the awesome Rubblebucket to come and party with us. Their set was amazing, and it was more than a little bit surreal watching the scene unfold in my parents’ courtyard.

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The festivities continued well into the night, and the next day we had Arthur’s naming ceremony, a delicious spread of Sri Lankan curry, and lots more chatting and playing and catching up.

Come Sunday evening, those of us who remained were exhausted but happy, and we had a lovely few hours chilling down by the tents.

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Arthur was truly in his element with so many people to talk to and play with, and it was truly lovely for us to have some quality time to hang out with friends we don’t get to see so often any more.

I think after six months of increasingly intense blogging with all its associated social media exploits I really needed a bit of a break where my only communication device was a walkie talkie. I have a feeling there might be a few more spells like that this summer too – after all, if real life wants to get in the way of the internet for a while I’d be churlish to stop it.

 

 The Reading Residence

Country Kids from Coombe Mill Family Farm Holidays Cornwall

Making deals with the universe

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I often catch myself doffing my hat to solitary magpies, not able to take the chance that they won’t otherwise find a way to let their sorrow seep into my life. No-one’s yet picked me up on it, stopped and enquired exactly what it is I think I’m doing, and if they did I’m not entirely sure what I’d say.

It’s not the only superstition I buy into. Unless I absolutely have to, I’m really not fond of walking under ladders. I try to convince myself that I’m being ridiculous, that it’s no big deal if the pavement and scaffolding are configured in such a way that avoiding it’s impossible. But I can’t ignore the fact that my heart quickens slightly and I apologise silently to whoever or whatever it is that might be offended by my actions. For ages I had a thing with drain covers too, adjusting my path to avoid walking over three in a row. That was pretty tricky to keep up in London, though not as tricky as avoiding stepping on the cracks between the slabs, something which I have felt compelled to try to adhere to during the more anxious periods in my life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, exams have always been a bit of a magnifier for this irrational behaviour. I can’t remember the exact details of the little rituals I’d enact to maximise my chances of success, but I still have the tiny, intricately decorated wooden elephant my Granny gave me as I was about to sit my GCSEs. It became an essential addition to my exam pencil case, watching me from the corner of my desk. I didn’t dare to see what would happen if it wasn’t there, though I knew deep down that any power it held was all in my mind.

I find it strange that I get sucked into this kind of superstitious behaviour, as on the whole I’d consider myself to be pretty rational. I’m not religious, feeling no presence of a greater being beyond humanity. And yet there must be something in my core that fears that the universe may one day turn on me, may decide that my luck has finally run out.

Because I know that I’m insanely lucky. Even on the days when I feel like everything is going wrong – maybe especially then – I cannot help but reflect on all the things that I am blessed with. If I did believe in a god, perhaps it would be him who I would thank. But as it is I’ll just go on making my little deals with the universe and trying to make the very best I can of this wonderful life I’ve been given.

Thank you to Sara at Mum turned Mom for inspiring this post with her prompt: Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help (Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes)

mumturnedmom

 

A day to remember

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For all of my idiosyncratic views of the world, there was one convention I just couldn’t quite shake: ever since I was a little girl I had dreamt of my wedding day. Beyond knowing it would be magical, though, I’d never had a clear idea of exactly how I wanted it to be. With all the frogs who crossed my path it began to seem like it would never be more than just a dream anyway.

But then I met my prince – you can read about that here – and everything just fell into place. After months of preparation we had an incredible day, surrounded by friends and family. It’s a cliche I know, but it really was one of the best days of my life. So when Aby over at You Baby Me Mummy offered me the chance to relive it for her Share Your Wedding feature I jumped at the chance.

You can read more about the day here. Enjoy – and thanks to Aby for giving me the excuse to relive all those wonderful memories!

YOU BABY ME MUMMY

 

Reclaiming my body

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When we set off on holiday this Easter I had two main objectives: to relax and unwind after a hectic few months, and to spend some quality time with my little family. I think we achieved these rather well, but there was something else that happened that I hadn’t really been expecting or even realised I needed: over the week we were away, I gradually began to feel like my body was mine again – something I haven’t really been able to say since before I fell pregnant.

Since puberty, and in common with many other women I know, I’ve had a bit of a tricky relationship with my body. I struggled with anorexia as a teenager, and put myself through the mill with rather too much partying in the years that followed. Through my twenties I was plagued by an underlying paranoia about being frumpy and overweight, though looking at pictures of my younger self now I realise this was completely misplaced. My body was simply the physical manifestation of my self-esteem: the less happy I was, the more I hated what I saw in the mirror.

