The weekend has reinforced my thoughts about considering moving back to London eventually. Seeing so many friends has made me realise just how much I miss them. I also survived a weekend of more socialising than I’ve done in a long time without feeling shattered this morning. Though a weekend away from the gym has left me craving exercise and I’m going to enjoy Zumba tonight. 

I’m still not ready to pack my bags immediately. It has been fantastic though to see that some of my friends miss me as much as I miss them. Speaking to them they’d be glad to see me back next week! However there are still things I want to achieve in my current job and for once I don’t want to rush the job hunt. I’ve never had the luxury of time to find a job before. There’s always been time and money pressures to find a job as quickly as possible. Considering that I’ve not done too badly, even with the ups and downs. But this time I can browse. I can really explore the options and use what I’ve learned in previous jobs to try and find something even better. 

Though it may frustrate people, I’m proud of my ability to adapt to the changes in my life. Moving to Durham was absolutely the best thing at the time, but a lot has changed in the past year and my initial feeling that it was somewhere I wanted to settle have changed too. I don’t have to pretend that I’m still as happy as I was initially, I can admit that things have changed. A lot might change in the next year too. Though London is definitely an option now, it’s not a certainty.

For now though I have things I want to achieve where I am. Personally and professionally. Things have been going well for the past few weeks and I’m looking forward to building on what has happened so far.

On Tuesday evening and Wednesday I was in London for the first time in six months. My past few trips down there I’ve found it unpleasant – the volume of people, the pollution and the frantic nature of everything. Back in August I referred to myself as an ‘outsider’ in a blog about London. I didn’t feel any connection to the place apart from to visit friends. But when I arrived on Tuesday it was different. The first thought that sprung to mind as I exited Kings Cross Station was “I feel like I’m home”. It would be an understatement to say that thought took me by surprise.

I’m not about to say I regret moving to Durham. By the time I left London I was homesick for the North. There is no way if I’d stayed in London I would have made the recovery I’m making now. For a start the NHS support wouldn’t have stretched past the medication they started me on. I wouldn’t have had access to counselling or CBT in the way I have up here. I needed a break from the city and the pressure. And I still absolutely love waking up to see an amazing sunrise over the fields out of my bedroom window. I’m also getting to see my nieces grow up. I got to spend a lot of time with my eldest niece until she was 4 and I went off to uni. I missed having the same opportunity with my two youngest nieces. I love being a big part of their lives for the time being. As for the job, the significant reduction in responsibility and stress has meant I could pursue different things outside of work. Most of all moving to Durham has given me the luxury of time to rest, relax and recover.

The book I’m reading at the moment had this paragraph in it and it summed up what I felt when I first came to Durham.

“I wanted to be left alone. Wanted the world to go away. oh, I wasn’t naive enough to suppose this Hansel and Gretel cottage existence would do forever; friends, a job, a lifestyle of sorts, maybe even a man might one day enter the equation, but at this moment my equation was small. I wanted to shrink my world so that I, and I alone was in control and only when I felt comfortable would I consider expanding. But only on my terms. Never again would I be at someone else’s beck and call, never again would I agree to a takeover.”
Rosie Meadows Regrets… – Catherine Alliott

And now I do feel comfortable and I’m itching to expand. After nearly 18 months of feeling that I have been apologising for my existence, I’m finding confidence in ways I never had it before. On the tube on Wednesday I flirted with my eyes. Almost accidentally I made eye contact with a man, and in a split second I decided to hold it. I smiled and looked away. And then looked back and he was still looking made eye contact again and he smiled. I don’t believe I have ever done anything like that before unless I’ve had a couple of bottles of wine down me. I felt like I should scold myself for being such a hussy, but I was smiling inside and marveling in the giddy feeling it gave me!

Being in London this week was an antidote to the things I’m starting to find difficult about living up here. My confidence is digging it’s heels back into it’s rightful place and that changes the way I interact with the world around me. Foremost with my friends. I have learned that having close friends nearby is incredibly important to me. Not that I haven’t made some lovely friends in Durham. I miss being around people that I can be totally myself with, the ones who are like extended family.

