As I think I’ve mentioned before I am a recovering “live to work”er

One of the things I forgot to do for many years was enjoy myself. My life didn’t just become routine, it became an endless, list making, planning exercise which left very little time for much else. There was no wonder that I started to feel old, I didn’t do anything fun apart from eat, and even then I didn’t really enjoy eating, it was just a way of escaping boredom.

To put this into context, the very first time I met the Dazzler was on a podium in a nightclub. Don’t get me wrong, neither of us was a disco queen or a muscle Mary, it was a club for the Flabulous, but for years we did enjoy a party!! But by my late 30s I’d started to do anythting to avoid going out!! As an example of the fun times here we are at an 80s 30th birthday party. This picture became our Xmas card that year…

All this was bought home yesterday whilst I was watching an episode of Doctors which features a pushy mum who exclaims “she needs to do all these photoshoots so that we can afford all the classes…” When actually all her daughter wanted to do was eat ice cream!!

I haven’t got a pushy mum to blame, My mum has always been my best friend, and never wanted anything for us except that we were happy, so I guess I can only blame myself. I felt I had to achieve certain things in order to show I was a success, even though, in the end, I was doing things that I didn’t just dislike, but hated.

So when I hit 40 I decided to have fun again!! I even celebrated my 40th at Disney-world. here we are with Tigger on my birthday…

However I was still treating enjoyment like a job, scheduling our whole time at Disney till neither of us was enjoying it. It wasn’t till we reached the last part of our holiday, when we booked a short cruise, that I truly relaxed! I think we hardly left our cabin the whole time and I realised that the reason I had relaxed was that I couldn’t use my blackberry- no emails, no “I know your on holiday but…” Texts from work, nothing. It was then I realised that things had to change and we discussed changing our life for the better.

It’s taken a while! We made some big life changes, giving up our jobs, buying an ice cream van- LuLu and starting a “business” but I was still treating everything like a job, making lists, getting stressed, all the bad old stuff, and I still wasn’t going out. I wasn’t even enjoying life with LuLu, and when you see her you will realise that’s a BAD thing…LuLu is a Beauty!!

But here we are, a year to the day after we bought her, and I’ve finally started to enjoy life!! I’ve been going out with the Dazzler lots more and even had a night out with a couple of mates on my own last week, getting riotously drunk but enjoying every minute of it.

And I can’t wait for this summer, we are going to have fun, a blast even. I’m going to enjoy pootling round in LuLu watching the smiles she brings, and I will laugh at our misfortunes, usually with you through this blog. But what of Lulu? She is already getting attention from all over and we meet with her mechanic next week to confirm that she’s up to going out and about then…

Fingers crossed!