I managed to get myself in a muddle yesterday with all the stuff I do online, my normal smooth path through my routine turned into a stop-start and never quite completed mess. I actually through at the end of it that I had managed, if slowly to get everything done, but then I found a huge hole in it, I hadn’t saved a copy of my quotes, so tomorrow I have a nightmare job or searching for quotes that I have no note of, so that I can work out which was the most popular. It is the same with everything in life, miss one step out and at some point you have to backtrack and go through it all again, just to be able to move forward. Strangely Adam and I had a conversation during the evening that told me exactly the same story, almost as though I needed yesterday to go wrong for me to understand something that happened a long time ago.

I have said several times before that I had two childhoods, one that was completely screwed up and continued into a screwed up marriage and a second one when I walk away on my own and started to live my life. My first childhood was cosseted and my understanding of the world was screwed by it, I went to private school, worked from the again of 9 and wasn’t allowed to mix with the people I liked, I was only allowed to know those that were first approved by my parents. Approval had nothing to do with who they were, but where they lived and who their parents were, add in total double standards that I saw daily when it came to my brothers and sister, followed by later abuse and being taken into care, only to find myself alone aged 15 and with no barriers and no safety net most teens have. Read back through my blog and the details are all there, as are the details of my first marriage. I have tried many times to explain to Adam just how different the world was in the early 70’s and just how different my upbringing was from his, but it is only recently that I think he has begun to understand and see the truth. It was actually when the Jimmy Savile scandal broke that the first real link formed in his mind, I had told him over and over how men in positions of power behaved back then and how they were protected by the belief that the girl was lying and that the man’s career was too important to make a fuss about it, not all of them of course but trust me a good number, suddenly he was hearing it from another and another and another, suddenly he understood and believed. I had told him several times how my father stopped paying anything on my 16th birthday, as did the start and that I had found myself with no money and having to walk in the snow in my Jesus sandals, as I had no other footwear and no money to buy it, yet a couple of weeks ago was the first time that I think he totally believed that someone would have no money and a choice between food, or heat, or clothing.

Last night we were watching Utopia, a rather odd but gripping story which although in the second series we are now half way through the first, but a young girl who was at private school had seen her mother shot in front of her and seemed to be behaving oddly. I saw her through my eyes at her age and said that she was never going react normally, her life to that date hadn’t been normal, she was cosseted from the reality of life. As often happens I found myself having to explain what I meant, there was a run through of private education, the area she lived in, the people she knew and how that affects a child, it was followed by my relating something I knew I had before and that was when I had my first job after leaving my first husband, I was working in a bar and aged 28 and I was totally shocked to hear one of the other staff swearing especially as it was a woman. 28 years old and I didn’t have a clue about the real world, I was still a child, one that may have been married, had children and lived around the country, but I still hadn’t heard a woman swear and I hadn’t the slightest idea over how people really were outside of the world I was born into and married into, I was the totally proper officers wife, with a hell of a lot to learn. That was the start of my second childhood, I did everything from that point on that appealed, rather than what I should and I spent years doing so, learning about the truth of life and eventually if not totally catching up with what a woman of my age should know, plus probably a lot I shouldn’t.

Adam and I have talked about my past life a lot over the years, I have 17 years of knowledge of a world he finds hard to believe ever existed, but somehow in the last few months he seems to now have more belief and understand about. The other day I said to him that he was born into what I saw as a “Cuckoo generation”, he thought I meant Cuckoo as in mad, so I explained. A Cuckoo lays it’s eggs in someone else’s nest, when hatched it pushes the rest aside and gets everything plus more than it really needs, I see his generation not laid in someone else’s nest, but pushing aside all the logical behaviour of learning and understanding the world, just demanding and getting far more than they ever could need in things, food and everything else, they were all brought up without the slightest understanding of every version you can think of, of the word “worth”. My generations knew the value of everything, his of nothing. It took me two childhoods to understand the world isn’t covered by a powder puff, his has had to learn the money doesn’t grow on trees, in his case he had is second childhood learning that the hard way. Maybe every generation requires a second childhood, maybe every generation fails in some way to prepare their children for life and maybe it has always been that way. I guess we all try and fail on some count to be good parents, maybe one day we might just get it right.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 26/07/12 – NHS issues continued

I thought this was probably the easiest way of answering all the comments here and on Twitter. The problems in Glasgow started a few years ago when there was a sudden decision that they would centralise the call handling for the entire Glasgow health board area in one call center. On the surface that sounds a good idea, less staff needed everything in one place, a good cost….