Friends aren’t the only things. I miss the ease of public transport, of getting to people and places. People are more sociable and relaxed because there aren’t cars, parking and last buses to worry about. I miss the culture and all the different things to do. I miss knowing the place, how to get around it and finding the little hidden gems of the city.

Not to mention the fact that Durham is small enough for a bit of eye flirting to become big gossip in no time.

Don’t worry I’m not about to pack my job in and jump on the next train down to the capital. I haven’t forgotten about all the negative impacts London had on me, but I think the “Durham effect” has negated a lot of that. I have developed the ability to be more laid back than I’ve ever been before. When I visit London in the next few months I’ll be able to work out if I can actually have a more chilled approach to the city.

But my announcement at the end of 2008 that I had ‘done’ London may have come prematurely. And with my mojo well and truly on the way back there may be too many opportunities in the big city for me not to give it another go. Come 2011 who knows what will happen!

It seemed quite a few of you enjoyed my BT blog and as I was rather angry (understatement) about the whole situation, I am pleased to say we got there in the end and it has been resolved. However I dare say this is the power of social networking. For those of you that aren’t aware, BT has a Twitter account @BTcare and it was my Twitter rants that got their attention. It was the BT Care team that sorted everything out as a result of my letter of complaint. The letter of complaint that I was sending because BT customer service were unable to answer my questions or provide any solutions. Without Twitter I wonder how much longer I would have been waiting for a response and a resolution. I’m happy with the outcome, and the service we agreed I will receive. However given a wider choice in future I doubt I’ll stick with BT in the long run.

I would have blogged about this sooner but as that issue was resolved my BT landline died. I spent last weekend without the internet, making me realise to my shame that I rely on the internet far too much. Of course my iPhone kept me connected to the world wide web but I still missed the ease of getting information the moment I want it in the way I want it. I’m a communications junkie. I may need to start going to some kind of Internet Users Anonymous shortly.

Believe it or not there has been more to life than BT these past few weeks…

Those of you who have been reading my blog since last year know about the struggle I’ve had with depression, bullying and my general health. It seems six weeks into the year 2010 is working out well. I’ve started Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has already led to one lightbulb moment of “Why did I never see that connection before?” It’s going to be an interesting and not always easy journey, but hopefully it will help me to prevent any future bouts of depression. It’s also helping me to understand why the bullying affected me so badly so quickly. I’m starting to really feel my confidence in myself returning for the first time in over a year.

Health wise I still seem to be catching everything going. The weekend after students came back I had a horrible cold, and yesterday I ended up leaving work early as the result of some kind of stomach bug. I blame students coming back from all corners of the UK and around the world with their nasty germs and depositing them in the library. My friend Phil thinks that perhaps Durham is just too clean, and like toddlers need to be exposed to germs to help their immune system, I need to spend more time visiting my friends in London. It is true though, I never got this ill in London. I’ve always been prone to catching bugs and viruses, but never to the extent or severity I have since living in Durham.

Think Geek seem to have the same germs as me!

However apart from the bugs, viruses and colds it seems my body’s reluctance to lose weight is over and it’s starting to drop off. I hope this continues and I can get back to a weight I’m happy with over the next few months. I’ll just keep up my side of the bargain with exercise and avoiding comfort eating and hopefully my body will respond in the way it has been the past few weeks.

If you happened to miss it on Facebook or Twitter (some would say that was impossible), I’m now a red head. I have never had so many comments or ‘likes’ on anything on Facebook so I think it suits me. I’m very flattered by all the positive comments. I’ve been thinking of going red for a long time. Should have done it a while ago!

Where it felt like 2009 was an uphill struggle it seems 2010 has got off to a much better start. That means that some other things, like writing, aren’t so prominent right now. Plans for my writing are progressing very slowly, and other plans for this year are barely out of the starting blocks. But investing time in myself in the short term will definitely pay off in other aspects of my life later on. I do find in CBT I use the word ‘balance’ a lot. Maybe I’ll eventually learn how to apply it to my life!

