The Beginning

 This is a beginning even though I have been writing this blog since 2006.  I have decided to change the blog’s name as the one I gave it no longer applies and because I want to get back to writing on a regular basis and may find a different direction.  Simple as that!  Why Kit and Caboodle?  I saw it used as the name of a clothing company in the RHS magazine The Garden and thought that it fit perfectly what I wanted to write about…the whole kit and caboodle!  

And so to start, which often seems to be difficult for me to do unless I have an impetus or a good kick in the pants.  I seem to be poised on the brink of change and rather than letting myself go with the flow and not have a destination in mind, I want to think through what I am going to do when the next year is over and I move from working at the school I have been at for the last 23 year.  I will also be going from living with Naomi and her family to them moving into their own home and me living on my own for the first time since before I got married.  I don’t know which I find more challenging (or is that terrifying)…living alone or not having a large salary to count on each month!

  

What to call this post?

This has been the most difficult 6 months of my life.  I am sure that in the year of Covid, many people will be saying that.  Before February, I think that I would have said that 2014 had been the most difficult, the year my husband lay dying in St. Peter's hospital.  I'm still not sure how I managed to cope with that.  However, this year is a different 'difficult' because it has been challenging on so many fronts.  

First there was and still is the pandemic, which led to the lock down in the UK in late March, and which still lingers and threatens to be reimposed as cases start to climb again.  If it had just been that, it would have been challenging enough.  However, I also had my mother, who suffers from vascular dementia, to look after at her flat in Thetford, a small town in Norfolk, where I only knew two other people besides my mother.