Fiona Angwin's Blog
January 15, 2014
The Accidental Immigrant – Part 4 Absent Friends – Hiraeth.
It feels terrible to say it, when the move has brought us to a beautiful part of the world, and The House is amazing......but I’m still struggling with homesickness. I know that eventually we’ll sort out all the practical stuff, from finding out where everything in the area is, to which church to go to, and I know God’s put us in South Wales for a reason.....even if we’re not sure what it is yet, apart from my husband’s job.....but leaving the Wirral has been terribly hard.
I reached the point in the run-up to the move, where if one more person said “You’ll make new friends” I could cheerfully have throttled them. (Not that I’m advocating violence, or anything). I know it’s true, and we have already started to meet people, and begin friendships (I hope), but the problem is, I really like the friends we’ve got....we had....we’ve still got....I hope.
My husband says that I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I do. Perhaps it’s because my parents died while I was still at school, but I work on the principle that none of us come with a written guarantee, and if anything ever happens to me, I want the people I love to know that I cared about them. This means that when I commit I really commit, and so many of the people we’ve left behind have been woven into our lives and our hearts....so not seeing them, and being part of their lives, is a wrench.
Friendship is such a strange thing.... theoretically it’s intangible.....but you can feel it.....or the loss of it, and one of the main reasons for working so hard on getting The House sorted quickly, was to enable some of those friends to visit. Change is difficult, because it’s impossible to know what will happen in the future. If we knew that we could keep some of those friendships going, the move wouldn’t have felt so difficult. As it is, only time will tell....and I’m not very good at being patient, and waiting to see what happens.
There is a word in Welsh - Hiraeth. It doesn’t really translate into English, but I’m told it means a kind of homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past....or in my case, of the Wirral we have left behind, and more especially our friends there.
I reached the point in the run-up to the move, where if one more person said “You’ll make new friends” I could cheerfully have throttled them. (Not that I’m advocating violence, or anything). I know it’s true, and we have already started to meet people, and begin friendships (I hope), but the problem is, I really like the friends we’ve got....we had....we’ve still got....I hope.
My husband says that I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I do. Perhaps it’s because my parents died while I was still at school, but I work on the principle that none of us come with a written guarantee, and if anything ever happens to me, I want the people I love to know that I cared about them. This means that when I commit I really commit, and so many of the people we’ve left behind have been woven into our lives and our hearts....so not seeing them, and being part of their lives, is a wrench.
Friendship is such a strange thing.... theoretically it’s intangible.....but you can feel it.....or the loss of it, and one of the main reasons for working so hard on getting The House sorted quickly, was to enable some of those friends to visit. Change is difficult, because it’s impossible to know what will happen in the future. If we knew that we could keep some of those friendships going, the move wouldn’t have felt so difficult. As it is, only time will tell....and I’m not very good at being patient, and waiting to see what happens.
There is a word in Welsh - Hiraeth. It doesn’t really translate into English, but I’m told it means a kind of homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past....or in my case, of the Wirral we have left behind, and more especially our friends there.
The Accidental Immigrant Part 3 Doctors and a Wardrobe!
What else is different about South Wales? Well, the medical system, to begin with. It wasn’t too difficult to find a doctor and a dentist....but there’s a whole different system when it comes to anything beyond the GP. I needed to see a physio about my damaged shoulder, but the doctor said it would take months to get seen on the NHS....why not go private? Which we can do....but he didn’t know who to suggest. Efforts to find a physio since have run aground, because recommendations seem to come by body part. ....this person for hands, that person for shoulders....we’re still looking, as I’d like to find someone who does whole people!
To say nothing of having the Welsh Health Board say they wouldn’t pay for me to have an operation I was about to have in England, so it had to be cancelled! To be fair, they’re happy to let me have it here in Wales, but it adds months of waiting! It feels as if it’s more of a regional health system rather than a national one here! However, I’m sure that once we’re in the Welsh system properly, it’ll all make more sense....hopefully. (And at least now I’ve managed to arrange a new date for the operation – with my original consultant – by going privately).
One of the things that we have had to deal with since the move was finding extra furniture....for the first time in years, we have more rooms than furniture to put in them! We needed to buy another wardrobe....which was delivered helpfully enough. The delivery men even offered to move our old wardrobe upstairs to another bedroom....they carried it halfway up the stairs, but couldn’t get it round the bend in the stairs, so they abandoned it on the half landing. My husband was working away....so it sat there ‘til he came home.....then it sat there for another three weeks, because he could lift one side of it, but I couldn’t lift the other. (I’ve got Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Type 3, a connective tissue disorder....so my joints dislocate). We needed another strong person.
