The sad world we live in – Mummascribbles

I realise I’ve been a wee bit quiet on here recently. Work has been a bit manic and whilst I haven’t actually had any events that are mine (they are all over now!), I have been here there and everywhere helping with others. Two weeks ago I was up in Harrogate, last week I was up in Belfast and right now I am in Brighton. All of this travelling has left me a tad tired and my brain just hasn’t been working properly, losing all of the creative juices that are normally running throughout. The problem with being a mum, a full time employee and a blogger, is that sometimes it isn’t possible to keep it all up at one time. Something has to give and just recently it has been the blog. I am hoping that once I am done swanning off all over the country, I’ll be able to get my brain in full working order again!

Of course all of this travelling takes its toll on my little family too. When I am not home, the other half has to do the nursery run which takes at least 2 hours out of his working day and on the days that Zach goes to my mum’s, she has to collect him from our house at 7am and drop him off in the evening too. Then there was the one day the other half couldn’t do the nursery pick up and in came my mum like the superhero that she is! I wrote a post about how wonderful my mum is a while back and I still don’t know what we would do without her.

Whilst I have been doing all of this travelling, there has of course been some serious stuff going on in the world with the horrific terrorist attack on Paris, the sieges, Belgium being on lockdown and everyone wondering when exactly it is going to happen to us. To say I have been left a little on edge by the whole thing is a bit of an understatement. I experienced the utter chaos that was the London Bombings and whilst it is still there in my head, it was so long ago that I have just put it to the back of my mind. With this new wave of Terrorism sweeping the world, it has of course come to the forefront of my mind and all sorts of awful things have been going through my little brain, especially with so much travelling taking place.

They’ve been targeting hotels and I have been staying in hotels. They have been bringing down planes and I have made a couple of flights. It originally happened here on the underground which I use every single weekday. Lots of people have been saying to each other, oh, just don’t go into London, but for those that work there, it’s not possible to stay away. Then there’s the evacuations and controlled explosions of suspect packages that have been happening frequently. And the evacuation of the EasyJet flight in Manchester that happened just as I was about to board my own one in Belfast!

On the two flights that I took last week, I was really scared. Scared that something terrible was going to happen, scared that I wasn’t going to see my family again, my gorgeous little lad’s face.
 

It’s awful…this is how they want us to feel. But it’s so difficult to not feel that way when you are in one of their potential key target areas.

There has been so much scaremongering in the press and especially on social media. A colleague on Friday told me that someone she knows who knows someone in the armed forces said there was intelligence that London was going to be attacked the weekend just gone. It of course didn’t happen. Lots of things have been posted on Facebook that all seem to stem back to the Daily Express (of which I then realise to be absolute codswallop!), about when and where they are planning to attack. I mean seriously, what makes the papers think we are going to actually believe them? Especially that one! Surely if there was intelligence like this, the warnings would be coming from the police, no? Like the whole Brussels thing at the moment – they are on lockdown but not because the papers told them not to go to certain places!

It almost makes you want to stop looking at the news, stop going on Facebook (not actually going to happen!), and pretend that it’s not really happening. It’s just not that easy though. We sat on that Friday night watching the horror in Paris unfold. It was awful – these cold calculated killings of so many innocent people who were just enjoying themselves on a night out. The images, the stories from the survivors. Each one horrifying. The world is a real scary place right now and we simply have to do what we can to stay safe. Unfortunately I still have to work and we all just have to carry on and hope that it doesn’t happen to us again. It’s such a sorry world we live in.