I think I may have blogged about this before, but I can't find it anywhere.
I strongly suspect that when I come to look back upon my life, I'll regard my twenties and thirties as wilderness years, of a sort. Not because I wasn't doing anything, far from it, I've been doing a bunch of stuff. Got married, bought a house, had kids, important stuff. But because I've spent that time working in catering, as floor staff for a bit and then a long stint in kitchens. I love what I do, and I'm pretty good at it, but the problem with feeding people for a living is that it's an absolute hoover of time. Sixty, seventy hour weeks are a normal state of affairs. It pretty much takes over your life. And by the time you get home there's no appetite to do anything other than collapse. Normal life largely goes by the wayside, what few speare hours are left are reserved for family (and there's never enough to do them justice).
I should point out here that this is not a whinge, I was well aware of what I went into at the time, and even more aware when we opened the business (eight years ago! Christ!). It's not work you can do unless you're into it, and it has always been, and remains, very much my cup of tea.
That said, after the initial terror of opening a business wore off a few years ago I started noticing that a few things were missing from my life. I realised I wasn't running as much, that I hadn't played the guitar inm years, that I wasn't writing anywhere near as much as I used to. All these things have, slowly but surely been restored to my existence as I finally, dimly begin to understand the term "work/life balance".
One of the unexpected side effects of this has been a re-awakening of music fandom, something I'd assumed was pretty much gone forever. I thought it was the general rule of things to be an obsessive in your teens and early twenties and then, y'know, just sort of lose interest, as actual stuff took over the space where music used to be. I've always maintained an interest, of course, keeping an eye on things, but not that intense feeling of it mattering so much. But a few times over the last year I've found myself stopped in my tracks by the old feeling of I have to have this song. And because I'm old enough to still think in terms of having a song, and actually paying actual money for it (so passe, I know), I have.
So this has come as a pleasant development to me, to realise that I can still get excited about things, that scrartch away the weariness and there's still someone who wants to grab people by the shoulders and go LISTEN to THIS! Isn't it AMAZING! And whilst I am deeply aware that this approach did me no favours in the getting a girlfriend stakes all those years ago, I am now married, so no worries there.
I strongly suspect that when I come to look back upon my life, I'll regard my twenties and thirties as wilderness years, of a sort. Not because I wasn't doing anything, far from it, I've been doing a bunch of stuff. Got married, bought a house, had kids, important stuff. But because I've spent that time working in catering, as floor staff for a bit and then a long stint in kitchens. I love what I do, and I'm pretty good at it, but the problem with feeding people for a living is that it's an absolute hoover of time. Sixty, seventy hour weeks are a normal state of affairs. It pretty much takes over your life. And by the time you get home there's no appetite to do anything other than collapse. Normal life largely goes by the wayside, what few speare hours are left are reserved for family (and there's never enough to do them justice).
I should point out here that this is not a whinge, I was well aware of what I went into at the time, and even more aware when we opened the business (eight years ago! Christ!). It's not work you can do unless you're into it, and it has always been, and remains, very much my cup of tea.
That said, after the initial terror of opening a business wore off a few years ago I started noticing that a few things were missing from my life. I realised I wasn't running as much, that I hadn't played the guitar inm years, that I wasn't writing anywhere near as much as I used to. All these things have, slowly but surely been restored to my existence as I finally, dimly begin to understand the term "work/life balance".
One of the unexpected side effects of this has been a re-awakening of music fandom, something I'd assumed was pretty much gone forever. I thought it was the general rule of things to be an obsessive in your teens and early twenties and then, y'know, just sort of lose interest, as actual stuff took over the space where music used to be. I've always maintained an interest, of course, keeping an eye on things, but not that intense feeling of it mattering so much. But a few times over the last year I've found myself stopped in my tracks by the old feeling of I have to have this song. And because I'm old enough to still think in terms of having a song, and actually paying actual money for it (so passe, I know), I have.
So this has come as a pleasant development to me, to realise that I can still get excited about things, that scrartch away the weariness and there's still someone who wants to grab people by the shoulders and go LISTEN to THIS! Isn't it AMAZING! And whilst I am deeply aware that this approach did me no favours in the getting a girlfriend stakes all those years ago, I am now married, so no worries there.
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