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I started gearing up for my final ever, International “When's International Men's Day?†Day, firing off a few early salvos and remarkably got to £10,000 worth of donations by bedtime . It was hard to guess how doing the main day on a Sunday would impact on donations, but my hope was that this being the last one would encourage people to give and we might beat our £150,000 record. I dared to hope we could get to quarter of a million. I really hoped we wouldn't get to a million as that would mean I'd have to do it again, but I was pretty confident that I'd set that target high enough to protect my fragile mental state.
We started the day with a Park Run. Me2 has been overdoing it with the late nights and early mornings this week and came in almost a minute slower than Me1's pace-setter assisted run of last week, but still under 27 minutes which is pretty good. Catie took about 3 minutes off her time, so whilst I was ten minutes ahead of her last week, I was only 6 minutes clear this time. Will she manage to beat either or both of the Mes?
It's a brisk and bracing start to the weekend, but it was good to have done the exercise as we went out to Thompson's a highly recommended posh restaurant in St Albans for my mother-in-law's birthday lunch. Terrific food and exemplary service.
St Albans was very busy and all the car parks had traffic queuing outside. We had come close to living here, but now after two and a half years in a village this all seemed very boisterous and unpleasant and I was glad we'd missed out on the house that we liked here. Though when I realised there was nowhere to park I remembered that there were usually spaces outside that house, so ended up driving a short way from the centre and parking by the place that we had seriously considered living in, before someone finally swept in and stole it from us before we could sell our house.
There were several places that we nearly ended up in and this was not the closest (the house near Hertford where we were two weeks away from completion before the vendor withdrew, costing us thousands of pounds in surveys etc would take that crown) and it's weird to consider just how different our lives would have been if we'd been in a different place. Ernie may not have existed and so many things in the timeline would have altered by now. It's like Sliding Doors, except the small differences would have properly impacted and the timelines diverged hugely.
Not just ours of course. The lives of the people who ended up living there and all the people they interacted with. By now, all your lives would be markedly different too. Even if you didn't read my blog. The dominoes would have fallen in a different direction, impacting on your lives to a significant degree.
I glanced into the garden and saw that the family who lived there had put up a play area in the trees and a Wendy house in the garden. It was their home now, the goal-hanging little shits. To be fair, we'd been goal hanging waiting for the price to drop to something we could afford. We would just about have been able to buy it at the price it went for. But in hindsight I know that would have stretched us to our limit and probably made the coming years more difficult. And St Albans seemed much too busy a place for me now.
Having already dropped Catie and Phoebe at the restaurant, I walked Ernie into town. It would have been nice to be that close to the shops, I guess, but it felt like a long way with a two year old. A two year old who might well not have existed if we'd made that choice. Really going to push that home for him when we first watch Sliding Doors together.