This is not a case of unfair comparison. Yes I lived in London for three years, but as soon as I made the decision to move out of that mecca of public transport on demand I realised I could no longer complain about having to wait a whole five minutes for a bus. Or indeed a whole fifteen minutes at two o’clock in the morning. I understood I would have to significantly lower my expectations, and allow the word taxi to re-enter my vocabulary after a certain hour of the night.

I grew up in a place where the promised service was not that different from the one here in Durham. A bus every 10 minutes during peak hours. And in Southport that meant on most occasions one would turn up at fairly regular intervals. Except of course on the day of my very first job interview. A rare occasion when no buses turned up for half an hour so I had to call a taxi. That taxi driver was celebrating his birthday. He was meant to be retiring. He had just lost his entire pension. For my second interview I got the train.

County Durham buses are a law unto themselves. Arriva is the worst. But Go North East, although significantly more reliable, still has examples of spectacular failures. Back in December while recovering from a particularly lethal dose of the flu I decided I would still make it to my nieces Panto by hook or by crook. That is because hooks and crooks are probably more reliable than the buses. In fact I left home two and a half hours before needed to arrive at somewhere a mere 16 miles away. A 30 minute drive.

An Arriva bus did, although late, somehow turn up in just enough time to get us to the Go North East bus stop. The stupid mistake I’d made was trusting the Go North East timetable on their website, only to get to the bus stop and be told on that timetable the bus had gone 10 minutes earlier. Confused by a time on the electronic display that didn’t seem to correlate with either of the timetables I called up the Traveline number. I was told that the web timetable nor the bus stop timetable were correct. In fact we had missed the bus we needed by 5 minutes and they were only every half an hour. Had our Arriva bus arrived on time we would have made the Go North East bus, but I would have missed out on the delight of finding out that they have three different timetables for one bus from one bus stop. Obviously painting every bus a different colour is higher up on the list of priorities than making sure your timetables all say the same thing. Eventually I made it to the panto in desperate need of a cup of tea. Returning home five or six hours after I left I finally got that cup of tea.

Checking the timetables is a mistake I make over and over again. Like the leaflets about gritting routes in Durham, bus timetables are just create unrealistic expectations. I have learned that the only bus into Durham that will turn up almost on time every day is the 8.13 am (When I say every day, I only mean five days a week). To give Arriva their dues it seems that the last three buses out of Durham from 9.30 pm onwards do actually turn up on time as well. But should I want to travel to Durham after 8.13 am or home before 9.30 pm then I could be waiting any length of time. If I want to use the buses on Sunday I have to leave myself an hour and a half leeway on a 10 minute journey in to town. Four reliable buses a day. I should consider myself lucky, some places don’t even get four buses a day. However I did choose to live in a city, albeit a small one, under the impression that I could expect my basic public transport needs to be catered for.

This week there’s been a new development for Arriva. Early buses. Or possibly non-existent buses. Though you wouldn’t know either way as the little LED lights promising that a bus is “due” don’t actually seem to have a connection to a bus being at the bus stop at that time. Or any time afterwards. And Arriva will probably shortly claim they’ve reduced the number of late buses significantly. Of course this is by making them disappear into thin air. Or just making sure that now everyone has to get to the bus stop fifteen minutes before a bus that might be early, late or just not turn up at all.

I am sure there are those of you reading this thinking “Surely she exaggerates?” (incidentally a word it seems no matter how hard I try I cannot learn how to spell). But no I do not. My friends who have come to stay can vouch for the unreliable timetables and non-existent buses. Some have waited up to forty minutes for a shiny metal carriage into town, which when coming from London is a shock enough to hospitalize anyone and reconfirm their incorrect prejudices of the North. My Twitter followers must feel like they know far too much about the bad bus services as I tweet while I wait.

