and looks back, not through the looking glass

I got a jolt recently.  Channel 4 is trailing the Rio Paralympics. Olympics time? Already? How can that be? Surely it's no time at all since London 2012?

It seems like yesterday.
It seems a lifetime away.

The summer of 2012.

My first blog.
My first tweet.

A latecomer to social media, (I only joined Facebook last year) my first blog was private, a way to share my holiday with family and a very limited number of friends. And I had a brand new shiny iPad, an early birthday present, to write it on; my old laptop was too heavy to take away with me.

The Olympics are important to the story because they seem to epitomise a time of innocence. Is that silly? Everyone was happy; there was that amazing opening ceremony,  so many wonderful performances, so many happy tears.

The fairy dust  even seemed to follow me across the world, there was a welcoming party when we arrived in Brisbane.  Ah no, that would be for  Queensland's returning heroine Sally Pearson who came in on the same flight.

We had a lovely holiday and saw some amazing sights.

 And then?

Well in the Autumn, prompted by the imminent arrival of......

DogStarke aka @southfieldchat

.........I started this public blog.

But something else had changed. Sometime between the euphoria of the Olympics and the end of my holiday, my mother had got sick. By Spring, she was gone.

The end if not of innocence but of being a child. Not completely because my father is still here, but the death of a parent shifts the generational perspective.

2012

        2013

               2014

                      2015

                             2016

                                   So much has happened.

                                                        MrS retired,  DogS arrived,

                                                                                   we lost our mothers,

                                                                             we travelled

                                    we sold a house, MasterS moved out,

                we sold a flat, we bought a house, we rented a flat,

       I had a landmark birthday, I resigned from my job,

 we made a permanent move.

And so to the present. We have a new home, a new business,  we are making new friends. I spend a fair bit of time using social media. I've taken up new things - yoga, and revisited some for the for time in thirty years - drama. I still have that iPad but write mostly on my Macbook. In May we'll vote for our next Scottish Government, in June on our future in Europe. August will bring the XXXI Olympiad, or  Rio 2016.


73 blog posts
6,204 tweets  

Not quite Spring 2016

It seems a lifetime away
It seems like yesterday

                       
Still travelling

Marina X