It’s now nine years this week since I moved to Orkney. I can hardly believe it, and hate to sound like a boring cliche but I have no idea where the time has gone. (I’ll pop a link in at the bottom to the story as to how I ended up here)
I remember clearly the ‘on holiday’ feeling when I arrived. The sounds of seagulls, the smell of the salty air, all transporting me back to family holidays of my childhood, relaxing by the sea, enjoying the sound of the waves….memories quickly returned.
As a single parent with little money, there wasn’t much spare for holidays, but I made do with living by the seaside and have always been content with telling myself I don’t need a holiday because I live in a place where thousands come to as a holiday destination anyway. As the years rolled by I got out of the habit of taking a break, and when I married Orkney Beef we didn’t even have a honeymoon. I realise it’s madness to not think we needed a holiday but we were both working, money was tight and any spare cash or time off work was always plowed into the family, decorating, fixing things in the house and so on. Skip forward 9 years and we suddenly found ourselves in a position where we had a few days off together, Tech Support was going away and we had the opportunity to either stay at home and be highly innefective, plagued with phone calls and distractions and achieve very little – or stuff it all and go on holiday.
We chose the latter
I am SO pleased we did.
We booked a few nights into a hotel and ten days later we packed our cases and set off. With neither of us able to remember the last time we had a holiday we were pretty excited to be going on our modest little break. After a few hours driving, we arrived at our destination or Portpatrick. A pretty little fishing port in the far corner of Scotland, and it was an absolute delight. The view from the hotel balcony was breath taking and there was even a bonfire and firework display to finish off the RNLI week that had been running.
Miss Lashes and NotPhil kindly phoned the hotel and ordered a bottle of Prosseco to be sent onto the balcony where we were and we enjoyed the most relaxing evening laughing and chatting to people who had come onto the balcony to watch the fireworks.
The best thing was being able to completely switch off. No phone calls, no looking at housework feeling guilty. Putting work to the back of our minds and completely pressing the reset button on our lives. It was the best thing we could have ever done. I have now done a complete U turn on having holidays and returned with the determination that we should do it again as it’s so vital. The bathroom remains in need of replacing, the bedroom rooms still need redecorating, I’ve no doubt there will be plenty of things we could be spending our money on. But we’ve no regrets. We stopped, we unplugged, we rested and we’ll be ready to do it all again as soon as we can. Anne Lamott’s quote is right. ‘Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes…including you’
Read about my move here
Norq From Ork 