Unfortunately as we have come to accept of late for most public service ‘private’ is a code word for crap. I am yet to be convinced that all these wonderful privatised services are cheaper, more efficient and better for the customer than if the Government had kept them as their own. However I will not give in and get a car. Soon the days will be longer and hopefully not to wet and I can resume my walk to work making my rants about public transport a much rarer sighting. For a few months at least.

In 2007 as the strikes came to the close I was drafted back into Operations as a manager of seven delivery offices. The days and weeks that followed the strikes were tougher and more stressful that the strikes themselves. The mail was backed up and had to be cleared stretching our resources to the limit. Each morning I’d be trying to find ways to get mail out of the doors whilst some staff went off sick, refused to do overtime and agency staff didn’t show up. That period of time was the first my area manager lost his temper with me, something I don’t respond well too. I got angry back. I knew some of my staff, now working their hardest to clear the backlogs of mail, were close to breaking point.  My managers were working 12 hour days, six days a week, delivering mail as well as managing and trying to keep up to date with the paper work. Tensions were high, patience was low and the stream of delayed mail seemed never ending.

Thinking back to those weeks that followed the strikes I am so glad I left. I’m sparing a thought for my colleagues I left behind who are going to have to clear up this mess again, in a commercial climate that is so much worse than two years ago.

People have asked me what my opinion is, who’s side am I on. To be perfectly honest my answer is neither. In my opinion the result is a product of both sides. Below is what I perceived up to leaving Royal Mail in 2008.I think there were things that could have been done over the past few years to improve the situation, but even through my optimistic eyes I can’t see how the damage will be reversed.

In my time in London I worked across in Operations as an operational manager and a project manager. I came into contact with some of the senior management in the business (I once accidentally ended up on a table of Royal Mail executive team and board members at a territory presentation… I didn’t move!) and it was fascinating seeing the ins and outs of the business. The challenges are huge.

I think the government however were fools to go ahead with liberalisation first. Though I’m all for grasping opportunity, there are times when the UK really should stop sticking its hand up and shouting “pick me, pick me!” Germany and The Netherlands are the two countries best placed to have coped and survived through liberalisation, and the fact they weren’t keen to be the first out of the gates spoke volumes. But the government can’t go back. It can’t undo liberalisation without further crippling the economy by compensating all those companies who now compete with Royal Mail who would be owed vast sums of money. A burden the UK taxpayers can’t take on right now.

Before I rant I want to note that there are some fantastic managers, some great CWU reps and thousands of top notch front line staff out there. Unfortunately a few spoil everything for so many.

What the CWU got wrong…

• In 2007 if you asked strikers what they were striking for many didn’t know and were confused. There were all sorts of issues mixed up in the modernisation plans including pensions and pay. Some of the CWU rallied their members with whatever propaganda would be most effective the audience there and then. However the arguments were confusing and inconsistent. As far as I could I worked well with the CWU in my old area, even the most militant. But I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t really understand why they are striking or what they stand to lose. The next couple of days Royal Mail will lose millions, and it no longer has millions to lose. The long term impacts of this industrial action will see it lose even more. It’s fine for Dave Ward to call a strike when he’s not giving up a penny of pay (the union pays him) but I really don’t believe he represents a majority of postal workers or their interests.

• A significant number of the Royal Mail work-force started at 16 and have spent their lives with Royal Mail. They don’t know anything else, and so it’s somewhat reasonable for them to believe when the CWU tells them it could be better. But realistically it couldn’t. Look at any competing firm (e.g. TNT, DHL, FedEx…) and you’ll find the pay, benefits and even the revised pension are no where near what you can get at Royal Mail. To top it off Royal Mail just doesn’t have the money to pay any more. If it agrees to the CWU terms (which from my previous experience are quite unrealistic) the company would bankrupt itself in no time leaving many more with no jobs at all. And I’m afraid this is what this series of strikes will do, cripple Royal Mail beyond repair and leave many more people without jobs.

