Am I Peter Pan or do I have a point to prove?

Before I get into this cryptic title, I want to start by reassuring everyone that I am not ‘back’ writing this pretty dull and boring blog and you won’t have to put up with my rants and ramblings every week.* I just had the urge to write something and remembering that I had this blog from ‘eyegate’ I thought that I would put it to good use!

So a lot has happened since I last wrote. Covid came and went and then came and went and then came again and then it was all alright and we could all go to the pub again (before the kids went back to school – am I bitter about this? Marginally…) We’ve had more Prime Ministers than I’ve had hot dinners and unfortunately the Tories still seem to be in ‘power.’ Energy prices have gone through the roof, Cadbury buttons have gone up to £1.50 a bag – disgraceful! I’ve had a few different jobs and I have thyroid cancer. So it’s no surprise really that either everyone has Peter Pan complexes or they want to live their lives to the max.

I am well aware that I have slipped into one of these categories. There’s the outside swimming for a start – the need to be in cold water and challenge my brain to overcome the ‘Jaws’ fear (I am a child of the 80’s after all!) The regular emails and texts to those friends who always say ‘yeah why not’ with hair brained ideas like swimming across giant lakes, camping in essentially flooded fields, swimming for 24 hours to raise money for a local swimming pool, or dragging them across moorlands and mountains as a birthday celebration. To the most recent adventure of randomly ‘wild’ camping on a Friday night in a spot that not only didn’t deliver the promised sunrise (couldn’t have been foggier if it was a Victorian night in London and Sherlock Holmes was investigating a crime) but treated us both with midge bites from hell on the Saturday morning as we packed up the tents.

It was as I was in my very small, barely big enough to stretch out tent on Friday and after both my friend and I questioned ourselves as to why we were camping out in the middle of a moorland when we had perfectly acceptable beds at home or even a perfectly acceptable campsite down the road, that I thought – ‘Why am I doing all of these things?’

Is it an inevitable part of reaching my mid 40’s when I am needed a bit less at home by the kids and I am trying to plug a gap? Am I trying to fulfil a long lost desire to be an explorer (I distinctly remember being about 9 or 10 and wanting to go and rescue Orang-utans in Borneo and swim with the giant turtles somewhere exotic) – A note on this point. I do not remember seeing any programmes about explorers getting bitten by midges quite as dramatically as I did on my one night wild camping. I might write to the Nat Geographic channel and lodge a complaint – Or am I subconsciously testing myself to see what might break me as I feel like I have been through a lot over the last 4 years? Trying to prove a point that I am not scared about what might happen because nothing can be worse than having your face ravished by midges on Ilkley Moor on a random Saturday in September…

I’m not sure I will 100% know, but what I do know is that I will keep on keeping on, fake eye in one hand and a whole lot of scars to prove that I lived a life.

Hx

* or I might write every week, I haven’t decided yet!