This is when we realised that we’d moved a long, long way from home. In the past, we could have solved the problem with a phone call to one of our friends, or by asking one of our neighbours to give us a hand. ....but here, we didn’t know anybody, certainly not well enough to ask them for a favour, so it sat there, and sat there, and sat there, and we climbed round it for weeks.....by this time I’d joined a local(ish) amateur theatre group, and I finally got up the nerve to ask a member of the group who lived nearby to give us a hand....he kindly agreed, and it only took ten minutes to move the wardrobe up to the next floor.....but it did teach us how isolated the move had made us. Never mind not knowing our way around....not knowing people is much, much harder.
To say nothing of having the Welsh Health Board say they wouldn’t pay for me to have an operation I was about to have in England, so it had to be cancelled! To be fair, they’re happy to let me have it here in Wales, but it adds months of waiting! It feels as if it’s more of a regional health system rather than a national one here! However, I’m sure that once we’re in the Welsh system properly, it’ll all make more sense....hopefully. (And at least now I’ve managed to arrange a new date for the operation – with my original consultant – by going privately).
One of the things that we have had to deal with since the move was finding extra furniture....for the first time in years, we have more rooms than furniture to put in them! We needed to buy another wardrobe....which was delivered helpfully enough. The delivery men even offered to move our old wardrobe upstairs to another bedroom....they carried it halfway up the stairs, but couldn’t get it round the bend in the stairs, so they abandoned it on the half landing. My husband was working away....so it sat there ‘til he came home.....then it sat there for another three weeks, because he could lift one side of it, but I couldn’t lift the other. (I’ve got Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Type 3, a connective tissue disorder....so my joints dislocate). We needed another strong person.
This is when we realised that we’d moved a long, long way from home. In the past, we could have solved the problem with a phone call to one of our friends, or by asking one of our neighbours to give us a hand. ....but here, we didn’t know anybody, certainly not well enough to ask them for a favour, so it sat there, and sat there, and sat there, and we climbed round it for weeks.....by this time I’d joined a local(ish) amateur theatre group, and I finally got up the nerve to ask a member of the group who lived nearby to give us a hand....he kindly agreed, and it only took ten minutes to move the wardrobe up to the next floor.....but it did teach us how isolated the move had made us. Never mind not knowing our way around....not knowing people is much, much harder.
January 10, 2014
The Accidental Immigrant - Part 2
So what’s different about South Wales? Lots of things! For a start, when you’re new to an area, every trip is an expedition....for the first few weeks I went everywhere with a map book of The Valleys clutched in my hand....even finding curtain shops was a challenge (The House has a lot of windows....BIG windows.....it took a lot of curtains, and virtually none of the ones from our old house could be reused!).
Even when you get your bearings, the landscape is so different to the gentle countryside around us when we lived in the Wirral. For a start, it’s spectacular.....almost everywhere you go, the scenery is impressive. Don’t get me wrong....not all the towns are beautiful (though I am developing a bit of a soft spot for Abergavenny), but the journeys....any journeys take you through amazing landscapes.
Outside The House is a lake (not, we don’t own it.....but it’s in a country park so we can stroll round it, as well as look at it out of the windows). Also mountains.....with sheep. Seriously.... we can look out of our bedroom windows in the morning and watch sheep pottering about! (Though most of the time it’s still dark when we’re getting up, of course! Roll on summer!)
All this spectacular scenery has another effect. You can’t drive anywhere “as the crow flies”. Places that appear to be close on the map cannot be reached directly. You have to drive down one valley and up another.....or the other way round, for variety.
This also affects finding anything......you want someone to come and do a job on the house? “Oh, we don’t go there....it’s more than two valleys away” (it would take all of 25 minutes to drive) . The same with finding a vet.....between the ones who don’t to wildlife work (we do bat rescue as well as having pets), and the ones who don’t do any valley except their own (even though we always go to the vet, we never expect the vet to come to us) it’s taken us until now to find one near enough (only in the next valley) who will look after all the animals.
Those were the first challenges we faced when we moved here in the autumn, but of course, there were others. .......
Even when you get your bearings, the landscape is so different to the gentle countryside around us when we lived in the Wirral. For a start, it’s spectacular.....almost everywhere you go, the scenery is impressive. Don’t get me wrong....not all the towns are beautiful (though I am developing a bit of a soft spot for Abergavenny), but the journeys....any journeys take you through amazing landscapes.
Outside The House is a lake (not, we don’t own it.....but it’s in a country park so we can stroll round it, as well as look at it out of the windows). Also mountains.....with sheep. Seriously.... we can look out of our bedroom windows in the morning and watch sheep pottering about! (Though most of the time it’s still dark when we’re getting up, of course! Roll on summer!)
All this spectacular scenery has another effect. You can’t drive anywhere “as the crow flies”. Places that appear to be close on the map cannot be reached directly. You have to drive down one valley and up another.....or the other way round, for variety.
This also affects finding anything......you want someone to come and do a job on the house? “Oh, we don’t go there....it’s more than two valleys away” (it would take all of 25 minutes to drive) . The same with finding a vet.....between the ones who don’t to wildlife work (we do bat rescue as well as having pets), and the ones who don’t do any valley except their own (even though we always go to the vet, we never expect the vet to come to us) it’s taken us until now to find one near enough (only in the next valley) who will look after all the animals.
