THESE WERE MY SCENARIOS:
Reality #1
I can see us at 40 as our mothers would have us now. Me with my grease-stained hands, shorts and lumberjack shirt, crocodile skin and rough ways smoking my rollies at the table in a café in Fremantle with you. You will be in a home-sewn vaguely turn-of-the-century Spanish inspired skirt and blouse ensemble, covered in cat fur and with your hair long and dyed black. We are both seeing divorced father-of-three's, mine a mine supervisor, yours a local government supremo, possibly Greek mafia.
Fantasy #1
I would like to be still unmarried, but preferably in a relationship of convenience with a wildlife documentary maker. We are together when we are on the same continent! I will be one of those crazy aunts who whisks her nephews and nieces off on adventures when she is home, and is always somewhere doing something and sending home weird postcards and artefacts for Louise and her husband to store in 'Aunt Claire's Trousseau' which will be huge fireproof chests in the shed at the farm. I am not sure what I am doing for money but hopefully, it will be writing and teaching, but there will not be a lot of it. Once I hit 45 and want to settle down I will come home, start another degree and live in a little donga on Louise's farm and drive a beat-up Volvo around Perth being eccentric and colourful. The documentary filmmaker will finally propose and we will settle in a 'renovator's delight' style apartment in Buenos Aires where we will teach English and dance until we die, hosting all manner of relatives in the meantime.
Reality #2
I will be home in August and meet some slightly deserving guy (engineer) and be living with him by my birthday next year. I will do a Dip Ed and be teaching Social Studies and English Literature at Mercedes by 2008. I will have my first child in 2011. I think it will be probably only two kids, possibly around two years apart and both little boys. I will take about 7 years off and once the littlest is at school (St Paul's and then Trinity) I will go back to teaching. Once they have left school and home I will be Head of Department and trying to extricate myself so I can go back to UWA to study the classics. I will be driving a Volvo and the hubby and I will only get to Europe about once every ten years and he will want to go to Greece each time. I will try to have salons and dinner parties etc but will become so tired of running teenaged boys around to sport that the salon plan will fall through in about three years. Melbourne will be my holiday destination each year as Louise will have a farm there raising horses.
I think I just have to go and have a stiff drink now.
Fantasy #2 (sad because I almost got there)
P&O will keep me on for another two years because I am so adaptable around the office. I will immediately enrol in a part-time course in curatorial studies and volunteer for the Friends of the National Portrait Gallery committee.
Over the next two years, I will network shamelessly, both through P&O's social diary and by becoming at home in the Gallery. At one point during those two years, I will make such an impression on someone in a position of power that I will be sponsored to complete an internship for the last year of my course and be able to walk straight into a job after I have finished.
This brings me up to age 27, still here and on a wage that would make the last two years look wealthy. But I will be blissfully happy working in the only area I care for, history.
By this stage, however, I have become so engaged by my own intelligence and wonderfulness that I am giving Nik a run for her money in the ice queen stakes. FSO, still being referred to as my ex after six years and quite possibly married himself, will still be held up as the perfect man and no-one will be able to compete with him. I am not sure I will even be inclined to attempt a relationship and I will certainly not be sleeping around so I will simply be complaining and getting on with enjoying myself.
By 34 my parents would have finally given up hope of grandkids from me and I will be taking out a loan in Australia to buy them out of the house in Mt Lawley as they will want to be retiring to the farm by then. Hopefully, by then I will have a reasonable wage and will be suitably experienced enough to have at least one publishable manuscript ready to be given to an agent.
At 38 my first novel will have made it to number 24 on the bestsellers list and I will be able to pay off the mortgage on Joel Terrace and return to Perth to pursue the research for my second novel.
At my 40th birthday, I will meet my first toy boy ...
*ahem*
Reality / Fantasy #1
I go home and decide to take a walk on the wild side. I go out to Kalgoorlie and set myself up with some hideously well-paying mining job with which I will stick for three years. I will buy a house AND each year spend at least two months in Europe to tide me over in the culture stakes. The rest of the time will be spent reading history books and highbrow magazines, writing, long-distance study and searing my skin.
Once I have paid off the house and run a lusty miner out of my house unsatisfied every week for three years, I will start travelling again, but this time with something to keep me supplied with moolah while I teach English in South America for two years, work the ski slopes of Whistler, spend two years in Africa helping to build villages for refugees with that lovely Scotsman I met in Skeggie and helping the counselling of children in the West Bank.
END OF MY SCENARIOS
More Flights Of Fancy - Life in Ireland
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