the life of a Campbell and a Loudon...from me to we

I couldn't stop there; it's not really complete if I tell you about all of this without all of Tom. Let me begin again, at the beginning. I'll go all the way to the end (of May, anyways). And then I'll stop.

May, 2008
Tom and I meet at The Greenhouse, the vegetarian cafe where he works as a Volunteer Coordinator and Project Developer. I think I met him for the first time on the evening of May 31, when I came to The Greenhouse for an evening dinner, and he thinks I had come to The Greenhouse once before to ask about volunteering. Maybe we'll never know.

June, 2008
After a few bumping-into-each-others at The Greenhouse and a live show at a local pub, I end up at his house for dinner with his brother and another friend. A few days later I make him dinner (in his kitchen, of course) to say thank you. And then we lay on his back lawn and watched clouds roll by.

July, 2008
We tip-toe through our first month of couple-dom, dodging boy- and girl-friend questions and stealing kisses. We make each other meals (vegetarian, dairy- and chili-free) and visit art exhibitions and talk and not talk. I tell myself I can't take a picture of a man I've only been seeing for a few weeks...but when his parents visit for a few days we spend some time in each others' company. I think they approve. Of me. Of us. In the preliminaries.

August, 2008
Katherine Cofell's leaving do at an Indian restaurant and an English provides the excuse for picture taking. Our first couple shot, with hands gingerly placed on shoulders and chins dipped in shy excitement.

I visit a field in Suffolk for Buddhafield East, a gathering of meditation, yoga, communal meals, and sans Tom. He welcomes me home with a chocolate nougat cake, the same one he wooed me with on the night we first kissed.
And then later in the same month, our tentative two month anniversary celebration with dinner at Cinema City. I bought him a box for his collection of teas, from green tea with echinacea to lemon and ginger to nettle to Malay rooisbus chai.

September, 2008
Our first vacation - all the way to Brighton on the southern shores of England. I say to his mom, Bridget, "It's one thing to be living together in the same city in your usual routines, but if we can travel together...that's compatibility."

Walking on the pier I play him Artists Are Boring by Kingdom Flying Club, skipping and dancing with one earphone in each of our ears.

On the beach I play him Peter Bjorn and John's Paris 2004: "I'm all about you, you're all about me, we're all about each other"; "While I'm sleeping/You paint a ring on my finger with your black marker-pen";

"We need this precious time just to comprehend."

October, 2008
I go on my first Buddhist retreat at the beginning of the month, and celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving in the middle. With a collection of Buddhists and Brits (not mutually exclusive labels), we have a bring-and-share/pot-luck dinner with vegan perogies and cabbage rolls for my Ukrainian roots and steamed green veggies and potato bake for my new English ties. Bridget and David come back to Norwich for a visit, and the four Loudons (brother Ben, dad David, mom Bridget and my dear Tom) plus this Canadian kid head for dinner to The Last Wine Bar. We all approve of each other.

November, 2008
I always think of it as my month because my birthday's in here, but this year I share it. Tom organizes a trip to London - dinner at a vegetarian restaurant, museum visits, drinks at a pub with all his old friends, now to be my new ones. He buys me a most perfect green coat for the winter that's hinting hard at coming on soon. We head to Whatton, his hometown, for down time with the folks and English countryside walks.


December, 2008
A mixed bag, really. A retreat finishes at the beginning of the month and makes a better impression than the first, but I'm still not running to sign up for my next one. Another trip to London peps me up: this time to see Les Miserables, Tom's favourite novel brought to stage in his guilty enjoyment of a West End musical. We make up for it by viewing the indie production of Barbershopera, the creation of Tom Green and Rob Castell, two of Tom's classmates while he was doing his playwriting MA. (You can join their Facebook fan page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Barbershopera/155504540230). Then comes Christmas in Whatton - the family of five is four for a lot of the time due to fractured pelvises and hospital stays, but we triumph over the wintertime blues, Bridget roasts the potatoes in oil instead of goose fat, there's turkey for them and a mushroom tart for me. Happy English Christmas.

January, 2009
We spend my favourite New Year's in 27 years at Frank's Bar with all my workmates and their significant others and a whole lot of other super significant people (most whose names escape me). We dance; I drink Dandelion and Burdock and remember there's too much sugar in it for me half way through the bottle and then switch to coffee; we come home at half two and watch It's A Wonderful Life; I wake up at seven and practice yoga in the garden as the world wakes up to a new year.

At the end of the month we venture to Cambridge. I forget my camera, or my camera runs out of batteries, so there are no pictures of the day we got engaged. There's sunshine and a picnic and a reading of Alice in Wonderland, but none of them really have anything to do with each other. But "yes" means telling people, and so to make sure we're not kidding we walk straight from the train station into Frank's Bar, tell everyone who's working, and have elderflower cordial with sparkling water to celebrate.