Those were the first challenges we faced when we moved here in the autumn, but of course, there were others. .......
January 9, 2014
The Accidental Immigrant
It’s the first working week of a whole new year....I have a mountain of things to do....and here I am writing my first ever blog entry. Call it displacement activity!
After living in Heswall, on the Wirral, for 25 happy years....my husband got a job in South Wales, and here we are. We decided as soon as he got the job that we’d bite the bullet and move house. We really didn’t want to live apart during the week for months or years on end....the five months before the move were quite enough.
The next few months passed in a blur of house hunting, legal paperwork and packing, and all while I was touring in a show (“Puck of Pook’s Hill” by Rudyard Kipling), in schools around the country).
Of course, everyone has to move house occasionally....what’s the big deal? Well, as well as all our domestic clutter, I’d run a theatre company from our house for over 20 years....and I’m still involved in theatre work....so a lot of that had to come with us...costumes, props, masks and so on. I currently work as a storyteller and puppeteer, so an entire room full of sacks of puppets had to move with us.....then there were the books....and the animals.
Our old dog, Minstrel, died just before the move, however, we did move our three cats, the fish tank, and several bats down to Wales with us (my husband and I are both licensed bat workers and do a lot of bat rescue). There was a moment on the day of the move when three large removal vans had set of for Wales with our stuff, and all the animals were boxed up and in the car, when our solicitor phoned to say our bank hadn’t released to money yet....and did we want to hold off on the sale and put everything back in the house. NO....We did not!!!! We set off for Wales in faith anyway, and it was all sorted by the time we arrived at the house.
Ah, yes, the house....or perhaps I should say The House! This is Some House. It’s a little on the large size....but rather wonderful. It was built by a mine owner in 1850, and it was built to last (we hope).
I find I keep apologising for how big it is....but it is the only house that could hold all my work materials and still have space to live in....and for friends to visit us.
The autumn was spent unpacking....did I get a little house obsessed? I fear I did. I was also trying to start up my business in a new area, and sell a theatre tour we’re trying to do in the summer....but mostly I was sorting The House.
You think when you move that you’ll live the same live, just in a different place....but it’s not quite like that.....there is a famous quote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. (L. P. Hartley -The Go-Between)
Well, I’m learning that the same applies to South Wales.....they definitely do things differently here.
On the plus side, most people are really helpful and friendly....but on the down side.....they do things differently here! We knew we were moving, we knew we would be living in South Wales, we just didn’t realise at first how different it would be. Now we know.....We’ve Immigrated. We’ve Immigrated, and we barely even realised it, until now!
After living in Heswall, on the Wirral, for 25 happy years....my husband got a job in South Wales, and here we are. We decided as soon as he got the job that we’d bite the bullet and move house. We really didn’t want to live apart during the week for months or years on end....the five months before the move were quite enough.
The next few months passed in a blur of house hunting, legal paperwork and packing, and all while I was touring in a show (“Puck of Pook’s Hill” by Rudyard Kipling), in schools around the country).
Of course, everyone has to move house occasionally....what’s the big deal? Well, as well as all our domestic clutter, I’d run a theatre company from our house for over 20 years....and I’m still involved in theatre work....so a lot of that had to come with us...costumes, props, masks and so on. I currently work as a storyteller and puppeteer, so an entire room full of sacks of puppets had to move with us.....then there were the books....and the animals.
Our old dog, Minstrel, died just before the move, however, we did move our three cats, the fish tank, and several bats down to Wales with us (my husband and I are both licensed bat workers and do a lot of bat rescue). There was a moment on the day of the move when three large removal vans had set of for Wales with our stuff, and all the animals were boxed up and in the car, when our solicitor phoned to say our bank hadn’t released to money yet....and did we want to hold off on the sale and put everything back in the house. NO....We did not!!!! We set off for Wales in faith anyway, and it was all sorted by the time we arrived at the house.
Ah, yes, the house....or perhaps I should say The House! This is Some House. It’s a little on the large size....but rather wonderful. It was built by a mine owner in 1850, and it was built to last (we hope).
I find I keep apologising for how big it is....but it is the only house that could hold all my work materials and still have space to live in....and for friends to visit us.
The autumn was spent unpacking....did I get a little house obsessed? I fear I did. I was also trying to start up my business in a new area, and sell a theatre tour we’re trying to do in the summer....but mostly I was sorting The House.
You think when you move that you’ll live the same live, just in a different place....but it’s not quite like that.....there is a famous quote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. (L. P. Hartley -The Go-Between)
Well, I’m learning that the same applies to South Wales.....they definitely do things differently here.
On the plus side, most people are really helpful and friendly....but on the down side.....they do things differently here! We knew we were moving, we knew we would be living in South Wales, we just didn’t realise at first how different it would be. Now we know.....We’ve Immigrated. We’ve Immigrated, and we barely even realised it, until now!