Through all of this I never stopped exercising – sometimes healthily, sometimes to excess. Having loved gymnastics as a kid I became obsessed with trampolining when I discovered my local club aged fourteen. It was that, actually, that stopped my anorexia being more damaging than it was: my coach declared one day that I was not allowed to come to training if I lost any more weight, and slowly but surely I began to find a balance. I kept the trampolining up through my late teens and twenties, funding my way through university by coaching at local sports centres. I also rediscovered gymnastics with tumbling classes at a circus school in East London, and loved going to yoga whenever I could slow down enough to fit it in. I also started going to the gym from time to time, though I’ve never had much patience with exercise just for the sake of it.

In the lead up to my wedding though I worked out a lot, made suddenly nervous by the idea of all those photographs. When we got married in the summer of 2011 I was probably in the best shape of my life. I was happy, and felt comfortable in my skin for the first time in many years.

Then when we decided to start trying for a baby the following spring my focus changed. I was terrified that the abuse I’d subjected my body to when I was younger would mean that I wouldn’t be able to have children, and focused everything on creating a nutrient rich environment to nurture a new life. It worked, and I fell pregnant more quickly than either of us had imagined, but that was just the beginning. I was scared all the way through that something would go wrong, stayed away from vigorous exercise and let myself gain probably a bit too much weight. I really wasn’t thinking about that though – I was following my instincts and doing what I felt would be best for our baby. The one thing I am really glad I stuck to was a pregnancy pilates class. That was never really about keeping in shape, but it did help keep me grounded as my body changed beyond recognition.

After Arthur was born, I was amazed at what my body had created and couldn’t begrudge it a single ounce of the extra weight it had acquired along the way. None of that mattered any more: my body had gone from being an awkward shell housing pent-up insecurities to a powerhouse that had grown a brand new person and delivered it into the world. And all that was important to me in the early days was to help that little person thrive: to work through the challenges we faced in establishing breastfeeding and keep myself strong and focused enough to be his mum.

Those days turned into months, and though I’ve shed a little weight along the way through breastfeeding and kept my core strong through babywearing my body is a long way from where it used to be. It’s not that I want my old body back – and I certainly wouldn’t want the angst and neuroses that went with it. But something has been niggling at me about wanting to reclaim a little of my body for myself, and that’s what happened on this holiday.

Between us, Leigh and I gave each other some time over the week to focus on ourselves. Just an hour or so a day, but even that felt pretty incredible after being on duty pretty much permanently for the past sixteen months. I did yoga and pilates classes, swam some lengths in the pool, went for a run. I even got to lie in the sun for a while, the warmth of its rays caressing my skin. And possibly best of all I enjoyed some proper swimming in the sea, back and forth along the bay as Leigh and Arthur played in the sand, feeling my breath quicken and my muscles tighten as my body slowly became my own again.

I’m not expecting to have it back entirely: I am still very much committed to breastfeeding Arthur – for how much longer I’m not sure any more. I still enjoy co-sleeping with him, even though it means I can never entirely relax and often wake up feeling achy and stiff. And I still intend to wear him in the sling for a while yet, which lovely as it is does restrict my movements rather more than I would like. But alongside all this I’m going to make an effort to get to know my body again, to give it the attention it deserves after everything it’s been through.

There’s a trampolining class I’ve been going to at the place Arthur does his baby gym, but I’m often too exhausted to give it my all. I’m going to try to rectify that, to make the most of the opportunity to do something physical that I love. I have a hula-hoop that was one of the main tools in my arsenal for getting fit for my wedding, and I’m going to try to pick that up again whenever I can – even just for ten minutes at a time. And I’m also going to try my best to fit in some of the other things I enjoy – swimming, yoga, running – and let Arthur and his Dad spend some time together, which I know they’ll love.

This holiday didn’t immediately transform my body, but it reminded me that it is mine, that it is strong and flexible and that I shouldn’t take those things for granted. I am looking forward to building on that over the weeks and months to come: to continuing to be a mother, but also remembering to be me as well.

Thank you to Sara at ‘Mum Turned Mom’ for inspiring this post with her prompt ‘In matters of healing the body or the mind, vacation is a true genius!’ (Mehmet Murat ildan).

mumturnedmom

Brilliant blog posts on HonestMum.com

Love

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It’s been a few weeks now since the anniversary of our first date, but I still can’t help but marvel at how much my life has changed since Leigh came back into it – something which was completely unexpected.

