From then, to now, with so much in between...

At 17 years old, I was in a world I didn't understand, with a life I was so ready to let happen to me for the sake of stopping the thoughts that swirled and stomped angrily around my mind.

I was ready for life to really begin, for something to make sense, I felt so closed off from anything that I didn't even really know if I was existing at all.

I was 17 years old and ready to give up on finding myself, I assumed that I was never meant to be found, to go from day to day lost and unsure until I could escape, even then I wasn't sure what I even wanted to escape from.

Looking back over the 10 years that have followed I find myself wishing that perhaps I had taken the courage, that I was sure burned through my veins, and talked to someone. Anyone. At 17 years old I was ready to assume that the world was nothing more than a series of painfully confusing moments that would never amount to anything. Now I wish perhaps that there had been someone who had seen in me, something, anything, that they could have used to pull me out.

But then I turn to that person who wishes that something had changed, and I smile, because there is not one moment of my life that I would change if it means I miss out on finding myself just here, and finding my hope, in amongst the random evenings spend searching the internet, trying to find people who would understand something about me.

At 17 years old, I was beginning to think that perhaps I was meant to exist on the margins of everyone else's lives. I didn't know how to put into words how I felt, I tried to, I honestly did, but in November 2002 I heard a song for the first time, I found a world inside its words, I found that my heart was able to soar and glide and smile. Until that moment I'm not sure if I really understood who I could become. Hidden away in the depths of my bedroom, as the homework was conscientiously done for fear of someone noticing that I was different, I found a song that gave me hope.

"Life's full of mistakes, destinies and fate

Remove the clouds look at the bigger picture"

Delta Goodrem, herself only just turning 18 at the time, and her first mainstream single Born to Try offered me something, a hope, a promise, a something, that I had been looking for. The words she had written, and performed as the song danced across the radio airwaves, offered me something I hadn't known that I needed. The song was on repeat every chance I had, a small mix CD of any Delta songs I could find online became the only CD that lived in my Discman. I searched and bought every Delta Goodrem single from Australia and everything she released in the UK for the first album. I went onto 'The Saturday Show' a kids TV show because I knew she would be there, one of the proudest moments of my teenage life was asking a runner to ask her to sign my CD (we couldn't go and meet her) and as he produced the CD she was amazed that someone in the UK had the Australian single edition, and that copy is still one of my prized possessions.

My Born to Try signed CD - January 2003

The song didn't just give me hope, and words that I could live by, this song, and by extention Delta herself, gave me friends. A connection to people across the world, who knew what it was like to search for something, maybe they were still searching, I was, but I was able to make friends with people who I connected with. I met one of my best friends in the entire world around the time Born to Try came out, 10 years on I would still trust her with my life, despite that fact that we've never sat in the same room together, our shared love of songwriting, of poetry and prose, of how words can portray something we're all looking for, that's what we share together. And for that, I will always be grateful.

I have never seen Delta perform, I have never spoken to her face to face, but that doesn't mean that her songs have not made a soundtrack to my life any less meaningful. Each album holds a truth that I've been waiting for someone to write down, an honesty about my life that I sometimes think only I can write, and then I hear the words echo out of the stereo. I do not always tell people about my past, or the parts of me that I sometimes am ashamed of. I have only given you hints here about a struggle I still find so very personal (there is no blame and no fault to lay at anyones hands), but if you find that you want to know my story, and you don't want to ask, listen to the lyrics of these songs, and there, amongst the poetry and the rhymes, you will find me, and thousands of others, curled, comforted, and calmed.

10 years on from hearing that song for the first time I have changed a lot, I am not the shy, unsure, person who hid behind the library stacks and hoped that for just a moment I could have some silence in my mind. I have loved, I have lost, I have discovered myself and who I am proud to be. I have a wife, who every day reminds me that she loves me, and that despite any self doubt, I am exactly who I am meant to be. I know that sometimes we attribute our lives changing for the better to one event, one song, one person, one feeling. I don't. I attribute it to every person I met along the way, who said that it was ok to be me. It was a journey I was destined to take, and each and every day I am glad that I took it, however hard it was, however hard life is still set to be, this journey we call life is ours to take.

But the first person, the first time the words of a song triggered that hope that I needed to feel, that was Delta.

"All that you see is me

And all I truly believe

That I was born to try

I've learned to love

Be understanding

And believe in life

But you've got to make choices

Be wrong or right

Sometimes you've got to sacrifice the things you like"

Card carrying members of a new society... for 31 days.

For the next 31 days, and potentially longer, the wife and I are vegetarian.

Card carrying, fully committed vegetarians, we even had to give up the parmesan cheese as that is not only dairy, its actually meat product (the wife advised me of this when I came home last week with some for the risotto). We will still each dairy and eggs, we are not to become vegan, but for the next 31 days we are putting ourselves in the middle of a little experiment.

We are not doing this for moral reasons, I've long had a battle with my brain about vegetarianism, and I fully support anyone who does this for that reason, I just don't have that bit of my brain wired that way. Instead we are doing this for a number of other reasons, sustainability, health, saving money but predominantly we see this as a sociological study. How do we, as consumers of meat and meat products, alter our minds, and our interactions with everyone else when we become a part of another minority (if you haven't worked out which other minorities I fit in then you can have a guess, answers on a postcard).

I went on a course in November which looked at ESDGC (Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship - a Welsh Government Agenda to engage the idea of SD and GC within various sectors) within education. I came away from this course exhausted, and with figures running through my mind, especially how we, as individuals can reduce our own carbon footprint.
It has been reported that if you switch to a Vegetarian diet, (according to PlanetGreen ) we could save a potential 1 ton of carbon emissions a year by taking meat products out of our diet. That seemed like such a massive figure, I know I won't be able to analyze our carbon emissions, I would need clever tech/lots of time, but i like the idea that just for a short while, we might be able to reduce our emissions, and make even the smallest of difference.

I've heard many stories that turning to a vegetarian diet is very good for you, and having watch our tv chef favourite Hugh F-W spend his summer avoiding meat and subsequently feel better in himself, we realized that perhaps this could work for us. We are both fit individuals, very active and do not eat much (if any come to think about it) processed food, but will taking meat out of our shopping list help us feel better in ourselves? or will we struggle without the easy energy source that meat can give you.

By cutting meat out of our lives for the month, there is the vain hope that we might also save ourselves some money, we already buy predominantly local/british food, we started that a number of years ago and apart from the odd bag of oranges, or bananas we do buy fully british, but can cutting meat out reduce our shopping bill further? We already buy local meat, when we do buy it, so perhaps we may be kidding ourselves that our grocery shopping can be further reduced.

To mark our transition from omnivores to vegetarians,  and the night before this experiment began we became the stereotypical American for the night, we went to the 'bar', drank beer/cocktails and devoured 'all you can eat' chicken wings as we finally started to understand American Football (NY Giants v Falcons) on the various screens.
I must admit, perhaps it was the prospect of the following morning knowing that meat was no longer on the agenda, or whether a diet of only meat and beer for the evening is really not healthy, my body did kick up a bit of a fuss, perhaps it knew, and was trying to ease me, guilt free into a vegetarian lifestyle.

Over the coming month, along with blogging about our experiences, we hope to investigate new recipes, try new or under used vegetables or pulses, and understand our relationship with meat.

Perhaps in a months time we will be screaming to be allowed into the meat isle of the supermarket, or perhaps, the month will fly by, and we will not notice that we have missed meat at all, and we shall just continue, plodding along, enjoying the vegetarian way.

Whatever the outcome, I'm excited to face the challenge, and to see just what I can make out of the ingredients we have.