With a little help from my friends...

Just a quick post to say a massive thank you to all the friends who've held my hand through the last year and a bit and offered tea, cuddles and a shoulder to cry on when I've needed it, which has been quite a lot. I haven't blogged much for quite a while because frankly life has been mostly less than sparkly and too many 'feeling sad today' posts are very dull and very self indulgent. It's not to say there haven't been good things - Lowewood, the reformatory and house party, my Central American adventure, the Lakes with uni friends - they've just got a bit lost in the mire of feeling sad and lost.

It's funny how things sometimes all go wrong at once to create a sequence that seems bent on keeping you down. Eighteen months ago I was blissfully happy - I'd just started an exciting new job, met a wonderful new boy, had fabulous friends and all seemed well with the world. What I didn't know (maybe I'd have done things differently if I had) was the boss of the new job would continually sexually harass and bully me for the entirety of my time there leaving me emotional and unconfident. That I'd get glandular fever but be working too hard to rest properly, making me tired and ill for the next year. That the boy interest would move far, far away, that we'd survive the long separation (with lots of tears) but that the damage it did wouldn't be something we couldn't fix. That when I finally got the guts to leave the job the ex-boss would stalk me and turn up at my house, making me scared to be alone. That my Dad would get sick, a lot. I could have predicted various minor annoyances like anaemia, a moth infestation, frauds on my bank accounts. I couldn't predict that the boy and I would plan to go to Australia, envisage a life together and then split up weeks before I was due to leave leaving me to go alone. That all of this would make me teary, tired and blaming and hating myself for not being able to handle it.

So yeah, it's been a weird and emotional time of coping with one problem before moving onto the next. I honestly don't think I'd have retained any of my sanity were it not for lovely friends who fed me tea or wine, listened to me sobbing incoherently or debating the same things in circles and dragged me out of the house when I just wanted to hide. I've not been very myself or very much fun and owe a huge debt to those who have helped hold me together - friends are the superglue of life. I'm not going to name people but you know who you are - so thank you. It really is true that you do get along 'with a little help from your friends'.

For better or worse 2011 will be a year of change - I'm moving to Australia, far away from everyone I care about. It's scary leaving people behind, knowing that they'll move on and I won't be part of things but true friends will always be friends and always have time for each other. It's especially scary going all on my own without the boy by my side - but that's out of my control. I'm hoping it will be a chance to draw a line under the sadness of recent months, recollect myself and re balance a little. One of my vanilla friends commented that she was glad I'd decided to go because it was the most 'me' decision I'd made in a while and she worried that I'd seemed a shadow of my normal self recently - that all the tears and worrying were out of character. Hopefully she's right and it will give me a chance to sort myself out so that when I come back I'll be a bit easier to be around, more fun and less sad. Hopefully there will be more fun kinky posts on this blog detailing my adventures down under too.

To all those who've looked after me - thank you so much - I have really appreciated it and hope you all know that (even if I haven't enunciated it very well through floods of tears). True friends are forever and I love you all so much.

R xx

Dashwood House...

Look where I found on my travels...

Inappropriate...

The hotel that we are hosting our annual workshop in is partly old and colonial, which has led to not a few inappropriate thoughts when the planning meetings get too stupefying. It's hardly fair to put me in a 150 year old colonial building that was originally a ballroom and is now used for conferences and to expect me to focus very well on presentations and the best position for the podium. My thoughts drifted back to the Rebecca I might have been 150 years ago - I suspect I'd still want to travel and be somewhat adventurous (something I get from my parents who are only just beginning to be able to do) and imagined arriving in the country as the wife of an ambassador or perhaps daughter of an ambitious merchant. The balls I'd have attended in that prestigious ball room, the arguments when I baulked against safety concerns in a foreign land and the inevitable consequences.

Living a double life can take a toll. Some people manage to merge the real life and bdsm sides of their lives reasonably well - they work in the arts or live an outwardly alternative lifestyle. For me that's just not the case and I take a perverse pleasure in being the last person that people would suspect. The model girl next door or altruistic career girl. It just gets very surreal when I'm reeling from a big scene or my mind is drifting to baser fantasies and then you snap back into it. I'm meeting some overseas colleagues for the first time and have somehow convinced them that I'm competent and there's the possibility of a job in Australia...but I could hardly mention 'what's the fetish scene like' in a discussion about practicalities with one of them. Although the possibilities for transportation scenarios are rather limitless...

I belatedly realised that yesterday was my 100th post - not many in over a year but I have had a bit of a hiatus recently so still a bit of a milestone I guess - but enough of the rambling!

Middle Eastern Reformatory

I am on my travels with work again. Sitting in a distant hotel room as the Call to Prayer echoes out across the land. An ancient city surrounded by mountains full of places to inspire kinky thoughts in a girl like me. Work travel has the ability to be terribly isolating as you battle with strange menus, dodgy hotels and the knowledge that everyone back home is probably having a riot whilst you grapple with spreadsheets on a Saturday afternoon. It can however be a time to be introspective, look inwards and rekindle your batteries away from the madding crowd. It's interesting that after months of being a little indifferent about writing I'm feeling the urge to blog again after just two days away from home. Thus this Arabic week (Saturday-Wednesday) I shall endeavour to bring a blog post every day, mainly because I have been having some fabulous adventures over the last few months, I just haven't really felt like blogging about them.

But first (as I really should be preparing a report for tomorrow but have been at work all day and fancy a break) I bring you the striking similarities between travelling in a strict Islamic country and a Victorian reformatory. This is largely inspired by my incarceration in such an institution a couple of weeks ago, which is a story for when I don't have a giant spreadsheet to populate.

1. Rules about dress. Except the reformatory dresses, ribbons and knee socks were far cuter than the long skirt, baggy top and headscarf that I have to wear here. Plus infractions resulted in a beating rather than being arrested or kidnapped!

2. Cold showers. Unlike most of the other inmates I was somewhat unphased by the cold bath at the reformatory (years of messing about in boats do that to you!) but having had three cold showers since I got here is significantly less kinky and really quite annoying.

3. Powercuts. At the reformatory the powercut caused a minor panic and spoiled my cherry batter pudding whilst everyone rushed around trying to find the fuse box. Here there is no fuse box and eventually the generators start roaring and power returns. This happens several times a day, usually when you are just about to save a vital piece of work. Thankfully Jessica bought me a very interesting flashlight that doubles as a vibrator and is perfect for keeping me amused when the power goes out, I would attach a picture but unfortunately the local internet provider has banned the babeland site as 'pornography' :( On that note it is very amusing to discover what does and doesn't constitute porn over here...

4. Working at the weekend. In the reformatory we had to copy boring phrases from the diary and cook for the masters, here I have to go into the office and pretend to do my job. At some point they're going to figure out that I'm a total incompetent but I'm hoping that when they do they won't beat me...

5. Contraband. At the reformatory we smuggled in huge amounts of alcohol and sweet goodies to nibble on. The dressing table of my room here is piled with Mini Eggs, Dairy Milk and Chupa Chupps lollies as often the food in these places is pretty random and I get grumpy when I get hungry.

6. Inspired kinky thoughts...from being wronged by masters at the reformatory to wondering what it would have been like to be a harem girl in years gone by...yes I have a dirty mind.

7. Regular interventions, although at least the hourly punishments at the reformatory didn't wake you up in the middle of the night like the call to prayer!

So there you have it girls and boys - same difference really :)