At the end of 2009 I was pulling myself back together after yet another failed relationship. I made some really bad decisions in my 20s – stayed with men for far too long who sapped my strength and identity, was terrified of being alone.

For a while I don’t think I was much fun to be around. I struggled with depression which whilst it was triggered by being treated really badly by two of those men in particular had its roots far deeper in a lingering feeling I had of just not quite being true to myself – and not even really knowing who that self was. All the while I was throwing myself into my career, getting real satisfaction from my work as a teacher with brilliant colleagues and fantastic family and friends. I had no real reason to be unhappy – and it was that I finally realised fully whilst walking in the snow in East London in the early hours of New Year’s Day. I needed to relish what I had, make the most of the opportunities I was being given, stop taking things – and people – for granted. My happiness was not going to come in the form of a man – or at least not until I had made peace with myself.

And then just as I was relishing the prospect of being happy on my own for the first time in my adult life, along came Leigh. We’d known each other for years – been part of a group of friends who all went clubbing together in our late teens and actually had our first kiss in a tent at Womad back in the nineties. We lost touch soon after that despite the fact we ended up at the same university, but when I joined Facebook he was the first person I looked up. There’d always been something about him that I was drawn to, but something always held me back from making proper contact with him.

We’ve talked about it since and he felt exactly the same way. We both seemed to think that we were out of each others’ league – watched each other from afar, with a strange sense of regret for a road not taken. Then one night in January 2010 Leigh made a comment on his Facebook page and, needing someone with whom to share my insomnia, I replied. I immediately switched my phone off once I had – it was such a tiny, insignificant thing, but for some reason it felt like I’d taken a massive step in reaching out to him and I was terrified in case he didn’t respond. But when I logged back onto Facebook in the morning it turned out he had, and that little comment sparked a flurry of online banter, our mutual friends amused at the public flirting we’d begun to engage in out of the blue.

A couple of weeks later I was throwing a party with my friend Sue. She thought I was bonkers, but I invited Leigh to come. He replied to my message straight away, saying that he would love to come but he was flying off to South Africa the next day for six weeks on a paramedic training course. This piqued my interest even more – I couldn’t quite picture the hedonistic public schoolboy I remembered as a paramedic.

Whilst he didn’t make the party, our communication had shifted from a public to a private forum, and over the six weeks he was away we exchanged increasingly long and intimate messages, catching up on all we’d missed over the more than a decade since we’d seen each other and falling a little bit more in love with each other every day. I was convinced it was the start of something, but Sue was understandably wary – she’d been there to pick up the pieces when things had gone wrong in the past, and she couldn’t quite condone me getting so caught up in a man I hadn’t even really met yet.

There was a particular week in February when we’d both gone to stay with another friend, Tsering, in Barcelona. They both teased me mercilessly about my pen pal, saying that I really shouldn’t get over excited as he would no doubt turn out to have a tail or at the very least extra toes. I, however, was undeterred. I knew it was crazy, but something about it all just felt so right. Leigh got back to London at the end of February, and our first date in the real world was on the first of March.

To say I was nervous would be a massive understatement, but as soon as we saw each other everything fell into place. The chemistry was just as strong in person as it had been through the thousands of words we’d exchanged online, and we had a brilliant night. We ended up going to a gig my brother Ben’s band just happened to be putting on round the corner, so he met my three brothers on that first date too – they gave him the seal of approval, and Leigh made a joke about the band playing at our wedding. Which, as it happened, they did.

He proposed a couple of months later, and we celebrated our engagement with a trip to Barcelona where Tsering got to vet him too – Sue had already given us her blessing (with a strongly worded warning to Leigh about what she’d do to him if he messed me around). I think they were both as relieved as I was that he had turned out to be amazing despite the unconventional way our relationship had started. There was no doubt that both Leigh and I were ready to settle down.

We got married the following summer in 2011, a year which was full of change for us both: Leigh won a place at medical school in Devon having decided to retrain to be a doctor, we found a house in Brixham in need of total renovation and moved in a couple of weeks before the wedding, then a couple of weeks after that I started my new job leading an English department in a school in Plymouth. Eighteen months later we finally finished the work on the house days before our son was born, and I have now taken a break from teaching to look after him and pursue the career as a writer I always dreamed of.

It makes me a bit dizzy to think about how different things are now than they were four years ago – how much we’ve achieved in such a short space of time. I finally feel like I can be happy in my skin, and much as I was ready for change that frosty January I don’t think I could have got here without Leigh, and love.

With thanks to Sara at Mum turned Mom for inspiring this post with her prompt: “That was unexpected…”

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