I have started dreaming again. I mean the kind of dreaming that you do awake not the usually forgotten sleep process. No, I mean those vivid, colourful day dreams that make you feel good, make you want to reach out and touch them. You can call it hope if you want to. Dreaming again and just in time too.

I have been dreaming of sea, sun and sand and a new future.

The past few years have been difficult and more so the last 18 months of so have been a blur of confusion and forced change. I lost sight of what I wanted to do, where I was going and was paying the price of that in depression. In desperation I have been trying to force changes on me and my family to try and get out of this rut. We are moving house, I have changed my route to and from work, am trying hard to change my daily schedule and lose the mainly preditable weekends. I have even stopped smoking (subject of another post, I think) but all of this has failed to shake off the feeling of powerlessness that has been hounding me for quite a while.

The pressure of it all was coming to bear on my family life which could have been disastorous. However, a few frank conversations and I realise that my wife and I have similiar needs and our dreams are not that incompatible, it just we have not really communicated them very well. The upshot of this bit of upheaval has been the decision that we are going to invest time and money to our return to Africa. And since then, my dreams have returned in vivid colour and I feel much happier now.

Don't get me wrong, I consider England my home but I don't need to live here, do I? The miserable weather, the hour and half commutes, the constant commercialisation of everything, the rat race, it wears you down. And it is worse for us who grew up under the African sun, you just can't forget that there is more to life than this. In 2 years or so, this blog will be written from the Seychelles or Mozambique or Tanzania or Zanzibar, who knows, we will go where the opportunity presents itself (as long there's some sea somewhere close - well that's what I think anyway).

Wherever I find myself, I will be writing, debating, reheasing, photographing and filming all the time. I am going back to my teenage dreams of using my talents to do the things I love to do, things that I have had so little time for since. The things I have had to do, and a lot of that time until recently has been enjoyable too, will end in 2 years time and a new chapter will start and I am looking forward to it.

And I will spend my spare time and money in preparing for this new beginning. I will not only be changing things around me but I will be changing me too and that, trust me, is a lot of hard work. Not only will there be a new beginining there will be a new man to go with it, one that has managed or is on the path to contentment.

I am so glad that this is the first post of the new talking2myself blog, the old one disappeared in the server move, for there no better way to consider the future than when you have dreams.

[First published on my Talking2Myself blog on specified date]