Living With Gladys Full Time

Well, I have to say what with one thing and another, you know a con man almost deceiving my  Mum and Dad out of £6k, a bullying family member hell-bent on being as spiteful and calculatingly cruel as possible, its been a bit of a week! I was already feeling quite rung out, so yesterday just about finished me!

What happened?

Nitten had to be re-homed 😢.

To be honest Alistair and I had mooted the idea a few weeks ago and Alistair’s sister Gillian found somewhere she could go. But I think Nitten got wind of the idea because as soon as we mentioned it to the rest of the family she started coming home like a good girl, every night, not going missing and staying away for a days at a time. Pippin wanted to take her when she moved into her own house too so we put the whole rehoming idea on the back burner and settled back into life with Nitten on the road with Gladys and the 2 dogs. Nittens sense of adventure though got the better of her attempts to be a stay at home cat! She started to wander, to where we shall never know, but the long days and nights of calling for her, shaking her food and looking hopefully out of the window willing her to just pop her head round the corner started again.

We are due to move on next week and the idea of leaving without her was unimaginable and the idea of having to stay in one place (lovely though it is here) because of Nitten sort of defeated the idea of selling up and travelling a bit! So yesterday having let her in a 2am we kept her in against her valiant attempts to get out, put her in her cat box and delivered her to her new home in Horesham. If a cat that loves the outdoors, micing, rabbiting and generally living the outdoor life of riley needed re-homing, then this is ‘the place’. It’s owned by a couple who are Olympian horse riders, the grooms are all animal mad and there are acres and acres of safe fields far away from the road for Nitten to roam in and play until her hearts content.

I sound very together about it today and as ever, a bit of good old fashioned time to adjust and allow for emotional catch up works wonders, but yesterday… the waaaaaaaaaaambulance was most definitely needed. I think poor Alistair wondered if I would ever stop crying ever again!

So, our menagerie has dwindled down to Laddie and Ebony, both of whom have settled brilliantly to life in Gladys. Laddie spends his whole day outside and literally has to be dragged in at bed time. Ebony by contrast spends her whole day inside sleeping in the warm and has to be literally dragged out at bedtime!

Talking of warm, bloody hell its been a bit nippy.

We made a rookie mistake and ran completely out of gas at the weekend and no back up, that won’t be happening again. The LPG ran out some time ago and its obviously not like just nipping t0 the garage in the C1 for a drop of petrol. Shifting  Gladys is a full on operation so we only move her when we are actually moving on. The temperature had dropped and for some reason our electric heaters had been tripping the fuse box so we ran the blown air gas heating instead, Yikes, 11kg of gas in 6 days! Expensive and totally impractical. Back to the electric heaters and fingers crossed no fuse box tripping ( we had an auto-electrician out and he’s done a bit of ‘overhead split giblet rewiring’ and it seems to have done the trick).

I think its going to be an interesting sort of winter in Gladys. Its lovely not to have that centrally heated feel, I always found that way too stuffy although I will miss the log burner.  I think it will be a bit like when I was young and lived at home, pre -central heating days, or come to think of it even when we did get central heating, if I was cold my dad would say ” put a cardi on”. Thats what we have started to do, more cardi’s, more socks, a couple of blankets at the ready, sounds fun doesn’t it😊. Although poor Alistair came back freezing from being on his Harley last friday in the wind and rain and all of the above and a couple of sheepskins had a hard job to warm him up!

So, we are heading into month 4 in our alternative lifestyle and it is still good. No regrets, even with having to re-home Nitten.

It seems to Alistair and me pretty cool that we actually followed through on our mad idea of selling our angel wrapped house to live alternatively in Gladys our RV. The angel wrapped house incidentally  is now referred to as 181 and I have been surprised at my lack of missing it (I must be more fickle than I realised). Gladys has very quickly become our cherished home, our little (well big to drive but small to live in) haven of tranquility and security. As the weeks have rolled on and we can begin to count in months the length of time that we have lived here, Gladys has also established her difference. We now have a dedicated office area where exciting new work is taking place (in the form of me becoming a food writer creating recipes that heal) and Alistair takes his Skype calls to heal the sick and wounded as far afield as Barbados! We are developing our work so we can work from Gladys anywhere in the world which we both think an amazing thing to be able to do. We have a kitchen area that has become a hive of activity for my new cookbook that I will soon be launching as an ebook and we have a dashboard greenhouse that is germinating chilli’s,  bell peppers and  warming indoor plants for our eyes delight. Gladys is looking good and her energy is growing!

Candace was at a ‘moon ceremony’ at her friends last weekend (sounded fab by all accounts) and was asked what she had gratitude for. “For Alistairs bravery in healing cancer alternatively, for his health and healing and for the knowledge we have gained as a family to better our own health” came her reply. Amazing, it brought tears to my eyes to hear her say that. It sounds cheesy I know, even before I’ve typed it, but this journey that we are on since the curve ball came along has changed so many lives for the positive and I know absolutely that Alistair and I would never in a million years have made the changes to the degree that we have if he had not ‘caught the curve ball’. Kirt asked the other day, that if Alistair could be cured right now for ever would we still live the way we live ( in Gladys, vegetarian, organic blah blah blah) and without even hesitating we both answered ‘Yes’. Its who we are now, we have had an identity shift, a deep level change for both of us. Kirt was pleased to hear it.

Alistair has got his head around the whole process of developing cancer, and healing from it. It is a multi faceted approach that all interlink, but the hierarchy for him is: to stop metastasis (that means stopping it from spreading to other places), to reduce inflammation and slow down the speed of the cancer cells growth, to continually cultivate a positive mental attitude and a state of inner calm using meditation, visualisation, Reiki and stress reducing activities including daily exercise outside in nature, and to detox his body and mind from toxins, all of which will ultimately encourage healing.

The foods that we eat at every meal time and the natural supplements that Alistair takes are the main source of preventing  metastasis, reducing inflammation and slowing down the speed  of cancer cell growth. Equally, the food that we eat also has a huge impact on boosting his immune system; improving the count of killer T cells that like to dine on cancer cells daily for breakfast lunch and dinner. We have become quite interested in trying to find the actual food source rather than taking the supplement, it tastes better thats for sure and makes for an interesting plate of food at meal times! Maitake mushrooms were our latest find at BumbleBees whole food health store in North London. A trip out on the Harley, a mooch around a proper health food shop, some booty in my bag from said shop and home for wholesome health giving meal for tea, that for me is a perfect day! Oh and some lovely sunshine to top up the Vitamin D count too, splendid!

So you can see life is different;  for some it may sound boring, for others too much hard work, but for others still it may resonate. All I can say is that for Alistair and me it works and it works really well. We seem to have found ourselves, our lives are certainly richer and our adventure is really only just beginning. And if I answer the same question that Candace was asked, I have gratitude to each of our children for supporting us in our alternative lifestyle, for their positivity, their love, their encouragement and for walking with us on our journey and sharing as much as they can in the changes that we are making.