Hobbies are great, as a child they are a way of socialising with friends and a way of finding who you are and hobbies, as an adult, are a great release from every day trials and tribulations!
As a child and into my teens and twenties, I loved dancing.......I know, it's hard to imagine now eh??
I did ballet, modern, jazz, tap, you name it and I was doing it. I loved being in shows too, whether it was the dancing school putting on their show every other year or our local pantomime and then on to the local amateur companies putting on musicals, I was involved in it all.
From a very young age I realised that all I wanted to do was perform!
Once I'd finished at school, I went to the local college and did a B-Tec in Performing Arts and then at eighteen I got into a dance/singing/drama school in London and off I went to complete a three year Musical Theatre diploma!
While I was in my final year at college I got in to a company that did touring shows around the country. I started off doing a pantomime with them, around the South East, and I was out of college for about two months while I did that, but doing that got me my Equity card, it meant I was a "professional"! When I left college I got another job with the same company touring the country with two musicals. It was hard work but great fun!
Over the next eighteen months I did a couple of jobs and then it was 1995 and I was totally unaware that this year would change my life!
In the second half of the year I got a job singing on a ship.......it wasn't a glamourous cruise ship, it was a Stena ship that went to and from Southampton to Cherbourg in France. I was part of a ten person entertainments team, there were four singers and six dancers and we had three different shows to perform. One was a pop show, one a musical and throughout December we did a Christmas show too!
The reason that year changed my life was because one of the male singers on the ship was Martin.....my future husband! We were on the ship from October '95 to January '96. We had a great four months on the ship and got very close but being on a ship meant that we were together every day. We made sure that we had time apart though, Martin would go up to the top deck and listen to his radio and I would have time with the girls!
I loved the time on the ship and we have some very fond memories from our time on there.
When we came off the ship it was quite strange though, we didn't really know where the relationship was going to go or what our next step was going to be. Martin and I had been together every day and suddenly everything was very different! He went back to his family in Bournemouth and I had come back to my parents in Newton Abbot.
It was a bit of a test really, it gave us a chance to see if the relationship was as strong as we felt it had been on the ship.
Obviously it was......we will have been together for nineteen years in October and we'll be celebrating our sixteenth wedding anniversary at the end of this month! :-)
I have to deal with a fair amount of altered sensations and pain so I have found that one of the ways that helps me cope with it is to have things that I can concentrate on. It's a distraction technique really! :-)
Martin and I have always enjoyed watching films together and we also enjoy a wide variety of television series too anything from drama, comedy and even foreign language, if it's written well then we enjoy watching it! The main issue we have is getting me to stay awake long enough for us to watch them!
Something else that I enjoy doing is making cards. I guess I have always been quite creative, I just didn't realise it until I started making a few of my own Christmas cards......they were so well received and appreciated that I carried on doing it.
Making cards is a great distraction for me.......until I finish and realise that my hands hurt! But as with swimming, I still enjoy doing it and the after effects are what my psychologist has taught me is opportunity verses cost. It's knowing that what you are going to do is going to have a cost to it. With swimming it's pain and fatigue, with making cards it's mainly pain but also mental fatigue, but actually doing these things are far more of a positive thing than a negative one, even with the after effects.
I have also found that if I make cards while we are watching something then I have more of a chance of staying awake! ;-)
This is a sample of a few of my cards!
XxXxX
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