yes it's the new year

I know everyone in the world with a blog will be doing this, but nevermind because this is my one and I happen to be doing it too.

This Christmas was a bit…crap in a word. I was in hospital with tachycardia just before, had all the relevant tests done, and all the relevant tests came back clear. Good news in a way, no radical thyroid treatment needed. However, my heart is definitely telling me something. Something bad.

I remember Christmas 1999. I had just finished my mock GCSEs. I remember the last one I had was 15th December and it was Russian. Then I came home, 5 mins away, and watched Miracle on 34th Street while painting my nails red and green striped covered in gold glitter. Fancy.

For the new year me and my mum and dad took a trip to Grassington and what it told us was their village is so much better than ours! They were setting up tables for street parties for new years eve. We bought some sherbert lemons and took them home. We also lit a candelabra and brought in the new year saying that the candles had spanned too millennia. The silly kind of thing I think most people were doing hehe.

This decade has seen many a change in my life. That’s where I started out celebrating the new year / decade / century / millennium, we were all there doing it. I never really thought much about the future at that point, at 15 I think you’re just that bit too young and the ‘Future’ seems a massive amount of time away.

2000 I took my real GCSEs, and then started my first set of A levels – the first year to do AS and A2 levels, (Maths, Biology, Business Studies, Technology, General Studies). By the end of that I was sick and tired of everything. Doing A levels really changed me, I started to branch out and grow, do new things. I left school not going to uni even though I’d applied. But in the months it takes to apply and finalise everything I’d changed my mind – not ready, not willing, hated the education system.

I spent a good few months looking for a job, not really knowing what to look for. I knew I needed something creative, and being turned down for a job in a card company really hammered home the gulf between where I was and where I wanted to be.

In September 2003 I started an art course at Craven College, AVCE Art and Design, and I’d finally come home. That was a brilliant course which I really loved. It was packed full of all types of art and design, it was great for me! During the second year however my grandparents died over Christmas in quick succession and it was the catalyst that plunged me into a depression. At that time I was seeing someone in London, so I had the stress of a long distance relationship (and the cost), plus work piling up and death surrounding me – no wonder I fell apart.

I got through it though, passed the course, ended the relationship before it got to a point I didn’t want it to, and started Foundation Art and Design in 2005. By the end of the AVCE course all talk was about uni, and to get on an art degree of any kind you have to do a foundation year (it’s to get everyone singing from the same song sheet whatever background they’ve come from, and also to build up a good portfolio for yourself).

Foundation was amazing. I really loved that course and poured my whole life into my work. I was constantly painting, jotting down notes and sketches in sketch books – everything that year was about the work. My finest creative hour.

I knew I wanted to go to uni to do fine art, specifically painting. And I knew that I wanted to live in a really nice town far away – for the simple fact that I may never get to do it again in my life, for family reasons or financial reasons etc. etc. I chose Chichester, which is pretty much as far away as you can get before you start coming back again. There were other choices, but that was way out in front. When all was confirmed, on a very hot weekend in July 06, me and my mum and dad went to visit the uni, just to get my bearings etc. before I got there for real. The best part was they both said I’d made the right choice.

You can read about the end of foundation / beginning of uni at the start of this blog, it’s all there straight from the horses mouth! The horse being my ‘06 self’ speaking.

September 2006 I moved to uni. The social side was immense. We were partying all the time, staying up late, drinking (ohhhh the drinking), making friends, kissing boys, exploring the new city and finding out what good deals they have in Iceland.

The trouble was – the work, the reason for going to uni, was pants! The course was terrible, I did literally no work while I was there. After my rampage of art work during foundation, nothing came out of being at uni. Yes I did the things needed to pass, but there was no inspiration there. They stifled me around every corner, I couldn’t get into a frame of working because they just kept saying no all the time. I only stayed because I was having fun and had good friends so it made it ok.

The icing on the cake was when I really put a lot of effort into one project, and then one of my tutors implied that I couldn’t mix colour. It really put the last nail in the coffin for Chichester. I didn’t do a stick of work for the rest of the year, a lot of times I just signed in and walked out again.

In February 2007 I met Brian. Again you can read all about it and how eloquently I talked of him at the time. I actually announced my engagement (in my head) the day after I’d met him hehe. For the rest of the first year I spent most of my time with him, practically every day and it still wasn’t enough time.

