My name is Andrea & I'm soon to be 35 (it's my birthday next week in fact). I live in East London with Richard (my wonderful husband) & Ottoline (my adorable one-year old daughter). Her name is a strange one, I know - it's pronounced Otta-leen, and is an old French/German name. I sometimes fear I have relegated her to a life of spelling her name over the phone to confused call centre staff & correcting the pronunciation - but you don't really think these things through in those heady first days of motherhood.
So, my passions; I love classical music & studied at the Royal College of Music. I don't really perform these days (nerves got the better of me) but I love going to concerts & spent several years as a Tour Manager for orchestras & dance companies, travelling all over the world. Travel is another passion - before we became responsible(ish) parents, Richard & I converted a landrover into an expedition vehicle, and took a year off work. We drove across Turkey where I developed a worrying addiction to baklava, and then into Iran where I promptly rolled our landrover twice & wrote it off!
We were fine - I like to blame the fact that I had to wear a hijab, but really I just lost concentration at the wheel.
Once Richard started talking to me again, we continued to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan & Krygyzstan where we spent lots of time living in yurts & drinking fermented mare's milk (not to be recommended!)
Apart from my immediate family, I have 2 gorgeous sisters, a Mum, a Dad (with wanderlust, who is somewhere in Australia these days) & an amazing grandmother of 90. Add to this, my lovely inlaws and you see that I have a great family who are very important to me. I hate the fact that we all live all over the place & would love to be around the corner from each of them (at least most of the time!)
Personally, I guess we've been pretty fortunate during this economic downturn, so far. I'm on maternity leave but work freelance. Rich is an architect and although the construction industry has been quite badly affected, his job is fairly secure for now. Seeing a few friends lose their jobs & hearing about the collapse of some key organisations has definitely made us feel that we need a robust plan for our future. And it's made us think a lot about sustainability generally - both in terms of our own lifestyle & more widely. Afterall the growth & financial boom we've experienced in many parts of the world in the last decade was surely never going to last?
Politically, it's hard to see how Labour will survive this (amongst other key issues in their 3 terms of power) so I think it's inevitable that we'll look back on this period as the 'nail in the coffin' for Gordon Brown & the Labour party. Whilst I think they've made some appalling decisions, particularly under the leadership of Tony Blair, I worry about the country being run by the Conservative party again. I hope that our changed relationship with the ecomony might yield some positive developments too - perhaps making people more modest in their spending habits and giving people more perspective on life.
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