Notes on Modern Life

Last Christmas I got married for the second time. Our perfect day shared with friends and family - friends who understand the hope over experience of second time around and family who have watched us make the mistakes that have brought us to this point in our lives. The thing is I look at the wedding video and the photos of our day and I can see the older generation, the friends of my parents, who have been married for years, who have brought up children in our quiet English town and I know that I still measure myself against them and quite frankly I have failed. Divorce and step families were unheard of at best and talked about in whispered hushes at worst, mothers did not work full time and dinners always seemed to be cooked from scratch using mince and fresh vegetables. But then I look at our friends, our peers, and I realise how unrealistic this benchmark is. I struggle to think of friends who have met, married, had children and stayed together - we all still seem to long for this vision we were brought up to think was normal, but life has changed and while we have experienced so many common modern life experiences it can be difficult to accept that what we have been through is somehow normal, or even acceptable, and not one of those taboos spoken about with hushed voices twenty years ago. For this (purely selfish) reason I want to record and hopefully make some sense of these thoughts on modern life.