• The big difference from 2007 is that we are now in a recession. Some of the things the CWU had asked for back then, and presumably are asking for again now aren’t viable. I can only imagine that Royal Mail is losing money hand over fist anyway as the recession effects revenue from business mail and marketing mail. Yet it is incredibly difficult to get sacked from Royal Mail. No one in Royal Mail was getting forced out of their job; all savings came from vacant posts or voluntary redundancy. But the CWU don’t get this and the leadership has tunnel vision. Whilst people across the country are losing jobs, having pay freezes and even taking pay cuts, how are we meant to sympathise with those who had secure jobs before this mess started?

What Royal Mail got wrong…

• I was lucky enough to join Royal Mail on the Graduate Scheme. That meant I got the training I needed to do my job. Some operational managers are promoted from post men & women and struggle to even get the basic training needed to do their jobs. There is so much talent in Royal Mail, when the going was good that cash could have been invested in creating some fantastic managers. But so many lack confidence and don’t have the support to develop their management skills. Great managers bring out the best in their people, something that would have really helped avert this issue in the first place.

• I will be the first to admit that there is plenty of room for efficiency improvements in Royal Mail. I’ve been responsible for working out how much could be saved and how to make those savings in my offices. The issue here is that management want the changes and the cost savings “yesterday”. The reason this doesn’t work is that the workforce is never given time to evolve to deliver these efficiencies. As an operational manager if I had been given two years to work with my people and deliver the efficiencies I’m confident I could have done. But unrealistic time scales and expectations has only meant that they’ve not achieved the cost reduction envisaged and damaged their relationship with the workforce further. A one size fits all approach doesn’t work. Some delivery offices are excellent and are about as efficient as you can get. But some people want blood out of a stone. And that’s when you’re best performers stop caring, because they’ve had enough. The pressure to succeed in such a short period of time has ultimately led to failure. And anyone that says “The changes HAD to happen quickly” is missing the point that in the end a lot of them didn’t happen at all.

• As an operational manager I found that there was on occasions a complete lack of trust at the ability of the people I managed to do their job. As far as I could (with the pressures above me) I allowed my managers some space to breathe and this allowed two things to happen. Firstly some excelled in areas I would have never known best in, and some dramatic results were delivered. Secondly it exposed those managers who were struggling, who I needed to coach and train. With time those managers improved and started delivering results too. But I had to manage upwards so I could give them trust and responsibility. I took the heat to allow them to excel and deliver what the business wanted. When I left that job I was at breaking point myself, however my managers were delivering and continued to deliver after I moved on.

Royal Mail gave me a lot of opportunities, I was thrown in the deep end and I had some great times as well as the awful ones. But the bad managers, bad CWU reps and bad decisions have enough impact to make some of us feel that in the end it just isn’t worth it. My three years in Royal Mail I gave the company everything I had, there were times when my life was literally just work and sleep. I know plenty of others who are still doing that and who don’t get the credit they deserve. They are miserable. I know that some of those would leave if they had the time and energy to search for another job.

Ultimately the only positive solution will come if Royal Mail and the CWU can learn to work together and start to trust each other. I hope to see some pigs flying and hear that hell has frozen over in the near future.

In London this pace was the norm, not just for a month. I survived (by a thread) six months in a row of working 50-70 hours a week. So why am I so exhausted after only a month of being manic? Why can’t I take the pace anymore? Why does everyone else around me seem to be getting on fine despite also being under pressure, whilst I am overwhelmed and overtired and probably annoying the hell out of them all too.

People keep telling me I need to say ‘No’ to things and I need to delegate.

Firstly saying ‘No’. Not a problem… there are multiple things I have said ‘No’ to, or told people they will have to wait until Freshers week is over. For every thing I’ve completed there is probably another thing outstanding. I obviously now look so exhausted and emotional that no one is pointing out the things I haven’t done, or emails I haven’t read. Whereas I’m making a mental list of apologies as I go along.

