All By Myself.

For the record, I am an anxious person. I worry about stuff. Every time Fixit goes off on a motorbike jaunt I envisage his death and it's ghastly aftermath. When my relatives fly overseas I picture crashes. Every time I hear about a campus rampage I get twitchy about Climber at his lovely, gentle, peaceful school. It's just the way my brain works. It's why I can't watch any scary movies, ever. The images get burned into my brain and I can't banish them. Has anyone ever seen the chip fryer episode from Season 1 of Spooks? I am still traumatised by that. I won't watch Spooks without Fixit now, he has to be there to tell me when it's safe to open my eyes again.

So although you would think it would be blissful for me to spend a 24-hour period with just me and the too-young-to-be-left-on-his-own-yet kitty, while the boys head to the hills for some Male Bonding and Quality Grandparent Time, you can see how having my sort of brain could interfere with this...

I tell myself to shut up! To relax and enjoy the peace! What a nice break it will be, only needing to look after myself, managing just my meal, playing on the computer as long as I want, watching whatever movie I like, sleeping-in (!!) to my heart's content and only having to answer the the demands of one small hungry kitty.

But then flashes of rogue semi-trailers arrive in my head. As I confessed to Shula during our lovely breakfast blogmeet yesterday, if I lost my 3 boys then I would not be able to go on. And then I would have to work out a way for me not to go on and those ways all sound very unpleasant and messy and scary. You see what a terrible brain I have? But being in Shula's company while my brain was doing nervous twitter stuff was a good thing. She could see the anxiety for what it is, and she neither dismissed it or exacerbated it. We had a very good laugh in fact. Don't mind us a bit of black humour, we don't.

The good news is that now that the first car-trip has been completed in safety (Fixit just rang me) I will be able to relax a bit and enjoy my solitude. I may cycle to the video store for a chick-flick and then whip up fresh pesto for dinner, served with a nice glass of wine. I will definitely take myself out for coffee tomorrow, I may even choose the cinema.

And then I will start to twitch again until they're back home with me, and if you can picture that Dido song about not sleeping till you're home with me playing in the background while you read that last sentence then you're on the same page as me.