Rising from the Ashes

Easter Day, which for the second time in the last 5 years co-incides with my son’s birthday.

My son made it clear that the biggest and best birthday present he could possbly have would be to have both his parents there for the day, so we gracefully submitted to this request, and spent the day bottling up emotions of titanic scale.

The children had a great day, except for one moment when my housemate’s mad friend (or, should I say, one of my housemate’s many mad friends) settled down and ate my daughter’s easter egg. When she complained, the w****r laughed, ate the last bit and said he’d get another one some time.

I thought I managed excessive British reserve in merely saying, rather firmly, “Please do it now”. He went off in a huff and never returned. I sometimes wonder if people abuse the label of mental illness so as to justify random acts of extreme selfishness.

Then I had the statutory argument on facebook about the origins of Easter, and the made-up goddess Eostre, whose non-existent festival is supposed by modern day self-styled pagans to be the precursor to modern to Easter. I don’t mind people making stuff up … after all, it’s the baseline of all creative activity … but there’s something perversely self-aggrandising about then claiming it as absoloute truth. It annoys me in the same way that any religious fundamentalism annoys me!

During lulls in the day’s activities I managed to finish packing the van for holidays tomorrow. A week camping in Cumbria, with appalling weather, including hail, thunder and lightening, forecast. Maybe we won’t last the week.

I thought I would celebrate the day with Happy Easter wishes to all and sundry, though I didn’t manage to finish this until early on Easter Monday.

The clouds of smoke were an accident, but I thought they fitted my experience of the day perfectly :-)

After 3 months of running around like a blue-arsed fly, things are easing off and I have some time for reflection.

The autumn was a time of little computer work, scraping together the bare minimum from the few jobs that came in. This gave me the time to put on the midwinter celebration, but the possibility of going out of business was growing weekly.

Since New Year I’ve been overwhelmed. Every hour I didn’t work in the Autumn became 2 hours of work over the Winter. It was busy through January, but the last 2 months have consisted of major projects extending through evenings and across weekends. Getting the children to bed early so I can finish the day’s work by 1 am … shooing them into the garden at weekends to entertain themselves, and bribing them to prepare the meals, so I can finish the server installs before the customer’s staff return on Monday morning.

And I have a new business – landlording – to add to my portfolio of network maintenance, database design, psychology teaching, dream therapy, ceremonial design, and writing.

Now I have some time to reflect, the usual question returns: “What next?”.

1) Training: after an unexpectedly good year, and bearing in mind that I can claim tax back on particular courses, I could afford a Masters in something interesting, like psychodrama, fine art, music therapy, etc.

2) That exhibition of paintings I’ve been meaning to put on for 10 years but never got round to. Because it’s going to be expensive. But I’ve run out of storage, and I have to destroy the work. I think it’s important to exhibit it before destroying it.

3) Messing about on top of Cader Idris with other artists/musicians. This is going to need funds, and to get funds I must think of ways of involving a wide audience.

4) Making an arty video out of the midwinter thing. A friend was raving about a ritual video on youtube which scored millions of hits, and asking why I didn’t do something like that? Well, the video involved 12 slim naked young female witches dancing seductively, just out of focus enough to be tantalising while maintaining a veneer of not being voyeuristic. The challenge: get a similar hit rate from a bunch of overweight heavily-clad 40+ ex-hippies shivering in the woods. It ain’t gonna happen.

5) Run another evening class in Dream Interpretation. I’ve run a few over the last 6 years, as well as some one-day workshops … most recently a day training the Oxfordshire Relate couples therapy trainers. Great fun, lots of jokes about sex therapists by sex therapists.

Now I’ve found a way to finance the training, I’ve decided it can wait. There’s no way I’m going to change career to something that yields half the income. Doubling work time would annihilate creative time completely. Sure, a training would be fun … but while the children are still at home, I can have lots more fun with them, a lot more cheaply, than with any Masters degree.

The exhibition needs to happen. I can devote some of the notional “first year’s course fees” towards this. Scheduled to open as part of Oxfordshire Artweeks in May 2013.

Cader Idris. A friend who is a professional video editor for TV companies suggested I get a TV company interested. I think it would make good Channel 4 telly, so that’s my next stop, propose a little mini-series … it’s a long shot, but …

Making the arty video. Well, that should only take me a week full time, maybe I can take an extra week holiday. That would mean working double-hours for a week. No problem.

Well, that’s enough to keep me occupied for the next two years. Next: Easter holiday taking the kids to the Lake District. Mission – climb Scafell Pike.

This bit, the making of solemn prayers to the goddess, was really fun.