Christmas treats for the soul

So Christmas is just another day. I'm guessing, thanks to China, more people in the world do not celebrate it than do.

My Christmas got off to a dodgy start with me having to work for 24hrs but luckily my colleagues pooled together and I did not have to wake up at the office. I couldn't go to England to spend it with my folks so I bought a good substitute, cheap red wine. My Christmas eve turned into quite a party due to dancing and singing along, with a Glaswegian, to John Belushi by the Broken Family Band.

This morning I went to work and had to deal with situations such as service-users in tears because they were missing their family who never contacted them anyway. Another woman tried to phone her sister only to be told she'd moved out the flat and left no details, but after handing the phone over to me the new owner told me why ... their father had been arrested for murder and the sister's partner was in prison for attempted rape. The usual stuff. My shift ended with one of the new polish colleagues getting a pretty good slap across the face and a big enough dose of shock to keep her crying for an hour. All the pretty stuff that everyone thinks of on Christmas.

After work I took up a kind invitation from a friend to join him and his family, luckily I arrived just in time for dinner and it was a superb evening with all the relatives. From there we took his grandparents to their home and his granny proudly showed me their open fire which they wouldd spend the rest of the Christmas night infront of. From there we went onto visit friends of my friend, a very close family. The father asked me what I did and I told him social work as a career and photography as a hobby .. and hoping to combine it into photojournalism at some point. He called me away to look at some autobiographies he had, then let me read a write up about a soldier who'd given up his limbs to courageously protect a town that wasn't even in his home country, and after that he told me about one of his children who'd died tragically a few years ago. He spoke about where he tried to get his inspiration from to keep believing that he should keep going. I listened. Then he asked where I, being rather young, got my inspiration for life from.
He probably won't realise it but his kind words and the time he took to talk to me is what will make me return to work tomorrow and keep going. Thanks Joe.

Coincidence ?

So a while ago I was lucky enough to be a photographer at the Edinburgh marathon - I still don't know how that came about but I'm glad it did. I posted some of my photos on flickr and a few months later a guy commented that one of the runners called Hugh was a friend of his. The commenter, Joe, and I kept in contact with photos - when he was in London he took a picture of a London sunset over the Thames for me and whilst I was in Switzerland I got a couple shots of a paraglider and some cows for him.

A couple more months later Joe's 'media guru' called Stuart contacted me just to say hi and show me a clip of a video he's making of a medition resort up north- he thought I'd be interested in the project which I certainly am. The guy building the resort is Shen, Stuart knew him from here in Scotland but when he was in Sweden filming a documentary the crew stopped at a remote shop for supplies and who did he bump into but Shen.

We exchanged a few emails and found out that we had a lot of common interests. Stuart invited me out to their family cottage by Loch Fyne for a day, where I met the original runner Hugh and his girlfriend.

A few nights ago Stuart and I went out for hot chocolate and chatted like we've known each other for years. But I can't help laughing when thinking about all the weird connections it has taken to form this unusually made friendship! My thanks go out to the long list of people involved!