4.7 Work and Home

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.



We’d been married now for eight years, living in our second house for six.
    Sometimes I wondered whether the original intensity of our feelings had been lost in the miasma of my parents’ reaction to John and me and the pressure of my finals. I remembered the inkling I’d had in the university library when revising for my exams that I was heading in the wrong direction. Was it correct? Had I been given the chance of a new life and not taken it? Was I sitting on the fence, unable to decide between John and my parents, the past and the future?
    These were depressing thoughts. No. Worse than depressing. Sometimes, in the aftermath of yet another of our fruitless attempts to be intimate, I just wanted to plunge a knife into my breast and end it all. I blamed myself for everything. I felt helpless. I didn't know how to change.
    My headaches were getting worse and now they were starting to make me vomit. Because they almost always occurred in my pill-free week, I mentioned them at the Family Planning Clinic.
    ‘Ah yes,’ they said. ‘Migraines. They are a possible side-effect of the contraceptive pill.’
    Hell’s bells, I thought. Why on earth didn’t you warn me?
    They put me on a progesterone-only pill (rather than one containing both progesterone and oestrogen) but it made no difference.

By contrast, our working lives were going well.
    I was back in the book-publishing world but freelance rather than salaried, working mostly from home which I much preferred. Ever since marrying, I'd struggled to integrate work and home. I didn’t like having to spend more of my time in the place I wanted to be less and I found it hard to divide my loyalties. My loyalties were to John exclusively (however confused those loyalties were).
    I’d moved to a second publisher when my traineeship finished at the first (something else I’m not proud of) but that job had come to an end because I didn’t get on with my manager. I hadn’t trusted her and when, five years into my National Trust job, she abandoned the company owing them money, I felt vindicated.
    Five years was more than enough at the Trust so I gave in my notice and applied for freelance editing at both the two publishers I’d been employed at, as well as publishers in London through my sisters who worked in that area too, and a ‘mind, body, spirit’ publisher in Dorset because they were fairly local and I was interested in the subject.
    The work consisted mostly of copy-editing and proofreading, both of which meant paying close attention to grammar, spelling and the precise meaning of words. All of this had been part of my degree, which included studying the language as well as the literature of France and Spain, and I was (I think) good at it. Plenty of work arrived, anyway.
    I quite enjoyed it too, even though I again had the sense that I was using only a fraction of myself. And I certainly enjoyed being able to get up from my desk every hour or so and walk round the garden.

As well as his music programme on University Radio Exeter, John had acquired a job presenting ‘Devon Rocks’, a rock-music programme on the local independent radio station DevonAir. This he did live every Saturday evening. In addition, he helped out on the overnight programmes (doing what, I wasn't sure - paperwork, finding records, making coffee, keeping the presenter awake?) and filled in on weekday evenings when presenters were not available for one reason or another.
    All of which meant I didn’t see much of him, and my eating problems, which had begun to calm down, returned when I was at home at night without him.

There were several reasons why my eating habits were improving.

    It helped me to have proper meals regularly with someone else, rather than starving and bingeing and having no routine as I had done when I was living on my own. In any case, bingeing was a secret, shameful activity and I tended not to do it when John was around.

    As I did most of the cooking, I'd been reading up about nutrition and concentrating on the quality of food rather than the quantity. This felt kinder. Instead of berating myself for my weight, I was nourishing myself.
    It was the eating problems as well as my migraines that had started my interest in the ‘mind, body, spirit’ movement. I suspected that conventional medicine could do nothing for either of these illnesses. In any case, I preferred to go my own way. I didn’t want to be labelled. I didn’t want to be a victim.

In spite of these small steps forward however, I spent many of my solitary evenings stuffing myself with whatever food I could find, trying to assuage some hunger that I couldn’t put a name to.

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