Have had a really nice time in the last 18 hours or so. Spent Saturday in the usual sweat over tidying, bedmaking etc. and cooking a bit. Cheesecake disaster - put in double the biscuits in the base and forgot to include the sour cream in the topping. That apart, no problems.
At 5.30ish my old university friend Al turned up for his "lads' weekend" with two fellow social workers, Steve and Stephen. They have an annual weekend away - and this year he chose a trip to East Kent - and the BandB they stayed in was mine! So we'd agreed a few weeks ago that they would pay me for B&B and I would give them dinner - and I invited Clare around too - so that I wouldn't be totally outnumbered. It was great fun - Al and I managed to have some good talks on our own, as well as the general conversation and after midnight we just sat and talked and had the "what do you think of the show so far?" conversation about life - reflecting on relationships and how they had gone and what it felt to be getting older and so on. It really was great, I had forgotten how close I always felt to him - I think we both have a capacity to feel deeply but appear on the surface rather analytical about relationships. He talked about how difficult he found it to cope with rejection - and about not asserting himself enough in situations - and I certainly empathised with that - we also talked about children - their emotional meaning in relationships, rather than their specifics. It was very good to have this conversation with him. We did cover a fair bit of the ground that is covered in The Romantic Feminist but I realised how many more stories there are about our conflicts between our emotions and our ideologies - and in some ways how feminism can be an artificial construct that comes between people - preventing them acting the way they really feel. Oh dear. I can almost feel a re-write coming on... I also appreciated his emotional language - a subtly different way of talking about relationships. I have become very aware since starting this blog how dependent I am on certain words - I need MORE words...
I think the other thing I became aware of was how few of my women friends have this sort of analysis of relationships... he is like me very fond of proper conversation - inquisitive, piecing things together, making conclusions, I was very interested to hear his great sad love story... and his observation which I also make, about how one buries stuff and ignores it - and how some people have this ability to completely ignore past mistakes, and never admit regrets (I can think of an enormous number of people like that). We speculated on the possible areas of regret of some people we knew.
The other two S's were both very nice - one was extremely quiet - the other less so - and teased Al a lot. It was nice to meet them and it was fun having a "dinner party" - we had the works: lots of snacky starters (multicultural tapas: mini salami, Polish brawn, Latvian smoked sprats, felafel, Spanish olives with manchego, beetroot salad, stuffed peppers), then bobotie, rice, salad and carrots, then the fated cheesecake, cheese, coffee, chocs etc. The two S's went out before dinner to explore the Conqueror - apparently voted the best real ale pub in Kent last year. Still haven't been there.
At 5.30ish my old university friend Al turned up for his "lads' weekend" with two fellow social workers, Steve and Stephen. They have an annual weekend away - and this year he chose a trip to East Kent - and the BandB they stayed in was mine! So we'd agreed a few weeks ago that they would pay me for B&B and I would give them dinner - and I invited Clare around too - so that I wouldn't be totally outnumbered. It was great fun - Al and I managed to have some good talks on our own, as well as the general conversation and after midnight we just sat and talked and had the "what do you think of the show so far?" conversation about life - reflecting on relationships and how they had gone and what it felt to be getting older and so on. It really was great, I had forgotten how close I always felt to him - I think we both have a capacity to feel deeply but appear on the surface rather analytical about relationships. He talked about how difficult he found it to cope with rejection - and about not asserting himself enough in situations - and I certainly empathised with that - we also talked about children - their emotional meaning in relationships, rather than their specifics. It was very good to have this conversation with him. We did cover a fair bit of the ground that is covered in The Romantic Feminist but I realised how many more stories there are about our conflicts between our emotions and our ideologies - and in some ways how feminism can be an artificial construct that comes between people - preventing them acting the way they really feel. Oh dear. I can almost feel a re-write coming on... I also appreciated his emotional language - a subtly different way of talking about relationships. I have become very aware since starting this blog how dependent I am on certain words - I need MORE words...
I think the other thing I became aware of was how few of my women friends have this sort of analysis of relationships... he is like me very fond of proper conversation - inquisitive, piecing things together, making conclusions, I was very interested to hear his great sad love story... and his observation which I also make, about how one buries stuff and ignores it - and how some people have this ability to completely ignore past mistakes, and never admit regrets (I can think of an enormous number of people like that). We speculated on the possible areas of regret of some people we knew.
The other two S's were both very nice - one was extremely quiet - the other less so - and teased Al a lot. It was nice to meet them and it was fun having a "dinner party" - we had the works: lots of snacky starters (multicultural tapas: mini salami, Polish brawn, Latvian smoked sprats, felafel, Spanish olives with manchego, beetroot salad, stuffed peppers), then bobotie, rice, salad and carrots, then the fated cheesecake, cheese, coffee, chocs etc. The two S's went out before dinner to explore the Conqueror - apparently voted the best real ale pub in Kent last year. Still haven't been there.
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