And I do delegate. At one point in my previous job I got so good at delegating I had to ask members of my team to give work back to me because I’d run out of things to do! But in this job I don’t have a team, and I am surrounded by peers who have there own priorities and deadlines. I’m not the only one with a lot going on right now. I have delegated most of what I can to team assistants, and even something to my boss!!! But a lot of my tasks would require me having to explain and/or teach something which would take longer than doing it myself. At the moment that is a false economy (though when I am less busy I will up skill some people to do some of these jobs for the start of next academic year)

Why do I do this? Simply because I care. I care about the effort everyone has put in so far and I want to finish those jobs before the students arrive. I care about the mistakes I’ve made and I want people to know that I haven’t deliberately forgotten about them. I care about making sure that the people around me know they’ve done a great job and delivering results that communicate their hard work. I can’t just come to work and do a job for the sake of doing a job. And if I stop caring that is normally a sign of depression. So in some ways I’d rather be caring, working too hard and temporarily exhausted, then uncaring and properly ill again.

I recently retook the Keirsey test on personality, it’s about 12 months since I last did it and I’m still an ENFP (Idealist Champion). I think I’m stuck with that one! There’s an interesting article on the Keirsey website about dealing with stress at work. It has a paragraph about Champions which I find scarily accurate:

“The Champion is usually a bundle of energy, but they can become exhausted if they are overloaded with work. They also will experience stress if their values and principles are violated and they see others in the company being hurt by policies that kill the human spirit. Then they become hypersensitive to what is going on around them. Facts become exaggerated. They have feelings of paranoia and may withdraw. To regain their equilibrium, meditation will help. Kindness and support by others, but not patronization, will help them get back to normal.”

You can take the Keirsey test for free at http://www.keirsey.com

Anyway, next week brings Freshers Week. And whilst it will still be busy it will be fun too. Two days of Freshers Fayre will give me time away from mentally demanding tasks and hopefully I’ll avoid having many more deadlines before the following week. Outside of work I’ll have my new tutees and will need my brain power to win the quiz on Tuesday night!!!

More importantly is getting my life back. My priority the week after will be returning to regular exercise, meditation and writing. The three things that keep me sane!

On the 1st October it will be a year since I decided to quit my job in London. One of the goals I set myself was to use more of my time to regularly write. Another thing I am proud to have achieved. My persistence in blogging has stopped me from being scared of putting words on a page, I’ll now happily write something I know is rubbish and come back and redraft it later. The difficulty used to be getting the thoughts from my head onto paper. Now the longest part of the task is usually uploading pictures, adding links and the final proofread.

I am also grateful for the existence of Twitter. Without that I’d still be writing to an audience of my closest friends and family. Twitter has allowed me to share my blog with so many, and I am so pleased that people enjoy reading it. And now it seems that people are starting to find my blog via other routes. A couple of weeks ago someone followed me on Twitter because they’d read my blog first!

It’s taken me over two and a half years to reach blog number 100. During that time my life has changed in many ways. Where will I be by blog 200? At the pace I’m writing now it’s likely to be in less than six months. The next few months will be lots of fun though. From October I’ll be a tutee for a few of the students at Trevelyan College. Once I get them settled in I’ll be challenging myself to write 50,000 words in a month thanks to NaNoWriMo. By December I’ll be ready to relax for Christmas and enjoy some time with friends and family. Before I know it, January will be here and I’ll be celebrating one year since my move to Durham. And I’d like to think that by the time I reach blog 200 I’ll have had something published somewhere other than here.

But I’m not wishing my time away. The past year has flown by and I want to enjoy as much of the here and now as possible. And share it with you.

The thing that needs to be said in my 100th blog is THANK YOU! Thanks to all of you who read my blog. If I hadn’t got Google Analytics letting me know that you are all out there I might have given up before now. The more you visited my website, the more I have written. You’ve stuck with me and been the life that my blog needed to survive and grow!

Anyway enough of the soppiness… time to write Blog 101!

