The Birthday Party

After a 5am start, a train journey which began before the dawn chorus (well, before Twitter anyway), a planning meeting, a birthday dinner, a lot of cake and a multitude of stories... I am well and truly happy and relaxed.

Just recently I've found that being unemployed and poor gives you a lot of time to think about things. Largely because you have a lot of time on your hands and not enough money for bus fare and so you end up walking to a lot of places. Yesterday, as I was walking to The Glassblower, I started thinking about my current living situation and whether or not I wanted to remain living in a house share situation.

It occurred to me that if you stay single and don't pair off with a mate (or boyfriend as more well adjusted people call them) then you necessarily have to be more successful to be able to afford solitary living. You can't move out and share the burden of everything with someone else and so you kind of need your career to work out well to avoid poverty.

At what age do you necessarily have to stop living with other people? Will I wake up one day to find I'm 45 and living with a load of students who secretly judge me? Will I even know they're students or will I just see them and assume they are my cats because I am such a loony spinster?

Is there some kind of forum for the celibate amongst us to meet up and form care homes of willing 25-50 year olds who can't really afford housing but aren't old enough to just go straight into care? Do I need to pop out a couple of sprogs so that we can have council housing or should I just hold out and hope that I either find a continual stream of people my own age who are equally averse to co-habitable relationships or that I die young?


The birthday party again today really got me thinking... at what point will life start to feel like it's how things were meant to go or will it all always feel like you're working towards something you've not quite attained yet? Don't get me wrong, this isn't whiny at all - I love my life - but I don't quite feel like I've got to the point where I can sit back and look at it and think "Yep, this is what I pictured." Reasonably, I'm not sure there'll ever be a point where David Attenborough is reading me leather bound books and I'm spraying lavender oil on his feet, but I hope I get somewhere a bit close.

Or would that be very dull? Are those the sorts of lives where people freak out because they got somewhere comfortable too early and now don't know what to do? Will a permanent attempt to get somewhere unattainable be much more interesting some day when my nephew is writing my memoirs and living off the proceeds?

I watch the rest of my family living in this little bundle of people who adore each other and see each other all the time and you can really tell that they live for each other. I drop in and out and very much love them from a distance but we all know I have to do something else or I'll go a little nuts - is that how it will always be?

Does putting career above family and above desire to have ones own family make you very sad or selfish? Would it be a bad thing to be the next George Clooney (plus boobs and IBS) and to never make a lifelong commitment because ultimately you know you can't stick to it... I have no idea.

I'm aware that this blog is a little more Carrie Bradshaw than my usual style and I've fought every instinct to write - "I couldn't help but wonder..." and then start reminiscing about my promiscuous friends, but I don't really have many and you can't see my imaginations so this is the best I could do. I do imagine tomorrow's blog will be the blueprint designs for a housing plan for people between 25 and 50 who would like to live in singleton villages - why does every other age group get to live amongst its peers in communities but for the long stretch in the middle you're just supposed to go it alone? It doesn't make any sense. Don't you worry though, I'll fix it.