Perspective

On Wednesday our fabulous bus volunteers spent 5 hours with a BBC film crew showing them our mobile lounge and I did a 30 minute interview with Matt Allwright who is one of the shows presenters (he was lovely by the way!)

The feature on the One Show was brilliant!! It showcased the bus perfectly and got exactly the message that we wanted to share into the public domain. What I think is amazing though is that 5 hours of filming went into a 7 minute feature.

Similarly when we filmed Inside the Cockpit for ITV back in 2019, they took 700 hours of footage which became three 45 minute long documentaries. It’s astounding the work that goes into making programmes like this and I often admire the work my brother in law and many of his friends do every day as TV producers and directors – it is so clever how they take all that footage and turn it into something really watchable and make it look so easy (it’s not, if you have ever tried to do something similar at home!)

It got me thinking about the scale of things and how they feel at the time compared with how they feel at a much later date. Actually this thinking was also prompted by the snowman I built a couple of days ago. We live near the sea, albeit in the far north of Scotland, and it is not very often that we get snow that settles, let alone deep snow. Over the last week though a blanket of snow has covered our garden, roads, the forests and even the beaches and the -23° of two nights ago (in Braemar, but it was -18° here) was the coldest night since December 1995 (we also lived here then and woke up the next morning to frozen pipes in our military quarter!!! It was -29° then!!)

It has been a bit of a magical winter wonderland, and I decided to build a snowman. The snow was a bit too powdery so the snowman was quite small but the photo I took and sent my husband made him think it was massive!!! Perspective!!

One of the years I look back on and consider to be very challenging was the first year I worked for easyJet. I was based at Stansted which was great because it was near my parents house and I commuted from home usually spending weekends away and midweeks back in Scotland.

At the start of the year, my brother had a motorbike accident which left him paralysed (see my previous blog), the same year, our entire lifestyle was at risk when my husband lost his medical and we worried that this would lead to a medical discharge, with no way to pay the mortgage and three young children to support. None of this happened but it was a worrying time for us.

Later that year, I woke up in my parents house to smell burning early one morning, and opened my bedroom door to see only smoke. I didn’t even know if my parents were alive and the smoke was so thick. We were lucky, I shouted for them to get up and get out which they did and although the house burned, the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been and most importantly, we all survived (still high up on my list of things that make me laugh is the fact that I walked down the driveway that led to my parents house in my pyjamas to guide the fire engine in, and one of the neighbours who lived down the drive was leaving her house on her way to work – she must have wondered who the mad person was wandering around barefoot in pyjamas on a crisp autumn morning and approached me with caution!!! As soon as I explained she ran back inside and got her husbands beautiful cashmere overcoat to keep me warm while I waited and admitted she had been slightly nervous about what I was doing!!!)

A month later, and by now having committed our children to a boarding school life, the MRA4 (the aircraft my husband was working on bringing in to service) was scrapped in a defence review and the base we lived at was nominated for closure.

So many bottoms fell out of our world that year and each time something happened we had choices about how we dealt with it. It was a really difficult year – I found it very hard to be away from my children (although it was my choice to work in this job it’s still hard saying goodbye to them all the time), and I was learning a new job from scratch and wanting to always be the best I could be, whilst my amazing husband was holding everything together at home as well as managing his own full time job and the devastation he and his colleagues felt at everything he had worked so hard on being scrapped in the blink of an eye.

With the benefit of 11 years between then and now, and knowing how it all worked out, it is easy now to look back and realise that we survived, and even became stronger because of the things we had to accept, process and find our way through. At the time, all of those things were just like being pushed over every time we got up from the floor and I did wonder how much more we could endure.

My brothers story is in my previous blog, my husband has gone on to astound us all with the way he manages his auto-immune condition, and is still in the RAF, we kept our house which we still live in, my parents were accommodated in a hotel for almost 3 months while their house was repaired (just in time to celebrate Christmas back there!) and my husband was posted to a new job near London which led to so many brilliant new experiences and new friends and happy times.

These days seem hard. And they are, there is no doubt about that, but they will end, and we will look back in years to come and be able to put some perspective on what we are going through now whether we are sinking or swimming.

All things pass. My snowman will not last for long (especially if my dog keeps eating bits of it!) and these days will pass too. I hope you are mostly swimming this week.