But that was quite some time ago. When I started thinking about getting my fitness back I decided to see if there was a spinning class in Durham. Despite all my googling I couldn’t find a thing so I concluded that there wasn’t any spinning action in this city. However last week at my sister’s I was flicking through a brochure for exercise classes and saw a mention of ‘Revolution’. The elusive spinning classes DID exist.

So I went along this week. Why oh why? Within 10 minutes I wanted to jump of the bike and run out of the place screaming. Gradually (very gradually) time went past. I survived 20 minutes, then 30. By thirty minutes my body was telling me to get off the damn bike and get out of there. Having not been on a bike for a while I’d also forgotten about “saddle bum” and “handlebar hands” so by this point the entire experience was unbearably uncomfortable. But I pushed on through. 35… 40… 42… Even at the 42 minute mark with only three to go I really didn’t want to take any more, not even the last 3 minutes. 43… 44… 45… Three quarters of an hour of torture and I’d kept going!

I wish I could say I walked away feeling fabulous, but my legs felt like jelly. It took all my concentration to get myself down the stairs and into the changing room showers. I stood at the bus stop with a body that was cursing me for putting it through something so bloody difficult. I wanted to curl up anywhere. Somehow I made it back home, and along the way the legs stopped shaking. There there was a period of normality for a couple of hours, before the thighs started realising they had been worked to death.

So what crazy part of my brain thinks this is a good idea? The part that knows it well get slightly easier, well enough to not be described as torture. And that the benefits of an intensive workout for forty-five minutes once a week have to be worth it. So yes, next week I will do it all again. Wish me luck!

The past two weeks I’ve been focussing on getting healthy so I have more energy. This came out of getting fed up of of feeling “meh” far too often. The depression has retreated for now but I’m still feeling a bit flat. I thought a fortnight of doing all the right stuff would have me dancing on the rooftops. It hasn’t. Though I have lost 4lb along the way. However that wasn’t meant to be my motivation, just a happy side effect. I’ve realised it’s time to just take stock of everything.

My sister did point out that a hell of a lot has happened in the past twelve months and perhaps my brain and body is just trying to catch up. It all started just over a year ago with being bullied at work. I’ve been bullied and suffered depression before, but it was only when I finally fell apart and I opened up about it that I realised how bad it had become. I didn’t say anything sooner because I was paranoid that I had made it all up. My sister who had seen me go through being bullied as a child and teenager, and suffering depression from my teen years onward, said that she had never seen me totally lose all confidence in every part of my life like I did with the bullying and depression this time round.

I don’t think the bullying caused the depression. I think that had been bubbling under the surface for the best part of a year. It was thing that shoved me off the edge. Although the person who bullied me moved to a different job, I couldn’t face trying to rebuild my reputation in a team where almost everyone was new in the past six months (that was how the bullying was so effective, my network had moved on). Even without all this I had been planning to leave the following summer as I knew it wasn’t the career for me.

The bullying had been going on for two or three months by the time everything came crashing down. Within five or six weeks I had handed in my notice and left. Applied for and got a new job. Moved out of my house in London. And I was off to New York for a holiday that had been planned for eighteen months. During this time I also had to deal with the guilt of how I’d upturned others lives in the process. My housemate, best mate, Suzi, had to move in between doing exams at a stressed point in her life. She also had to live with a depressed Helen. I was affecting my family and needing more support than ever. The overriding feeling was that I wanted to disappear for a couple of months, sort everything out on my own and then turn up and say look everyone it’s fine. I just didn’t want to affect anyone else.

But before I left London I went on anti-depressants for the first time in my life. Although I had two months between my old job and new, there wasn’t much time “off”. The first fortnight was manic, leaving parties, moving, going to New York. Once I got back I needed to find somewhere to live in the North East and the Christmas took over. Before I new it I was starting my new life. I knew I didn’t have time to fall apart so I needed the medication to keep me on track.