February, 2009
On the second I turn five and he knew it was coming so he bakes me a cake: all organic and all sugar, with beetroot juice to make the icing pink. We head back to London for Avenue Q in the last days of its run at Noel Coward Theatre, and then head up to Portobello Road in search of a wedding dress. I have a vintage prom dress in mind, but instead we find From Somewhere, a shop which "up-cycles" clothes by sourcing discarded material from the garment industry and sewing it into new creations. The girl in the shop shares her enthusiasm for the fashion and the ethos, and we're sold - on the concept and on a knee-length dress coupled with a cape.


March, 2009
We begin the lead up to the day. Emails, invites, cupcakes, Certificates of Authority (required for foreign nationals to marry British citizens). Tom books honeymoon train journeys.We take solace in days of walks in spring sunshine and bringing old friends back up to speed with our new life. In a lot of conversations and emails in which I tell people I'm engaged, they answer back, "Congratulations! To who?" We revel in the aloneness, but the planning frenzy seeps into even the most well intentioned laid-back, eco-friendly, low-cost affair. We enjoy Norwich's cinema offerings, 103's dinner menu, Take 5's crypt entertainment. We say so long to our good friend Cat Spurden who goes off to seek her fortune in the Youth Hostels of the UK. I take off in the last week to Taraloka, a women's retreat centre on the Welsh boarder, and come back refreshed.

April, 2009
The last month of singledom - and sanity. We keep saying "we're basically done, we could get married tomorrow", and it's kind of true. At the end of the month, Jackie and Sam visit from Tokyo and we get to have a trial run at showing off Norwich before our families descend in a few short weeks. My first experience of my worlds colliding in over a year - not just those of past and present but of fellow partners and housemates. Between the delicious meals, hanging out at home and on the streets of Norwich, in the sunshine cobblestone streets and the grassy knolls of the Plantation Garden, outside the boxes of crossword puzzles and on top of the squares of a giant chessboard, we managed to all get along just fine.

May, 2009
A few months ago I asked to become a mitra at the Buddhist Centre, and Tom lovingly accepts my invitation to attend and share this important public commitment to my practice. The following week we celebrate his birthday with a trip to Sheringham and a choo-choo train ride to Holt, with lunch at the famous Byfords and a surprise chocolate cake waiting back home at Frank's Bar. We count down as the family arrives - Mom and Tara via London on Wednesday, May 13 and then Mair, Dad, Bridget and David on Friday, May 15.


May 18, 2009
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=campbell.andreal&target=ALBUM&id=5350124776838649185&authkey=Gv1sRgCPj2wJu7-qLwhgE&invite=CPL85qAK&feat=email

post-May 18: honeymoon highlights
In Paris, at a sidewalk cafe
somewhere along our 26 hour train journey to Sicily











on the ferry to Milazzo

the view from our apartment on Salina

our tans beginning to darken...

...mine a bit more than his

the cove we found on the west coast of the island

at one of our many pasta dinners










practicing yoga and Tai Chi





view from a the top of a mountain














through Rome on the way home

















...it's not a honeymoon without Paris

home again

Much love to all of you. I don't know if I'll ever update this regularly, but I'll try to let you know periodically when I do. Otherwise, drop me an email or find me on Facebook. May you all be well and full of life.

Namaste, Andrea Lauren (Loudon) Campbell

So, to pick up from where I left off. This is the life of me. With pictures. A pictoral representation of a year in the life of me. A retrospective perspective. Of me. Just me. Of course, I did just get married - of course I did. I married the love of my life. But I am still just me, the same me that was un-married until May 18, and who is still just as much me when I am alone, in meditation and in baking cakes and in coffee houses and gardens and inside my head if not my heart. And I had to do it alone, I didn't ask anyone (any-you) what you thought because I had to know it was for me. For me, just me. And these pictures bring me closer, and now bring some closure, to that girl.

May, 2008
I arrive in Norwich from London to Couchsurf on the couch of Katherine Cofell, an American living in Norwich with her British partner Bill. They take me out to Reepham, the village where they live with Bill's Mom, and I glimpse the grass-scented sheep-filled countryside life, step on some stinging nettles, and walk through a farm field. Back in Norwich, I visit The Greenhouse for a meal and then as a volunteer. I decide to stick around for a bit.


June, 2008
I spend Summer Solstice at Stonehenge with the London CouchSurfers. I come back to Norwich and then take the train up to Sheringham for a day in a seaside town on the north Norfolk coast. I picnic in a park with my new workmates at Frank's Bar and come second in an English pub quiz.


