Articles with the Tag Sandra

Onwards into 2012

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So yesterday I got back from my parents where I’d been for the holidays; a bit of a bother dragging the kittens there and back again on the train, but managed succesfully with a little help from my mum. The kittens behaved quite well on the whole, but Sophie did gave me an heart attack a few days ago when she slipped out of the window in my second storey bedroom into the gutters. That wasn’t too bad, but then she tried to clatter up the rooftiles and I could just grab her before she plummeted back…

Apart from that little incident the holidays were quite relaxing, with endless games of Colonists of Catan and some light reading, but coming back to my empty flat did bring home the reality of life without Sandra again. I lived with her for the better part of a decade and the last three years especially were lived for her; getting ready for the kidney transplant first, then trying to get her out of hospital and back home and finally her dying and funeral.

I’m not sure what to do now. Suddenly there’s this big hole in my life where Sandra used to be and I’m not sure yet what can fill that hole, if anything can. The last two months I’ve gone through on autopilot, but now I’ve had time to think and reflect on what to do with the rest of my life and just don’t know what to do with myself…

Singled Out — Virginia Nicholson

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Singled Out


Singled Out
Virginia Nicholson
312 pages including index
published in 2007

I found Singled Out in the Middelburg library and picked it up because it looked like the sort of book Sandra would’ve enjoyed reading. She had always been interested in social history, especially of Britain between the wars and of the role women played in these years. Sandra had actually been the one who first pointed out to me why there were so many spinsters in twenties and thirties detective stories, all those women living alone in bedsit rooms or sharing a cottage together. That was something I had noticed but assumed just to have been some sort of convention of the genre, rather than something real reflected in fiction.

But that was exactly what it was, as the interwar period was the period of the “Surplus Women”, two million women for whom there was no and would be no husbands, with the “flower of British manhood” cut down in the mud of Flanders. The First World War had left hundreds of thousands British men dead and many more crippled for life and a whole generation of women without enough husbands to go around. Granted, as the raw statistics prove this was not a new situation, as in Victorian times too this had been the case, but this was the first time this gender imbalance was both large and out in the open. This time it had hit the middle and upper classes disproportionally and therefore was widely commented on in the media and felt by those women themselves. What’s more, it came at a time of huge societal changes and anxiety and, as Nicholson shows, these socalled “surplus women” played a huge role in making British society more equal to women in general.

Read more…

So farewell then, 2011

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So here we are at the very last day of a year that turned out to be quite a disaster, if only for me personally. This time last year Sandra was still in hospital but looking forward to going home early in the new year and indeed would be, celebrating Easter at home. She was weak, but finally on the road to recovery, or so I thought. That of course turned out not be the case. She had to go back into hospital a number of times and the last time she had to, she had had enough and decided to stop it all. Her struggle ended on the 7th of November and I’m only slowly coming to grip with it. The simple fact of her death colours everything I do.

Next year will be the first year without her since we met and fell in love back in 2000. With a bit of luck I’ll be able to live another sixy years or so before I die, but they will still be without her and sometimes I worry that i’ll forget her.

And I don’t want to forget her.

UPDATE: it’s 2012 now in Holland. Happy New Year and let’s hope it is a good year for everybody.

First Christmas without her

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Have some Robert Fripp Christmas cheer:



And so ends my first Christmas without Sandra. To be honest, I haven’t thought much about her, unless this was playing. Which is what I was hoping for spending the holidays at my parents, away from everything that would’ve reminded me of her and celebrating Christmas with her. Instead I fell back in the old family patterns, which is just what I needed right now even if I dreaded it a bit beforehand. It’s been relaxed, with a nice proper dinner yesterday, turkey and all and not too many obligations other than playing Settlers of Catan.