However one side effect is weight gain. By the time it got to Christmas I’d put on a stone and a half. A few months later I discovered the average weight gain on Citalopram is two to three stone, which made me feel great for all of a few hours. But I have just felt wretched most of the time. As I’d been moving towards depression the weight had crept on (comfort eating is the bain of my life) and over the previous 12 months had probably gained a stone. But to put on another stone and a half in the space of a month or so was hideous. When you’re starting a new job in a new place you want to feel fabulous. I just felt fat. I wanted to have some big neon sign saying “I know I look like a heffa, but I’m on medication, I’m not just a big fatty who can’t be bothered”.

I started my new job. And eventually started counselling too. I’ve found it so hard to make friends. I have met lots of lovely people, and the situation is improving now, but despite outward confidence and my apparent ease with socialising, inside I feel very socially awkward. There are times when I just prefer to be by myself, as being with people, whether old friends or new, is just hard work. So that’s been a huge barrier at times and made me feel very lonely. I’ve never felt homesick in my life, but the way I miss my best friends at times is probably similar to that.

And then I came off anti-depressants, which was just the most awful month. My moods swung from high to low. My sleep was all over the place. Everything felt out of sync and my head didn’t know what was going on. At this point I’d known the only close friend I’d made in Durham about a month and he got the full whack of my uncontrollable emotions. But my attitude was ‘at least now I’m going to lose all this medication weight’. Wrong.

Eventually the emotions and moods settled down. I became more confident that the depression had lifted and made some breakthroughs at counselling. I’ve also been through a whole bit of relationship stuff (which isn’t just mine to discuss hence the brevity). I finished counselling about three weeks ago and then I thought I’d do this whole holiday thing. Positive thinking, positive actions. The power of positive thought, et al.

But writing all of this makes me see that perhaps I do need to give myself a break. I’m haven’t written this for sympathy, many people go through and survive situations that are much worse.Ultimately the changes I’ve made in my life as a result of everything will be for the better in the long term.

I just want to be able to accept how I’m feeling and keep doing the good stuff I’m doing. I’m just tired of things being difficult. I’m tired of being a difficult person and I just want to get on with being happy and enjoying life. But for now I need to learn to be kind to myself and love myself again. Because after all of this I need some TLC.

I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the great Bill Bryson and tell you why I love Durham so much.

1. It’s so pretty. For years my favourite part of the East Coast train journey was pulling into Durham station and seeing the Cathedral and Castle, it’s one of the best views in England. My walk to work is through woods, fields and along the river. I can see countryside from my bedroom window. Even flat hunting in the snow last December was made bearable because of the beauty of Durham under a blanket of white. You can’t get angry with this city because within seconds you get a glimpse of a beautiful view and all is right with the world once again.

The view from the London Kings X train pulling out of Durham station, taken on my iPhone

2. It’s incredibly friendly. If you want to be sad and wallow in self pity then don’t come to Durham. You can’t get much past your front path without a “hello” or “morning” from your neighbours. Dog walkers talk to you. As do people at bus stops, drunk and sober. You feel obliged to smile, be friendly and helpful. And don’t think you’ll get away with a one word answer to a question, there’s at least five minutes of chatting to follow. It’s great!

3. The air is clean. Stepping off the train at Durham station from London is literally a breath of fresh air. Gorgeous clean air. Durham is a tiny city in the middle of lots of farm and woodland so there is more fresh clean air than you can shake a stick at. And it’s free.

4. There’s less stress. I am so relaxed and laid back that I’m not sure I recognise myself some days. A weekend in London is exhausting now my pace of life has gone down a notch or two (or twenty). I can chill out, relax and not worry about having to do every single thing this minute. I thought being less busy would give me less to write about, but now I have more time to appreciate life and sit down and write about it too.

5. There’s something else. I can’t name or put my finger on what makes Durham so special. Long before Harry Potter and his magic descended on the city I am sure the Durham ‘thing’ existed. Bill Bryson will back me up on this one. Once you’ve visited Durham you want to go back. It’s also the anomaly of the North. Friends, who would moan about going as far north as Birmingham, will happily come up to Durham. Now I live here I think it would break my heart to leave.