And Breathe... - 2015 - A Year in Review

August/September 2015 – Part 9 of 12

Things now felt different.

After the funeral, we started to get used to Dad not being around. The adrenaline that kept us going through the darkest hours had now subsided and reality started to kick in. As mentioned in the last blog “Life After Fred”, we’d booked a late holiday at a very unexpected discount, one weeks All-Inclusive to Es Cana in Ibiza at 40% off. That sort of reduction in High Season at the last minute is practically unheard of; it was as if it was there just for us. Thank you, Mr Universe. Rude not to take advantage, eh?

It was well needed and deserved, the only down-side being the fact that the food wasn’t great and that aside from the beer, the all-inclusive drinks were appalling and served in tiny plastic cups, plus no matter how many people were waiting to be served, if there was a regular customer at the “cash” end of the bar, they were seen immediately. On occasion it took over 20 minutes to get a drink.

We love Ibiza though and the weather was decent enough, plus we went on an Island cruise and saw a beautiful sunset, absolutely stunning.

In addition, we saw a HUGE Yacht, British registered, it's own Jet ski deck, giant slide... amazing.

Elsewhere, my work routine was starting to get back to normal and to my dismay, BT Openreach had not exactly been doing their job, Since May we had been waiting for a link line to BTMK’s Southend office and the Fibre Optic cable had been delivered tantalisingly close to the building – the box outside in fact – but because we were on the first floor, we had to have a hoist to get the cable from the ground floor to our level and that still hadn't happened. The reason for this was that there was only one hoist in Essex and because of our location, the work needed to be done on a Sunday, the one day that the hoist operator didn't work. No – I'm not joking.

This was slowing us up massively as the Southend office needed to use our system and could only log in to it via regular broadband which made it SO SLOW! It was literally taking 5 times longer than it should to get the work done; not great.

Generally though, Dawn and I felt that we really were entering a new era, that all the stresses over the year had come to a head and that we could now push on and get on with the rest of our lives.