Part 1.... chapter 8

It's been weeks of madness since I last aired thoughts in my diary. I swear, if I didn't write it all down I think I'd get lost in my own daily life. 
Well it's 2007. For me it wasn't an exciting personal celebration, or shared feelings of love between two people welcoming in the new year. Oh no.... No bodies embraced on my bed banging louder than the fireworks. No champagne corks bouncing off the walls in celebration of new beginnings.... 
On the business side of things though, it meant the new venture has begun....

With the offer excepted, The Cricketers Pub is now ours. On the 15 th January 2007 we signed the tenancy for a three-year lease. It's been a mad 24/7 rush on. The pub was a bloody disgrace. Dirty beyond belief that the regulars even went back there when the last landlady had it. No wonder her business fell apart.
The toilets weren't clean and working properly. The carpet, God don't get me started on the carpet, it was sooo dirty I never thought it would show its true colour again. The cellar smell was rank and the beer pipes were in a shocking state. The bar, well, I've never seen a bar so dirty, the floor thick with sticky beer stains. Bar top looked like it hadn't see any wax or polish, ever! Beer pumps thick with sticky stale beer, drip trays full of dead fly's. Only enough usable glasses for a mad hatter's tea party. All these are to name a few. The worse was not having any heating and hot water, and with out hot water you can't open a pub. And with no heating what customer would want to stay in a freezing pub in mid January.

I got in touch with the brewery to supply gas fires and gas for opening night and my partner asked friends from a biker club if we could loan their hot water caddy so hot water was on site until the boiler was fixed. After a lot of hard work from a lot of good friends we were ready to open the doors to the public on Friday 19 th January. 
All eyes are on us now....

I was right. All eyes were indeed on us. On every move made, every word spoken, every action taken, every bloody breath. Maybe I was a bit hasty to want this new routine or was it just me being paranoid from peoples staring eyes.

So much has changed since we moved into the Cricketers, it's been a few months now. Obviously it's hard work with two businesses and we don't see each other as often as we did, but we knew all this. We had months of talking about what it would mean in terms of hard work. I run Crowley's Bar, he works in the Cricketers, but I'm the main boss of both. I do the stock take. I do the cash and carry runs. I do the account books and wages. I do the hiring and firing. I do the banking. I do the advertising. I do the band booking for weekends. I occasionally do a shift at the Cricketers, and to be honest I don't wont to. I do all the work behind the scenes. He works the bar at the Cricketers day and nights. He takes care of both cellars. He cleans the beer gardens. He painted signs for the walls outside. He gets a wage. Don't get me wrong, I do want to be here and make a success of it but it's doubly hard going when your not feeling it from ya partner.
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My sex life has gone back to being as extinct as the dinosaurs. No spark, no scent, no excitement. There is no romance of any sort from him, and hasn't been for to long. Plus there are a lot of times when I don't feel supported, listened to, respected and loved.
My life has turned into a huge pulsating stress ball, repetitively rolling high levels of venomous poison into it 24/7. All coming from the feeling that my relationship is going nowhere and maybe it's time to end it. I don't think we've got anything in common anymore. And with other peoples incompetence to put effort into the work they get paid for isn't helping either. I just wanna cry..... ;-(


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