Rugs, baklava and food fights over life partnership

Jonathan and I have been on a ‘romantic getaway’ in Istanbul for four days (a 40^th birthday present) and whilst eating our body weight in aubergine (me) and baklava (Jonathan) we spent two days of it discussing whether to buy a gorgeous Kurdish carpet for my office – or his.

Having worked from home for two days a week for most of the last year – setting up Children Unite - I’ve now moved full-time to a small office that I share with Living Lens (who made the film on this blog).  Jonathan works at home in a tiny office at the bottom of our very small garden (it is literally four steps from our back door to his office door!!).  This arrangement seems to be working well – us working separately in our little offices.

But I need a rug for my office. And in discussing alternatives to where this rug could go we ended up talking (over kebabs and falafel) about how Children Unite might grow.  One of our ideas was to turn Jonathan’s office into a cushion (and rug) filled reading room and he move into my office.

This meant we talked a lot about ‘partnership’ (we were on to baklava and coffee by then). When you are working with the person you’re living with and you are both bringing up two daughters – it can all get a bit much!  There are a lot of partnerships in that sentence!!  Our time in Istanbul was about our personal partnership – we never talk about each other as husband and wife to other professionals (and I have to admit to regularly talking about ‘my partner’ and not saying ‘he’ or ‘she’ to people just to create some ambiguity about the relationship!).

Children Unite is a ‘professional’ partnership between Jonathan and myself - although we have realised when you create an organisation it tends to be an extension of yourselves in some way. So, when there are two of you involved in this creation it is much easier if you can agree on how you see it growing and your respective roles in this process.  And I’m pleased to report that we didn’t have a huge food fight on holiday (we were too full!) – we agree on this.  We don’t see Children Unite growing much in size, we’re not interested in creating a huge organisation or even a medium sized organisation because we want to be part of the action at the grassroots level.  Also, I think, we want the organisation to fit with our other partnerships…with our children and with ourselves.  We need separate ‘professional’ roles or our professional partnership will become too ‘blurred’. So, Jonathan is a technical adviser to Children Unite, and I’m the organiser and campaigner.

And, for the moment, we need separate offices (I got the rug)!