My Other Life ?

Picking up the idea of My Other Life suggested by  Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer, I don't think I would say that I have another life. For me, the whole point of life In the Land of New Normal is that following diagnosis and the immediate treatment I am (like many others) getting back to my everyday life but that as a result of the cancer some things have changed. Some of the everyday life gets written about in this blog, but admittedly not all that much as yet.


So readers of my blog will know that I enjoy walking and needlework, am interested in chemistry (thanks to my late father) and that I have recently taken up curling. From other social networking, people may know that I am involved with medieval textiles and living history. What many don't know is just how obsessed I am with a particular group of late medieval businesswomen. So obsessed in fact, that I have an address book full of the names and locations of over 250 women who have been dead for between 400 and 700 years.


A barrister by profession, I now work for a third sector disability organisation where I run an advocacy service. Highly rewarding and totally absorbing work for a charity with some very thoughtful and supportive trustees.


I love reading and music; I played in my school, university and county youth orchestras, but mainly only listen these days. I don't know where I would be without my iPod enabling me to take so much music everywhere I go. I prefer live theatre to film and have been known to go to performances of Shakespeare by both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the local amateur society in the same week, thoroughly enjoying both.


Early this year, spurred on by the need for more weight bearing exercise, I joined an Egyptian dance class. I'm not very good, but am loving it. It is a very different style of dance from the reels and country dances I learnt growing up in Perthshire!


Something I am absolutely no good at is drawing. People have been known to fight over who has to have me in their team for a game of Pictionary!


I don't do as much cooking as I used to. I've never been all that keen on the "what shall we eat tonight" type of cooking, but love what I call production cooking. By which I mean multi-course dinner parties, with days of preparation and the opportunity to bring out the good table linen, china, cutlery and glasses . There doesn't seem to have been much time for that in my life for a good few years now, but I still enjoy it when I get the chance.


That is a bit more about my life and I'm sure that more will appear from time to time in the blog. Almost certainly there will be new experiences that get a mention. There may be passing references to places I've visited in the past (such as the disused quarry where I was fossil hunting by torchlight with my geology class when I found my first trilobite). Possibly there will be reminiscences - did I tell you about the time I was in the post office and it was held up in an armed robbery???


Oh yes, one more thing - we may live on opposite sides of the world today, but fellow blogger the Feisty Blue Gecko and I were at school together!