Tragically on 21st March one of our uni friends killed himself. Our halls only had 12 rooms, one was a warden, so 11 first years. I still remember that night when we all sat around as various people were wheeled in to try and comfort us. It’s heart breaking and sad, lonely, rage inducing. I went home that weekend, (I never went home from uni apart from Christmas) and tried to forget it. It’s still hard, it still reverberates within me.

It doesn’t help that finding someone so special and then losing someone in very tough circumstances were so close together. But it was good that I had Bri there, I don’t know what I would have done if he wasn’t.

At the end of the first year I was deciding my future – I was actually looking up other uni courses that I could start instead in the September. I was looking up model making actually. Then me and Bri decided that he would come back up to Yorkshire with me to stay over the summer. We’ve never been apart since. We lived in each others pockets that summer, and it was great!

In September 07 I moved back to uni, into a house, and literally lived there for about 2 days. I was willing to give uni another shot – I’d had the summer to think it over and get inspired. I was fired up and feeling good, but as soon as I got there they were up to their old tricks and just shot me down again. In October I left and withdrew from the course. I stayed with Bri in his first flat, and we lived there until May. For various reasons, a big one being money we decided to move back to Yorkshire.

In June 08 we moved into our flat and we still live there now. It’s cheaper than the flat down south and it has two bedrooms, one of which is our workroom / office / craft room – yay!

During my time in Midhurst, I started making beads out of fimo, which logically progressed onto making jewellery. I bought a few books and supplies and taught myself some new techniques. An old tutor from college who is friends with my mum offered me the opportunity to display my work at the end of year fashion show in 2008. I spent a month making dozens of pieces for it, and it was the first time I’d shown anything. I couldn’t be there in person but I posted them all to my mum and she did it for me. It was really good working to order, and gave me some great design ideas which I’ve since replicated to sell.

When we got to the new flat, the extra room meant I could really go to town on making stuff. By the beginning of 2009 I was starting to take the jewellery business seriously, starting to get a website sorted out and finding places to sell. I did a very unsuccessful craft fair in April which spurred me on to think about organising craft fairs myself. This idea is still in fruition, but hopefully will gain more momentum in the next year.

2009 was a little bit rubbish all in all. The business was a bit slow, I only sold little bits here and there, and really didn’t put much effort into the fairs business until late on. My grandma died as well which set me back a bit. My two cats also died around this time in amongst everything else. We (at my mum and dads house) got two new cats in the summer, I’d almost gotten over it all and thought that negative thoughts were holding me back. I love cats and missed having them around. Tragically though one of them got run over and it broke my heart, as I mentioned in a previous post. All the negativity came flooding back and bad memories from everything else also did.

It really didn’t impact well on the fairs that I did do at the end of the year. I felt a little bit like a failure, my hard work went unnoticed and I just felt like I was under attack from all sides, even fate. The last fair in November was a good one though, it was the sign that I can do it if I put my mind to it and really concentrate – it was a success and I have to remind myself of that.

Then came the blip of the heart trouble. Scary even now, especially seeing as there’s ‘nothing’ wrong. For the last few weeks I’ve been taking things easy, trying not to think, playing on the Sims 2 a LOT, got a whole community going there with all the bells and whistles. Playing that feels good for me because I feel like I do things wrong in real life all the time. I know it’s escapist but that’s what I need right now – to feel that somewhere even in an imagined world I can do things right.

I didn’t celebrate the new year this year. Probably the first time in 20 years. I fell asleep around 7.30pm, and thought to myself – I see midnight turn over most days of the year and I don’t crack the champagne, so I think I can miss this one ok. I’m pretty glad to be looking out of my window onto a new year. The air looks fresh and clean, and perhaps me venting this ten year epic has purged me of something.

Funny, reading this back it feels as if I really packed it all in, but it went by really fast. There’s obviously plenty in there that I didn’t mention, things I’ve forgotten, things that aren’t interesting, things I may not want to document.

I’m not going to say anything twee about the coming years, I’m not even going to predict anything. I’m just going to just take every day as it comes. Plan when I need to, not over plan when I don’t have to, not over think things. Give my heart chance to get back to normal. In the literal and metaphoric sense.