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The holiday was over and it was time to get back to the realities of life. At the time I didn't take notes. Partly because real life wouldn't have seemed noteworthy and partly because I was busy completing the notes from the trip and starting a write up in the form of the first 10 or 11 pages of this. Let's try to avoid too much talk of writing about writing about writing - that's going to get dull.
So, the trip had come to an end, my notes have come to an end, what is there I can usefully say about the few weeks of calm that preceded the most significant change in my adult life?
It might be useful chronicling how we lived. Caroline worked for the University of Northumbria as a lecturer. I worked, as I still do, for a computing company in Newcastle. We lived together in Fenham and generally got on well. The routine of the day was fairly humdrum. Unlike many couples, we slept in separate rooms - the ostensible reason for this being that my snoring kept Caroline awake. We'd done well in the room in Dublin because the king-king-size bed (two kings being a worthy description) had been in two separate sections and had somehow absorbed my noise, as well as my body and my ability to get up. Caroline had the main bedroom and its comfortable bed, I had the futon in the spare room. She'd wake me up every morning and send me off to work. I needed someone to do this, and an alarm clock has never been as effective as she was.
Perhaps sharing bed time is a good thing for a couple, and I'm not referring to night-time-shenanigans. There's probably some important bonding and trust that forms in a couple who can go to sleep together. We had been able to sleep together at some points in the past, but my snoring - a product of my obesity (as well as other factors) had given Caroline many years of sleepless nights and she'd developed an ear-plug habit, which even then could not guarantee her too much protection from the volume I could generate from my lungs. We had phases of managing to share a bed and then phases of me being relegated to the spare room for long periods of time. It's all a blur now. You just make the best of the situation you're in. There's no doubt that Caroline was affected severely by sleep-deprivation and this undoubtedly had a marked effect on her feelings towards me and the rest of the world. I probably put her through a lot of unnecessary suffering, just by being in a room with her and sleeping. I'm sorry for that.
Not sharing bed time was not just restricted to the room and furniture. We also had different sleeping habits. I like to stay up very late and can function on a few hours' sleep. Caroline, on the other hand, needed more sleep and preferred an earlier bed time. After an evening which would revolve around food preparation and TV, we'd put Caroline to bed - a pleasant enough experience, which would involve some time spent together as she got comfortable for the night (with me probably having a hidden agenda to make it "special time"... and, more often than not, failing) and then me leaving her to it. I would then probably go and do the washing up, have a shower and then spend a few hours on the internet or writing the website. When I got so tired that I couldn't see any more, I would go to bed.
This all seemed perfectly normal, and for some time was probably devoid of the distance that ultimately developed between us. We perfected the art of being friends and getting along well. We had in-jokes and silly things we did unashamedly in each other's company. It was comfortable and it was the life I assumed we'd continue to have together indefinitely.
20 May 2004
Ashley Frieze