Pulling Myself Together by Denise Welch

Author:Denise Welch [Welch, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Depression, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Mental Health, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780330513012
Google: st4JmceVq5sC
Amazon: 033051301X
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2010-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

Although I was loving my work, Tim and I hated being apart. I think it was especially tough for him because he was the one on the other side of the world. The massive time difference didn’t help. I’d often have to call him at night to catch him in the morning over there. Of course, he’d want to speak to Matthew, but by then Matthew was in bed. So I’d call when Matthew was having his cornflakes, only to find that Tim was on a night shoot and couldn’t talk. It was a nightmare.

After two months apart, I had a fortnight off work in June and decided to go to Australia because I missed him so much. Very kindly, the BBC paid for Matthew and me to go business class. (Not in a million years would that happen now!) I had been feeling OK for a while, so I thought the journey would be manageable. But then, the night before we were due to fly, I started feeling terrible. The thought of being so far away from home with a two-year-old child was intimidating. If anything went wrong, it was a twenty-four-hour flight to England. I began to panic.

Suddenly I didn’t want to go. The pressure was terrible. If I could have waved a magic wand to make it all stop, I would have done it in an instant. Yet how could I back out now? Tim was so looking forward to seeing us. It was just horrendous.

I made myself go to the airport and get on the plane. If I hadn’t been with Matthew, I would have taken a sleeping pill and slept through the whole flight, but obviously you can’t do that when you’re with a child. Thankfully, the cabin crew helped me out. We flew Malaysia Airlines and, my God, the staff were amazing. They could tell that I wasn’t very well and they looked after Matthew for at least four hours, two hours of which he spent in the cockpit with the pilots, playing with a stick-on wheel. The stewardesses had him for the other two hours, which was just so generous of them. It made a huge difference.

Eventually, we arrived in Melbourne. We’d had a heat wave in England, one of those crazy spells when you could fry eggs on the M1, and I was expecting Australia to be the same. I scanned the airport for surfers in shorts, but it was the middle of winter, and Melbourne in the winter is freezing and grey, like Manchester. It was miserable. So much for my thoughts of a holiday in Summer Bay!

Tim was waiting for us with his friend Mark, who played his nephew in the series, and Mark’s wife Melanie. Melanie was really looking forward to meeting me. Ten years younger than me, she had heard a lot about this wife of Tim’s. Unfortunately, I was so poorly by then that Tim had to arrange for me to see a psychologist the minute I got off the plane.

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