Welcome

Following the crowning of my NHS experience with a stint at a PCT and the resulting redundancy (traumatic, though much wanted and worked for), my husband and I are going back to my roots near a small village in Smaland, Sweden. These are our experiences.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Review

It's been exactly 2 years and 4 months since I've worked in an office, and 2 years since we came to Sweden on a 'sabbatical', so I guess it's time for a random review.
Soooo, in the last 2 and a half years, I've been made redundant (along with most of the NHS it seems!), discovered the extent of my burnout, finished my Masters, move country (and don't talk to me about the Social Services here! even the Immigration people are fed up with them), move house twice, driven in a car accident that made the front pages (what they don't tell you in the propaganda is that being fat helps cushion vital internal organs, it was my skull - the bit with no fat, that was broken -ha!), asthma came back badly, jobless, starting a completely new career at the age of almost 50yrs and planted some broccoli.







Right... hummm, well, those were the highlights. I would say it's been a bit of rollercoaster really.  So now, I live in a picture postcard house with my husband


(still together-see above paragraph, it was the broccoli that was the real difficulty...) and cat (hummm, asthma...) and am going to open up a cafe and small art gallery in the mission hall over the pond.





So, living the dream!  It is actually quite tough when dreams start to become reality.  Things come up that weren't figuring in the dreamworld - like money and builders, and then of course, what is there left to dream about? (yay, caribbean island).

Being a social beast, the hardest things have been leaving my friends.  Of course, the people here are lovely, they really are, but there's not a lot of space in people's lives in the country.  Things don't change much, so people fill up their internal spaces and don't know how to squash up, to make room for a new person coming along. Of course, in the countryside, it's not as easy to bump into people, or meet up, so everything is more of an effort, as is making sure there's enough milk, cos the nearest shop is 10km away and doesn't open until 10am.  (she says, conveniently forgetting about the 14hr service station shop only 5km away).

I've planted and eaten my first vegetables, made a miniscule profit (but a profit nevertheless!)  with a summercafe, made new friends, been lonely, happy, sad, had time to unlearn and redo some fundamentally flawed, but persistant, core beliefs, reenforced my understanding of God's love and interest in my life and really have begun life in my 40s (UK proverb - Life begins at 40).  It appears I've had a midlife crisis thanks to a right-wing government - should I be grateful??