CELEBRATING TWELVE YEARS WITH LAUREN | MY VISIT TO COLDSTREAM

If you didn’t see my last post, then you may have missed the reason that last weekend was special to me. April 20^th is twelve years since the abuse I suffered, ended. 2007 was also the year that I first met Lauren Dewar. We’ve been best-friends now for twelve years. And I decided that she was one of the few people I wanted to spend such a significant and important day with. Some people might be surprised that I wanted to spend the day with anyone; like I should have taken the day to myself to think about things but twelve years ago, April 20^th was probably the loneliest day of my life. Telling my abusers’ ‘boss’ what he had done and being called a ‘manipulative liar’ resulted in me feeling like I had no one in my corner. Like there was literally no one in the world on my side. So of course, I wanted to spend the anniversary with one of the people I love the most in the world.

For a long time, I believed that the most important thing about friendship was how many you had and not the quality of them. As I grew up, I learnt that the essential thing about friendship is that there’s an unconditional love between the two of you, trust, a very unique mutual sense of humor… There are so many important aspects to a friendship that mean more than how many people you have listed as a ‘friend’ on Facebook! I think that Lauren is one of these incredibly special friends – I mean, after twelve years… she must be special!

So, of course when she told me she was moving in with her long-term partner Darren, in Coldstream - over fifty miles away from me – I was gutted. But I was also really happy for her – she deserves that huge, overwhelming, all-consuming, I’ll-move-away-from-home, kind of love! Unfortunately, I still hadn’t visited their home so April 20^th seemed like the perfect opportunity! 

We spent the first few hours after I got off the train in Berwick Upon Tweed, we went to a lovely Deli, did a bit of shopping, and walked around the town centre before heading to their home. It wasn’t a long drive from Berwick to Coldstream and we had fun taking timelapses and trying to keep the new plant standing upright! Getting to their home, I have to admit, I was so relieved that both their dogs (Oakley and Dallas) liked me straight away! Oakley actually liked me so much that he wined outside the bathroom door when I went to the toilet!

After a few pink gins(!), we met with Darren and some of his family and had a few more gins! At night we got a pizza – which was delish and I was really chuffed to see it was a sofa bed and not just a sofa! So even with the puppies jumping on me every few hours, I had a really good night’s sleep!



On the Sunday, Lauren and I went to the Hirsel Gallery for the afternoon. We looked around, got food and took a ton of photos before heading back to collect my bags and – sadly – go to the train station.