July, 2008
I work at Frank's Bar on Bedford Street. I get a job at The Green Grocer on Recreation Road. I live at 105 Earlham Road, but I bake a cake at 63 Alexandra Road with hazelnuts and beetroot and topped with rose jam. I practice yoga in Chapelfield Gardens as under age kids drink beer and make-out in the afternoon. I bake cakes and make salads at The Greenhouse.

August, 2008
I attend Katherine Cofell's leaving do at Spice Paradise, the Indian restaurant where she brought me to meet Bill's family on my second night in Nowich. I bike up to Mousehold Heath and watch the sun set over the city before I get caught in the rain and come home soaking. I go to Buddafield East, a 'gathering' in a field in Suffolk where we camp, use compost loos, eat communal meals and chop communal onions. I meditate (almost) every morning and chant in a puja every evening. I tell myself emphatically that I am not a Buddhist.

September, 2008

I work more at both my jobs and I spend more time at the Buddhist Centre more often - more meditation, more yoga, more volunteering on the front desk. My life is more full. I go to Brighton, the popular southern seaside destination for Britons. I walk on its pier full of carousels and skee ball games, soft whip ice cream and sugar dusted deep fried donuts. Fish and chips without the fish. Vegetarian restaurants galore. Just enough sunshine for September.

October, 2008
The second of the month sends me off on my first Buddhist retreat, to the Burnham-Overy Windmill just past Wells-Next-the-Sea. I squirm and go all claustrophobic, but I grind my teeth and breathe with it and make it home in one piece. I celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with a gander of friends (but no goose) at my new temporary accommodation on Press Lane in Norwich. I make perogies for the first time, in two batches; one is vegan. We sing 'Johnny Appleseed' in call and response.

November, 2008
I turn 27. Mair and Dad arrange a cake from across the ocean and Mom sends me pink roses. I go to London and see Annie Leibowitz's exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and spend my birthday night at The Peasant pub. Later it's Whatton, a village in Nottinghamshire, to find a pile of horseshoes and a few castles on a handful of hills. I venture out to another retreat at the Windmill and almost enjoy the weekend.

December, 2008
Back to London to see Les Miserables for the second time in my life. I can't remember if I enjoyed it more or less than the first. I do think Eponine's On My Own has taken on a mythological tinge in my head that no earthly rendition can match, that she can only perfectly balance dying and hitting the high notes in A Little Fall of Rain in my head and not on stage. December the 25th in Whatton: a tree and a mushroom tart and an English Christmas for me.



January, 2009
The New Year rings in at Frank's Bar in my fancy frock. I read a horoscope that tells me a new occupation is on the horizon, so I apply for an administrative position at an NGO called BananaLink but it passes me by. So I hang up my suit next to my party dress for another day and keep loving waitressing on the weekends and stocking grocery shelves one day a week. I start the Foundation Course, a one year survey of Buddhism, at the Buddhist Centre.

February, 2009
The English winter still looms. I turn five (years sober, that is), and get a devishly sugary pink iced cake for my efforts. I go to a meeting, and while it's comforting to sit in a room of people who understand what five years means, I don't miss anything I found there. Later in the month it's London town again, this time for the New York musical Avenue Q and a walk down Portobello Road for the first time since this time last year.



March, 2009
My first week-long retreat. I drive with two lovely ladies out to Taraloka, a women's retreat centre on the Shropshire-Welsh boarder. I absolutely, positively, heartfeltfully, and magnanimously enjoy the collection of moments that made up all those seven days. I chant and cartwheel, meditate in the shrine room, talk the Dharma, sit in the sun in a tank top with a colouring book and rejoice in the spring to come. I ask to become a mitra, a bonafide friend of the Western Buddhist Order.



April, 2009
I spend most of the month enjoying snatched moments of domesticity and Norwichian relaxation. A walk to University of East Anglia and the art exhibit China! China! China! at The Sainsbury Centre. Then the month culminates in Jackie and Sam's arrival from Tokyo. After ten years of no communicado, Jackie and I reconnected in Japan in '07, and now it's her turn to visit me. We walk down cobbled streets, have coffee in cafes and dinners out on the town, wander through the Plantation Gardens and play chess on the lawn outside the Assembly House.


May, 2009
I finally, officially, stop with the me and become part of a we. I can't really look back at the last year without him; I have to eliminate pronouns from sentences to pretend he hasn't been here all along, not in the background but alongside me. I'm still here, still me, still the same as I've been, but everything I do is reflected in his choices, and my life isn't solitary, can't be, won't be, doesn't want to be. I'll tell you all about us in the next post, and you'll see what I mean about me and Tom.