I can't believe I did that - part 3, 1994 to 2007

 1994 - 1998 : the mental health years

In September 1994 I moved again, this time to Norwich where I became a full time postgrad student on the UEA year-long Diploma in Person-Centred Counselling. That proved to be another rather turbulent time, with a close fellow student friend attempting suicide after calling at my home for help and finding me absent. They didn't want to go into hospital, so in order to avoid sectioning it was agreed that I would live closely alongside them for a month or so on 'suicide watch' - which turned into a kind of hyper-intensive therapy. At the same time, and 2 hours away, after many years of increasing agoraphobia my mum was also now in a severe depression and had suicidal feelings that my dad found difficult to cope with. I had support from my student community and in particular from my supervisor but found being faced with such deep depths of despair - while still working as a therapist and group facilitator at the university - both moving and incredibly hard, as such work forces you to explore your own dark places. Without a doubt it changed me as a person. 

I went on to work as a therapist in a drug and alcohol addiction organisation, while I did a research MA in Counselling which explored the therapist's experience of personal change within the therapeutic relationship. My mum died within this period - she'd been diagnosed with ovarian cancer but I believe she died early because she simply had no will to live. My dad grieved, of course, although most of his grieving had already been done - and then very soon started to really live his best life, travelling, eating out, and going on many cruises (a lifelong dream that my mum had always refused to share) in the company of a new partner. I was so happy to see him 'seizing the day' after such a long period of effectively being a prisoner caregiver, but sadly those years had really taken their toll on him and he died just 3 years later. I learned from my dad in those years about the consequences of giving away your self when faced with a challenging situation (very relevant at this moment as many of you will know!), and of the importance of seizing the day.

1998 - 2007 : from burnout to burners

After my dad died I went into a period of total exhaustion and burnout during which all the events of the previous 6 years caught up with me. I took 3 months away from work, went back part time for 3 months and then left altogether to move to Cley next the Sea in North Norfolk with J, who I'd met in Iona a year earlier but who lived in Norwich and had taken the same diploma course as me a year later. With the proceeds of my dad's house, and an inheritance from his mum (who had died 2 days after my dad) together we bought a listed house that I'd loved for years, Whalebone House, where my student friends and I used to go for tea and cake.

The front of our café/tea room

We redecorated everything and reopened the tea room, making all our own cakes, serving great teas and coffees, doing salads and smoked fish and Welsh rabbits for lunch every day, and looking after the B&B guests in our 2 rooms. We opened one day in October, thinking it would be a soft opening ... but we'd forgotten it was half term and by 3pm there was a queue down the High Street. Our dishwasher hadn't arrived, we were piling up all the used cups and plates in the courtyard at the back, and J had a total meltdown in the kitchen while I kept both food and front of house going! Things did get better, we took on a couple of students to help in the summer, people kept coming and seemed to love it, and we got written up in various magazines. I was in my element, doing what I've always loved the most, waiting on tables and it was just what I needed.

 

Antique bentwood chairs inside the café

It was also pretty exhausting, getting up at 6 to make cakes and scones (sometimes over 100 scones a day), serving breakfast to our guests, dealing with deliveries and shopping and getting ready to open at 11, then closing at 6 and working for another 2 or 3 hours. We ate badly, piling on the kilos in spite of the physical hard graft. So after 3 years we changed direction, changed our decor and turned ourselves into a restaurant, opening 6 evenings a week. 

A complete change of style when we opened our restaurant

I moved into the kitchen to cook a daily changing 4 course menu, with no choice, based on vegetables, cheeses and pulses but no meat or fish (though we never ever used the word vegetarian). John looked after our allotment where we grew a lot of our own food, and looked after front of house (not his forte, it has to be said, but he managed). We could seat just 13 people and because at that time it was a bit of an off the wall concept fully expected it to be a slow, low key type of thing that would tick over pleasantly, doing everything ourselves with no stress. That went well. Not.

The North Norfolk chattering classes decided we were a Good Thing, and they came, and they told their friends, and they came. The summer tourists came, often more than once. Within a year we had waiting lists. A year later we won Les Routiers Regional Restaurant of the Year award, followed by various other awards and black tie dinners to go with them, and still more people came. The UEA climate change department awarded us a balloon ride for our carbon neutral ideas. It was fun, exciting and flattering, but I felt like a total imposter because I knew I was just an ordinary woman cooking in my kitchen for people who were eating in my front room. 

I hit my sell by date in the summer of 2006 when yet another glossy magazine wanted to profile us and the daily round of growing, buying, menu planning, prepping, cooking, serving, washing up and grabbing miniscule portions of dinner on saucers in between courses stopped being fun. I'd wanted to live in France since I was 18 and decided that this was my chance - and J decided to come too (a decision which he's later come to regret - but that's another story). In October 2006 we closed, in November we put the house on the market, and it sold on the first day.

In January 2007, with no real time to reflect on what I was leaving behind or on the changes that lay ahead, and with most of our wordly goods in store, we moved together to a gîte near Castelnaudary while we decided where, and how, we wanted to live.